As in super saturating some heated water and then evaporating it (or some similar method)? I really have no idea.
I’m not 100% sure that it would be worth the effort for me personally but it would be an interesting experiment. What’s the yield on recrystallizing/reclaiming NaCl?
The good thing is that a relatively small volume of salt seems to have a large carrying capacity for debris (soot in this case).
It’s pretty easy to tumble for a few minutes by hand but imagine you could pick up some kind of barrel tumbler and automate that action if so desired. Not sure if salt is too fine if a media for most tumblers though.
Sure, I think I can come up with something! I’ve experimented quite a bit and have gotten to where the cost is relatively low. Any particular emphasis on the process - making the puzzle lines, materials, construction, etc?
Hate to be a beggar … but know you’ve put some time into trying different processes (start to finish) … and your tips / products for each step would be awesome.
BTW … we dog-sat for some smaller dogs and they “marked” their territory in a few rooms. Very thick California shag carpet. Shampooing didn’t take it out. Heavily sprinkling salt and letting it sit for 24 hours … pulled it right out of the carpet.
I used a big bag of rice to clean the soot and char. Works quite well and quickly. The wife dropped her phone in a lake last month and I had used the rice as a desiccant. Still had it hanging around.
The grain in my daughter’s rock tumbler is much finer than salt. The final compound is more fine than sand. I think it would work well. Also, I used salt yesterday to clean leather out of the forge before burnishing. Worked great and is keeping my burnisher much cleaner.
I hadn’t looked very extensively at tumblers; really only watched a video of a cheap parts tumbler from Harbor Freight. It looked like a lot of the media was walnut shells, larger plastics, etc. So the media in your daughters tumbler being finer than salt is great. I wasn’t 100% sure of the construction and didn’t want it slipping out everywhere through a shaft connection or something. Thank you!
The good news is it should only take a few mins in the tumbler versus a few weekends i has also considered something like a small vibrating table (not as fancy as ultrasonic cleaners) - just something driven by a small concrete vibrator or something. That’s probably overkill though and way more of a pain to rig up.
The tumbler we have has a rubber gasket that prevents leaking. It’s fairly small and a bit noisy (especially with rocks in it). We got it for a science fair project. The good thing is that it has two barrels which may be fairly standard, which means you could put two puzzles in at once without having to sort pieces later.
We also have a concrete vibrator thing that you put on the edge of a concrete form to vibrate out the air bubbles. That might work on a table, but seems a little more of a pain. the good thing about that is you could put puzzles in ziploc bags with salt and then vibrate them all at once that way.
I used a mixture of pink himalyan and table salt (because that’s what I had on hand) and it worked beautifully, but I could probably have also used the grinding materials that came with the tumbler. But they’re more expensive. Some of the salt sticks to the face of the leather, but I just washed it off before dyeing. I was a little concerned the salt might react in some way with either the material or the dyeing process, but it doesn’t seem to have. I was also a bit worried it might grind away at the engraved portions, but it didn’t.
Haven’t used a tumbler in decades, but I recall using plastic pellets as a cushioning agent in addition to the various grits and polishing compounds. Is that still a thing?
