So, I've been trying to make some vitreous carbon. It's an extremely useful material. After searching through patents, I found several that described
processes for making it through pyrolysis of phenolic resin. When I saw that, I thought, "yay! phenolic should be easy enough to get! That's just
bakelite!"
Oh how wrong I was. . .
Basically, I have not been able to find ANYWHERE that sells this in sane quantities. Every producer of it has a "get a quote" button, which is
basically a euphemism for "too expensive for you."
Any help? Metacelsus - 29-4-2013 at 12:07
Most printed circuit boards use phenolic resin as a substrate IIRC.Diablo - 29-4-2013 at 16:03
Go to any thrift store and buy old outlet plates and grind them up. Or go to Home Depot and buy a multipack, but make sure that they are the hard
thermoplastic type, not the newer flexible ones, which are not bakelite. But older ones were all bakelite. The Habitat reuse stores usually have
scads of them. mr.crow - 30-4-2013 at 09:43
Most printed circuit boards use phenolic resin as a substrate IIRC.
The nasty old brown ones do. The resin is soaked into paper sheets and loaded with fire retardants. New ones are epoxy fiberglass sheets.krfkeith - 30-4-2013 at 15:22
The problem is that bakelite was impregnated with wood flour as a filler, wouldn't that interfere with the pyrolysis process? Obviously cellulose and
lingnin are primarily carbon, but their pyrolysing behavior might be rather unpredictable.
