alt Hacker NewsThat was an interesting read. However it doesn't look like small scale DIY at a high quality level would be particularly expensive in terms of tooling? Only in terms of time and personal experience.
Ball mills are trivial to DIY - electric motor, belt drive, couple pieces of copper tubing, drill some holes in a wooden frame, use large metal coffee cans, throw some ball bearings in.
Calcination is also easy. 1000 C is not a difficult temperature to deal with. You can hit that using plain old nichrome wire. You will need to purchase a few ceramic bricks of course.
The only slightly tricky step I'm seeing is sintering. The nickle-zinc option mentioned in the article will be substantially easier (lower temperature, oxygen atmosphere) but the required temperature still pushes up against the limits of nichrome wire. Given that propane can get you to the vicinity of 1900 C and tanks of that are sold at the grocery store (at least where I live) I'm going to say this step is also cheap and easy to DIY.
The real issue is that you can't do this at home if you live in high density housing. You will need a shop or a small back yard.
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> However it doesn't look like small scale DIY at a high quality level would be particularly expensive in terms of tooling?
Ahh, the lure of a DIY project that makes you go “How hard could it be?”
It’s an all too familiar feeling for me.
I've done worse than that in my garage but I also know that if I burn it down (and the neighbors garage with it) that the insurance company will not look at me kindly.
Regardless it is not a process that you're going to make work on your kitchen sink :)