building an electric circuit from paint

snipped-for-privacy@doglover.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@k70g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

I really like this one. I'll be watching this thread to see what turns up. Silver paoints are used to repair board traces and such, so if crude (or even surprisingly effective) semiconductors can be made, and if you inlude collage on a canvas, the idea that some kind of painted radio might be built is awesome. That kind of thing could draw people to galleries in thousands, if it's workable.

Copper and aluminum paint is also available, but I do not know how well they work. In general, oil and oxides are not going to be good conductors. But tin oxide, for example, is used to make sort of transparent electrodes.

Bill

-- Fermez le Bush

Salmon Egg wrote in news:C180A9A4.4AFE3% snipped-for-privacy@sbcglobal.net:

True, about those oils.. Many metal oxides are great insulators too..

Several things already look interesting though, you can use metallic and insulating paint in layers, you could paint capacitors, collage would allow easy coil placements. Carbon loaded paint might make resistors. Trimming with a knife or abrading the surface could allow easy tweaking of values after they dry. The only obstacles to a luridly beautiful flat radio three feet wide appear to be the semicoductors, and maybe the sound ouput. I'm not sure if any kind of sound transducer could be constructed of paint and collage, except possiblu electrstatic types, and I don't like the idea of high voltages in that kind of radio.

Bill. thank you for your comment. So if I add some red Iron pigment or blue Cobalt pigment to the transparent Tin oxide? Maybe I just got to try it :D

You are using a selfish, inefficient technique to post to Usenet.

The last half of this thread

The last post in that thread hints at why (clueless) Google Groupers are so reviled by those who read Usenet using a "newsreader".

The concise version:

oh ahummm...... Learning moment. :-/

I'm a that clueless (-stroking my long blonde hair-)...?

Thanks for the advice, next time I'll make a crossposting!

So yo're extualy saying there's a good change it may work?

Is a radio handmade with a brush from metallic oxides 'oilpaint' possible?

snipped-for-privacy@doglover.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

I'm just saying that some parts are doable, maybe even easy, if you allow collage. You can paint capacitors, wires and resistors easily, but not coils. Even then, that still leaves semiconductors to be solved, and even if it could be done, I think the signals would be very noisy. Maybe if you got a large slab of fine porcelain made as a 'canvas' it might be done with low enough noise to demonstrate as a working radio. A simple AM radio is easy to make, but you need a lot of gain and some attention to the tuned circuit to get the best level out of it to start with.

Consider metal powders, not just oxides. If suspended in binding agents that cure to contract, bringing the particles together, you can solve the wires and capacitor plates that way. You can paint a semiconductor the same way as a capacitor, but I have no idea if it's possible to make paints that will work. Consider the simplest forms, FET's, unijunction transistors...