2023 06 16 Beach Bubbles With Ancient Juice
The past couple of years, I have not been very active in soap bubble research and haven't had many opportunities to make giant bubbles. The other day, an early Father's Day celebration, we headed over the hills to Half Moon Bay for lunch and beach lounging. It was good bubble conditions: overcast, mild breeze, temperatures in the mid-60s.
Rather than brew any new bubble juice, I decided to use up old juice that I found in my closet. All the juice had a Dawn Pro base. Two jugs were BLM juice (one 16:1, the other 25:1) mixed up in June 2017. One was mixed up in August 2018 from a dawn pro/guar concentrate mixed in 2014!
Each juice was a little cloudy, but all worked perfectly as if freshly mixed. The juice in these jugs had never been used -- …
2021 08 07 PAM Jelly - Ugh!
Just a quick note about making sure you let your PAM (polyacrylamide) fully hydrate and become uniform before combining with other ingredients. I was mixing up some juice (actually trying to come up with a concentrate recipe with the minimum amount of water necessary) and thought I had it nailed -- but after I used the juice, I noticed some bits of gel on the ground. It was very similar to the gel chunks you get from mixing insoluble PAM and water. (NOTE: if this happens there is a solution to the problem as mentioned at the end.)
I realize now that I had done a quick mix (using hot water to mix up the solution) and stopped my off-and-on stirring after about 20 minutes at which time I added the detergent.
Clearly the PAM hadn't really finish…
2018 10 21 Amendola PVA/Guar/PVA Recipe First Attempt Mixing
I experienced a "gotcha" when trying to mix up my first batch of Vincent Amendola's PVA/Guar/JLube Juice
When I added the PVA solution to the guar gum slurry, a discrete gel ball (about 5 ml big) formed in the slurry after a minute or two.
I tried to mash it up with two forks, but that didn't work. It wouldn't break up and it wouldn't dissolve with stirring. I waited 10 minutes to see if it might dissolve or soften on its own. It didn't! After about 10 minutes, I decided to try something else. I warmed the slurry VERY briefly in the microwave (20 seconds on partial power) and stirred it for a minute. It seemed to get smaller. I repeated the warm and stir process a few times, and the ball mostly dissolved, but there were still a few bits of d…
2018 10 21 Making 10% PVA Solution
In preparation for exploring Vincent Amendola's PVA/Guar Gum/J-Lube recipe , I mixed up a 10% PVA Solution using Polyvinyl Alcohol powder purchased in 2011 or so. I know nothing about the particular type of polyvinyl alcohol that this is. The chemistry supply store had no information to offer at the time of purchase. I've made 1% and 2% solutions in the past by simply sprinkling PVA powder into water that I was stirring by hand and then warm slightly and stirring some more.
Ingredients:
- 90 grams distilled water
- 10 grams polyvinyl alchohol powder
I sprinkled the PVA powder into room temperature distilled water while stirring by hand. When I was done sprinkling the powder, the solution was milky/chalky. I put the beaker in the microwave for 20 s…
2018 10 21 PAM200 Trial
I haven't had a chance to bubble since the September PAM Trial. I've been curious: how much PAM is too much. So, I mixed up a batch of bubble juice with roughly 200 grams of 0.1% PAM Solution per liter of juice (at 20:1 water to Dawn Pro). The juice worked quite well and was clearly not overdosed.
I had some BLM-based juice (at 20:1) on-hand and tried it. The two seemed to work fairly comparably. The BLM juice might have been able to more reliably make 40+ foot tubes BUT there weren't really enough trials to tell and the windspeed was variable enough that the difference could quite easily have been due to the wind.
Conditions: 60 degrees F, 85% relative humidity, fully overcast.
Test loops: 48-inch Rubbermaid webfoot microfiber mop top-string…