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in reply to @secrets's post:

You have me very interested in the sulfur inlay process. Just out of curiosity, can it be died or tinted in any way? Not looking for epoxy levels of color reproduction, but some shades would be neat.

A huge amount of natural fabrics use sulfur-based dyes and the simplest use things like sawdust as a reactant to turn it black. The trick, which I'm going to have to experiment more with, is finding the ones that a shitty home chemist can whip up that don't raise the melt point or otherwise create Problems with the chemistry, since all the established dye formulations are indended for dissolving and soaking in fiber not uh, melting down and using as a filler material. My neighbors are gonna fuckin hate me by the end of the summer.

Possibly! Same deal, anything you add to sulfur makes it behave a little differently than just pure sulfur and it's already in a very weird place chemically (which is why this works for sulfur and not just any ol' rock or metal). I got a big bag of the stuff sold as a fertilizer on Ebay but some additive they put in it made it flash off almost the instant it melted, so now I'm trying to be a little more methodical about things.

Epoxy dyes work well for mixing into epoxy but do they even mix with liquid sulfur? Does it compromise the structure of the inlay, does it anything weird when heated up to a couple hundred degrees, what does it look like when mixed with an opaque yellow rock vs. a clear plastic? One way to find out.

This paper gives a promising list of potentially workable additives, some nastier than others. My first attempt at mixing in sawdust and a bit of charcoal (cachou de laval if you're fancy) produced kind of a splotchy grayish-black but that's an established early-industrial technique, I think I was just sloppy with how I mixed it

I think you could probably also go places with oxide dyes considering they already are oxidized, though I don't know the reactivity of sulfur, oxygen already has a pretty damn strong bond, so I doubt it'll eat those off. Iron (II/III) are pretty easy to make & give a pretty good dark brown, so that might be worth a shot as well. For black, very fine charcoal is probably your best bet yeah.

I feel like getting a good homogenous mix might be difficult depending on particle size, surface tension & viscosity, but there's probably not a whole lot you can do to alter those properties. I currently don't have enough of a lab to experiment with this, but it does definitely sound very interesting :)

Ohey! I'm really wondering how you got that wood lasercut for the sulfur. Is that solid wood? Did you go all the way through and fill it up or something, or somehow stop at a certain depth & chisel it out?

I got furniture to build & a friend with a lasercutter & a love for obscure historical finishing methods, so I really want to try this :D

+ iirc you mentioned coarse grained woods end up soaking up the sulfur, what kinds did you use?

The tabs at the ends of the tabletop, are those used to secure the legs in place? Would love to see a drawing of that sometime if you have one available!

Also, have you experimented with dyes yet by any chance? I probably will just go for pure sulfur anyway, I'm just very interested in the whole idea now :)

Thanks in advance & for the idea!

This is all cherry boards I got at an estate sale. I get the laser to burn a trench about 1/8" deep and then just pour the molten sulfur in (or put in a matching piece of wood or whatever that I've laser-cut using the same pattern).

You got it those tabs hold the legs in place and pull out to detach them, the whole table was meant as a showpiece that'd travel around a fair bit so it breaks down and flatpacks in about a minute

I'm going to try out formulating a darker sulfur when I get the opportunity. Right now my laser is a little uhhh crispy so it'll be a few months unless I get a ton of free time to hand engrave something. This stuff seems a little less forgiving about what you can dump in there compared to say epoxy, I'd steer clear of water-based liquid dyes. One of my earlier unsuccessful attempts got a fair bit of sawdust in the mix when I tried to scrape off and remelt some excess, and it did stain it a (gross, blotchy) brown.