Nov 162008
Photography of the result of a steel bolt meeting a grinding wheel. I will likely take some more photos tonight when it’s dark to see if there are any differences of note. Some interesting things can be seen, including burning specks of iron exploding and what appear to be helical paths of some of the sparks.
4 Responses to “Spark Art”
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The sparks will vary in color and form depending on how the the steel is tempered (try a drill bit sometime); in fact that’s one old test used to figure out the degree of tempering on steel.
The higher the degree of tempering, the more numerous, brighter and involved the sparks are.
For all their spectacular appearance, they don’t transmite much heat though.
For something really wild, shoot compressed air on a burning steel wool pad as it burns down to white-hot slag in under thirty seconds. This generates a lot of smoke also.
Hey! Great pictures!
I did this experiment for a Junior High science fair project. I ended up with a B because my analysis was adversely affected by poor quality photos. Neither my dad, nor I were photographers. I wish we had digital cameras back then!
[…] a followup to this post, here are a few shots taken after sundown. Slightly […]
If you can find such a thing, try a bit of titanium.