[Captions by Mary V. at Y Translator]
In this video we're going to
experiment with melting epsom salt, In this video we're going to
experiment with melting epsom salt, also known as magnesium sulfate. [Music] YouTube user Dallas Woiken
was curious what would happen if we put epsom salt in our foundry. Will it melt down into a liquid
the same way table salt does? Here's what we want to learn. Can we melt Epsom salt in our furnace? And if we pour it out into a mold,
can we cast something out of it? Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate, and it's most commonly
dissolved into water, and used as a mild first aid
for things like sprains or bruises. This is also used as a saline laxative. Meaning you mix it with water,
it turns it into a salty water, and it helps you go of your stopped up. But it is a type of salt, and we're going to see if we can
get it to melt down into a liquid similar to the melting down table salt. [Music] It's kind of bitter. I really don't enjoy that. It doesn't taste at all like table salt, like none whatsoever. It's not terribly surprising. It's entirely different compounds. It's entirely different chemicals. It just happens to look similar,
and it is a type of salt but it's not table salt. But let's see what happens
when we melt it down. Can we get this to turn
into a puddle of clear liquid? [Music] Don't know why one is
blue and one is green. [Music] It does look like something is
happening around the edges of the cup. So I'm inclined to think that maybe
this is going to go somewhere. However, magnesium sulfate is
supposed to melt at quite a bit higher of a temperature than table salt. So we are going to put the
lid on and let it sit for a while, and see what result we get. After we look at the melted epsom salt, I wanted to try casting it, and I was trying to
decide on a good shape, and I thought, well, it's a crystal, what if we make it
look like a bigger crystal? So I took this piece of wood,
and I cut it and I sanded it down to sort of look like a crystal growth, then I fit an eye bolt in the back, and we're going to try and mold
this wooden crystal in some dirt, pull it out, and then cast our
magnesium sulfate in that crystal shape. Our epsom salt has been in the foundry for probably 30, maybe
40 minutes at this point, and it's just starting to liquefy. However, the steel cup that
it's in is starting to fall apart. The added heat makes
it oxidize a lot faster, and it's possible that the magnesium
sulfate does something to it as well. But I think we've started losing
part of the sidewall of our steel cup. We're going to take a look at
what's happening inside this thing. It's all very bright. [Music] So we've got some liquid down there. It's sort of like a thick liquid
but this cup was solid when it went in, and it's just now falling to pieces. Very thin-walled steel cup. I'm afraid if we give it any more time, that cup is just going to
completely going to disintegrate. In fact, it might already. It might just fall apart
as I try and take it out. [Music] And leaving the top off of
the foundry cooled it off enough that whatever liquid we did have
at the bottom of that cup is just gone. By gone, I mean it's re-solidified. I have a crucible that is now
full of regular table salt, and we're going to try
and melt it down here. And the reason we didn't use the
magnesium sulfate in this crucible is that these crucibles
insulate quite a bit more, and since I knew that our foundry
was only barely able to get to the temperature that melts
the epsom salt in the first place, I didn't think it would be able
to melt it through this crucible. However, the table salt has a
much lower melting point, and we should be able to liquefy it in here. [Music] It has cooled down, turned back
to being mostly white, but it's still very hot. So let's pour some water on,
and see what happens. [Music] Oh, a lot of steam. That's some weird formation. The shapes that this is turned into
on the sides is pretty funky stuff. Rest in peace
stainless steel measuring cup. [Music] Completely destroyed the
integrity of that steel cup. It's just gone. [Music] And here's our salt. [Music] To mold our little wooden crystal, we're going to mix some water in
with this dirt that I've sieved a little bit to get all of the large pebbles out. And we're going to try and use
these two by four pieces of sort of box to hold it together. I'll press this in and really press
all of the-- I guess we call it mud, but it won't be quite so wet as that, and we'll try and make
a mold then pull this out. Hopefully it comes out nice and cleanly, and we can pour our salt into that. Okay, the inside of that looks pretty good. That's going to be our mold. We'll see what happens
when we try casting salt into it. [Music] Oh-oh. [Music] I believe the force of the salt
hitting the water in the mold broke the mold apart, and we started having our
liquid salt flowing out the bottom. I admit I did have some suspicions
that something like that would happen. [Music] Lots of salt flowing over there. [Music] Some right there.
There is still some in the mold, but I'm not sure if any of it
stayed in intact in there, like the shape of the mold
might be completely destroyed. I don't see any clear exit points though. So that could all just be salt
that bubbled over off the top and ran. It might not have broken out of the mold. It might have just
bubbled up from the mold. Let's give that a couple
minutes to cool down. [Music] Well, I wouldn't say
it casted up very pretty, but we did get the shape
of the crystal a little bit. [Music] Attempting to melt epsom salt
did not really work very well. We were barely able to
get it to melting temperature, and by the time the heat had caused
our steel cup to oxidize so badly that it lost all structural integrity, and all we got were some
lumps of half-melted salts. Melting down the regular table salt, we then tried casting that,
and it was mixed results. We cast it in really wet dirt, and the salt reacted with the
moisture in the dirt unsurprisingly, and a lot of the salt
bubbled up out of the dirt, and what didn't bubble up had
a tendency to stick to the dirt itself. So there's dirt sort
of embedded in the salt. There have been a lot of questions
asking whether or not we can cast salt. A lot of people have
commented wanting to see that, and this is by no means
a definitive answer. We got a fairly poor result,
but we did get a result. It took the shape
that it was poured into, but it's so full of air bubbles, and the dirt of the substrate
that it was being poured into, it's not a very good representation. But there's lots of different
things you can cast in. Just because it did not
work in this one method, doesn't mean it won't work at all, and we might want to try some
other methods in the future. Hmm. Salt and dirt. What a great mix. Guys, that's not the end,
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Today we're seeing what happens if you try and melt down Epsom Salt. Does it melt like normal table salt? Can we cast something with it? Let's find out!