From Rock to Copper Metal

today's episode is sponsored by LastPass I've covered my challenges with trying to produce glass fairly extensively in the past but one material that's actually been an even bigger challenge and been holding me back in many ways has been metals through gold panning and some silver mining I've been able to produce some precious metals but only in small quantities making a workable quantity metal has been pretty elusive to me ever since a very poor attempt I made at smelting iron several years ago but if I ever want to make it pass the Stone Age I need to figure out how to make some metals instead of jumping straight into the iron age I'm going to start with one of the very first metals humans began working with copper by mining it and then extracting out hopefully a usable quantity of copper it takes millions of specialized skilled experts around the world to produce the kamas items we use every day but could an average person do everything to make all these items alone well that's what I try to attempt my name is Andy and this is how to make everything but first thanks to LastPass for sponsoring today's episode if you do anything online nowadays the question doesn't seem to be if you'll be hacked but more like when you'll be hacked the best way to protect yourself is to have complicated regularly updated passwords but keeping those organized can be a pain thanks to LastPass they make this part easy if you've been following our channel you know we've talked about using LastPass password manager to keep all of our passwords in one place now that we've been using it for a while we can confirm that it's still working great for us no matter where we are in the world LastPass relieves the trouble of looking for passwords and anxiety around getting locked out of accounts with LastPass you don't have to write remember or reset passwords LastPass allows you to keep track of your passwords easily so you can stay sane and focus on being productive when you update a password it will automatically update on all your devices no matter where you are with the LastPass browser plugin you can autofill login info quickly as well as automatically update LastPass when you update your passwords put your passwords on autopilot with LastPass click the link in the description below to get your free trial of LastPass between the Stone Age and Bronze Age was a brief period called the calculus ik or copper age beginning around 7,000 years ago like gold and silver copper can exist as a native metal in diseased native copper nuggets they're likely first exploited to make metal tools over native copper is pretty rare it was eventually figured out you can extract copper from various ores through smelting and gain access to a larger supply copper is a fairly soft metal so soft it can be worked pretty easily even when it's cold and it's wide use was eventually replaced when it was discovered a stronger version of it could be made in West Asia and Europe this occurred around 3500 to 2500 BC it was discovered adding an additional compounds to copper but produce a stronger alloy bronze well in California earlier this year we were able to find some information on a few abandoned copper mines in the Mojave Desert banded in the 1940s this area had a few options of mines to check out unfortunately the directions to it were a bit vague and took us on a bit of a wild goose chase falling down some wrong roads Andy George is lost so is Chris because he's lost with it finally after following a nearly invisible road through some really rough trails that have been partially washed away by flat floods we approached the mines do we pull out here for the copper mine get on the ground everywhere raus copper ores can come in a few different colors depending on the composition but many forms of it are the distinctive green so this fairly uncommon green tint was a pretty good sign I don't know how rich it is but probably some copper at this point the road was being a little too rough for our vehicle to continue so we'd have to go by foot and we'd have to rush well I'd have to rush well Chris took a sweet time so we can make it to the mine before the Sun set and we were left stranded in the dark in the middle of the desert it's pretty good [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] these kids are just down there still alive after hours not being able to find Andy there he is up there being stoic I walked after over an hour of hiking I finally reached the site of the abandoned mine where there was a very obvious exposed surface of green rock [Music] not safe surface his mine is supposed to have a few varieties of wars including veins of malachite and azurite I poked my head into a few holes to see if I could find any I wasn't able to figure out where the main mine actually was but I was also reluctant to dig too deeply as it's kind of dangerous to explore old mines think things might go to the main one it's very narrow I'm not very very far into tight places so I'm just gonna get some surface stuff bad along the surface just leading up to here there's just green rocks everywhere that has to have some sort of copper in and I'm pretty sure basically this whole cliff side is just green so I don't know the purity of it and a few days gonna meet up with the geologist and we get some input if we can extract some copper from this alright this is rocks starting to run short on time before dark I collected some of the surface stones this should hopefully contain at least some amount of copper I'm just gonna get some chunks and probably call it a day I don't know how much copper US will actually make hopefully should be enough I just gotta bring back to the car get back setting coyotes are coming out soon then a quick visit to Dave to confirm if I actually collected copper or not so I was able to collect some of