Knowing if your glass is quartz is important if you will be heating it and cooling it over and over. In the cannabis industry quartz is used for bangers, dab straws and the Elev8R Vaporizer Heater. In this blog we will go over a few way to test if your glass is quartz. Our favorite way is the water test.
How To Tell If Your Banger Is Quartz (water test)?
What you need for the test: Quartz banger, torch, cup of water
- Heat your quartz until it is hot, you can even make it red hot
- Put your HOT quartz in water
- If it does not crack, you have quart
How to Tell if your Glass is Quartz (Short Version)
How to Tell if your Glass is Quartz (Full Version)
How To Tell If Your Banger Is Quartz (Look For Bubbles)?
Visually look at the glass. In glass you may see round air bubbles. These can be see in the glass or at a weld. You may need to use a 10x magnifying glass to see better. Quartz can contain imperfections, but they will not be round air bubbles.
How To Tell If Your Banger Is Quartz (Check the Hardness)?
This method is a little harder to do for most people. You will want to perform a Mohs hardness test. In 1812 German geologist Friedrich Mohs invented the hardness scale used for testing minerals and other materials. Glass ranks around 5.5 on the Mohs scale. Quartz crystals rank as 7 on the Mohs scale. Therefore, a piece of quartz crystal will scratch a piece of glass. Test the unknown stone under inspection by trying to scratch a common piece of glass such as a glass bottle. If the object easily scratches the glass, the specimen probably is quartz crystal. If scratching the glass takes a lot of effort, the specimen likely is another piece of glass.
How To Tell If Your Banger Is Quartz (Use a Gem Tester)
The final way to test if your banger is quartz is you can use a gem tester to measure the thermal conductivity of the quartz banger. Press the gem tester probe gently but firmly against the suspect quartz banger. Unlike quartz, glass acts as an insulator, so glass does not conduct heat well at all. Consequently, if the indicator needle stops at the lowest reading on the gem tester scale, the specimen most likely can be labeled “Glass." If the suspect quartz banger is quartz, however, there will be some heat conductivity and the gem tester indicator needle will move to the area labeled “Quartz, Amethyst, Citrine” on the scale.
