How to Make a Metal Ball - Gallium Not Foil!

[Music] you may have seen the recent craze where people take a roll of kitchen foil screw a load up into a ball then compact it really tightly using a hammer to form a perfectly round highly polished metal ball the videos really are impressive and it must take hours to achieve but instead of trying this method i'm gonna try making a round metal ball out of gallium you may have seen my previous videos with gallium but if you haven't gallium is a solid metal at room temperature but if you warm it up to about 30 degrees c it turns into a liquid so you can use it to do all sorts of things let it cool down and it turns back into a solid metal pretty cool huh to melt it i poured some warm water into a cup and dropped in four tubes of gallium leave them to warm up so the gallium melts to try and mold it into a nice round shape i'm going to inject it into a ping-pong ball so i poked a hole into the ball using a small screwdriver slightly enlarged it and cleaned it up i'm placing it inside of this egg cup with a hole pointing upwards to hold it while i fill it up when the capsules have warmed up you should see the gallium has melted i'm pouring it out into this small pan you can see it's all liquid and it looks really cool i added the other capsules so now we've got a decent sized pool of liquid gallium next i'm taking this syringe and sucking it all up and now it's ready to inject into the ball i did this quite slowly because i didn't want any accidents stop when it gets to the top and there's our ping pong ball full of liquid gallium i tapped it on the table a bit just to make sure there wasn't any air bubbles in it then left it in the egg cup to set i went back after a few hours and this is what i found it looks like the gallium expanded as it set it also appears to have split the ball slightly and dribbled out of the bottom i snapped off the overflowing gallium then put it on a cutting mat and carefully used a knife and a screwdriver to split the plastic ball and remove it from the gallium and there we have an almost perfectly round gallium ball pretty cool huh it's interesting you can see the one side is very shiny and the other is rather textured you can also see the seam line running down the middle it really is quite heavy and it feels very dense [Music] and if i try rolling it you can see it actually rolls really well i thought it would be quite nice to try smoothing out the ball and make it nice and shiny all the way around so i decided to try using this polisher on a drill i set it spinning and to begin with it looked quite promising but then i realized the friction caused between the polishing wheel and the ball was actually melting the gallium and you can even see where it sprayed it onto the table so i figured the best thing was to place the ball onto this warm metal tray and melt it down ready to use it for something else in the future i hope you've enjoyed watching this video if you want to see more you can click on the links or take a look at my youtube channel page stay safe have fun and as always thanks for watching you

Channel: DaveHax

Views: 4,829,662

Keywords: Foil ball, Gallium fidget spinner, kitchen foil, tin foil, gallium metal, foil ball polishing, foil ball challenge, foil ball smooth, tutorial, life hack, ping pong ball, Lego, Lego figure, how to make, Dave Hax, liquid metal, hammer foil, round ball, fidget spinner, aluminium foil, aluminum foil, aluminum gallium

Id: VJWe5XFo6jc

Length: 4min 35sec (275 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018