this copper ore this I hope it's a copper ore you tell me all right well my guess is crew so cool actually very good color you guys you guys have a heck of a night drew nice piece it's a copper silicate yeah that's one of your great copper specimens it give me into my yield might not be too large from the ore that I collected it might have virtually be grams oh really yeah out of a substantial amount once again there's a lot of impurities that's what you have to work with only to consider the most efficient method for extraction if I want to get a usable amount but first need to make it small and the next step has treant always is to crush it and mill it in a ball mill get to small particle size so you can extract the ore so smash smash [Music] done some of it and pretty soft so it actually grinds down pretty quickly so got the copper or it all crushed up and in the ball mill there's needle a run for a few days and get nice fine particle sizes so for a low-grade ore like the stuff I collected the process of electoral mining is the probably the best way to do it which is the same method they use today for a lot of copper extraction the first step is I have a bath of sulfuric acid I'm going to dissolve it into and the copper will react with the sulfuric acid to produce copper sulfate all the impurities will settle out so then from the copper sulfate I will run electricity through it and on when the anodes will form pure copper [Music] so I've looked the copper sulfate solution react for a few days to do the electrowinning process so I'm going to measure out what I got and see what type of yield I can expect from my larger batch got the dried sample now hopefully a majority of the copper do some math figure out what concentration we were able to extract from the raw or not looking good math time you do math at my head a little under 2 grams parts / whole I remember how to do significant figures there we get about 2.8 percent of actual copper from the ore which is actually higher than I expected I got a little bit over 50 pounds of raw ore so my final yield should be a pound and a half not bad that's good to know now to do the big batch I do not sorry I wasn't talking to you a letter anyways now I know what to expect get started on the pullback well ventilated outside add the sulfuric acid very slow so the sulphuric acid reacts with the copper or overnight last night and produce copper sulfate which should now be in solution and most of the solids should have settled some to take from the top strain it and then I can begin the electrowinning but the negative on to the stainless steel got the batch of copper sulfate all drained so gonna get this guy in there if you load and get as much surface area as possible I believe that'll be the factor for the speed and then we'll turn it on and we should get bubbles in theory is doing oh it's already plating copper let that run overnight and see what happens [Music] I let the electrolysis run on the solution for about two weeks now it took longer than I expected but seems to have mostly stopped reacting so I assumed I had most of the copper and as you can see here a lot of it formed on the actual steel itself could need to scrape this off so I had a few of the lead I'm gonna anodes that fell off during that so I need to rinse it and copper off of those and not include those because I don't want to melt lead try to limit how poisoned I am didn't get over my fingers and strain the rest [Music] [Laughter] [Music] into the kill I through several batches of copper extraction I had done as well as the whole steel cathode just to melt any remaining copper off of it [Music] the sky [Music] one gloves nice copper scraped off a little bit of slag here it's at least somewhat iron there's a solid stuff floating on the surface so probably have a bit morning to remove and then pour it into the muffin pan I'm preheating just a little bit us like up to that pretty good [Music] it's a pretty clean poor hand so I was able to take this green rock and make this brown metal did a lot of these rocks though the end result of all that is I have point eight nine nine pounds hoping for a pound little short for that amount of copper its current value that's this two dollars and fifty cents and how much did I spend to source this and make it from scratch it's about five hundred and thirty-five dollars including the airplane ticket renting all-terrain vehicle to get through those trails and all equipment and then the hours of time to actually extract this so not a great deal still have some order process some of it I'm gonna keep just go that's pretty and then in the meantime I have copper a metal can use for future projects like my camera ended up using a very modern method to extract the ore I collected since I wasn't able to find any richer ores such as Malachi at the mine well over I was able to purchase some for less than five hundred and thirty five dollars so I'm hoping to do a future video attend me to extract it in a more primitive way that they did back in the Bronze Age my mom is gonna be so pissed and she sees what I did to our muffin pan [Music] if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoy these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 1,701,998

Rating: 4.7842789 out of 5

Keywords: Maker, History, Science, Education, Industry, copper, mining, smelting, rockhounding, geology, mineralogy, bronze, ore, extract, electrochemistry, copper age, metal, metallurgy, malachite, lastpass, lastpass login, password, password generator, lastpass chrome, lastpass download, lastpass premium, random password generator, generate password, password manager, recover, lastpas, laspass, lastpass premium features, delete account mobogram, lastpass.com, how secure is my password, brow tidy ox

Id: 3nneL6zDEMA

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2018