Clay from Stone Dust

At the moment, Stone Dust (a byproduct of ore processing in the ore washing plant, added in the experimental versions) is plentiful but has few uses. Currently, the only ways to use Stone Dust are to use it to make CF powder, which is really only useful if you intend on using construction foam, and throwing it in the recycler for scrap.

I propose a recipe to make clay from stone dust. Clay is itself very fine stone particles that have been chemically hydrated. Since Stone Dust is itself very fine stone particles, finer than sand, it would stand to reason that mixing stone dust with water could produce clay.

The new experimental canning machine can mix dust and liquid, but it produces a liquid product and is inappropriate for this use. Therefore, this recipe should be done on the crafting table similar to the hydrated coal dust, unless a new machine appropriate for this task is made available.

Really? I took a list through the predenied suggestions and I didn't see it. Plus, stone dust is practically useless if you never use construction foam.

I took a look on Google. Apparently there is such a thing as "stone powder clay". I also looked at the wikipedia article for clay. Clay is a collection of hydrated silica minerals with a very fine grain size. Silica minerals of course come from common rocks. Stone dust is stone that is very very finely ground, so is therefore also very fine grains of silica minerals. The only remaining part to turn this into clay is hydrating the minerals, which of course is done with water.

I really don't see why this would be a problem. Is abundant clay unbalancing somehow?

I don't understand. I'm looking through my recipe book and I don't see any connection between clay and lithium. To me, lithium appears unobtainable and unusable. I did see the lithium entry in the list of items, but I don't see any uses for it.

EDIT: Let me guess, lithium is for GregTech or some other mod, and the only reason the items are in the IndustrialCraft item list is for compatibility. Same with silver.