Purplpixie

Toilet ceramic is mohs 7 ?

Makes sense. Think it is fired quartz/clay, may have aluminum oxide too.

I believe toilets are about all porcelain Pat. It's usually beige color. Sound right Scott ? it is fine grained, as Scott says, very hard, should be like chert.

Kohler's reasons for using porcelain, seems like cheap toilets may be made out of lessor materials:

"Porcelain is also a champ at shrugging off water. It may sound simple, but a porous material will allow liquid and bacteria in, so being impervious to both is important in a structure that's main job is to deal with waste. The key to keeping water out is in the porcelain's glaze. After the toilet is coated, it's fired in a kiln. Unlike, say, grout in a shower, which takes on both water and bacteria, the glaze stops bacteria at the toilet's surface.

Having all the gross stuff remain on the toilet's surface also makes it easier to clean. (Imagine if cleaning the toilet were any less pleasant.) And every year another wave of aggressive cleaning products claim to do better work on the bowl. In order to ensure that the toilet can withstand the pressure from both abrasion and chemicals, Kohler sends their cans through the equivalent of 20 years of use, or 80,000 scrubs. The testing, Hedlund says, just confirms that people are more likely to upgrade their toilets for water conservation or style reasons than for actual need."

1dave-new clothes washing machines-also low water usage. They are junk and hardly clean your clothes. Using vibratory and mild agitator.

Entirely junk. Having to wash clothes twice, lots of ELECTRICITY. Do they know what ELECTRICITY is and what it pollutes to create it ?
Old agitator washing machines being phased out, will no longer be made...
Anyone out there had to buy one of these pieces of junk ?

Pat

If it can be knapped into arrowheads it will cab

I learn a lot from these oddest threads because I know everything else.
Jim

Or the purest white porcelain "jasper".

Cameo carved it could be spectacular! Whiter, durable, cheaper and more legal than ivory!

And it may smell.....

Sorry, Dave but that's total urban legend...
The legend faults the asbestos sealant, not the o-rings. The o-rings were indeed the problem but not due to a change in the material used.
www.nbcnews.com/id/11031097/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/myths-about-challenger-shuttle-disaster/#.VLlgitLF_Ak
The day the shuttle exploded was 10 days after I started working at the rubber company I still work for today. I already had about 4 years experience in polymers and had worked with fluoropolymers like the viton used for the shuttle o-rings. They were the true culprit of the disaster, not the asbestos sealant. A by product of vulcanizing viton is good old H2O water and it must be removed by a postcuring process that requires a 12 hour stepped cycle. Any exposure to moisture before use like the weather conditions before the launch means the boosters should have been disassembled and the o-rings either replaced with dry ones or the existing o-rings re-postcured (dried)
A few years after the disaster I hand built a set of custom viton seals for the leaded observation windows of a nuclear facility of some sort, possibly a particle accelerator that was never completed. I didn't want to end up being connected to another viton related disaster so I spent a lot of time in research before taking the job on.