How to Make Large Copper Metal Crystals

hey good so today I'm going to show you how I make really large copper crystals is a small piece of wire this is a little little thicker wire but this will be the cathode this is going to be what the crystals grow one that is quite dirty as you can see but we're going to take some sandpaper to that and clean it up what we use it this is a anode that I had poured this is just made from scrap copper pipe wire things like that I just crushed it all threw it into a crucible and melted it into a little rectangle mold I drew I drilled a little hole at the top here if it'll focus no layer goes that is so I can clip the wire lead the alligator clip onto it whenever it goes into solution the solution menus this is some copper sulfate I just mix it in with some water and that is it use a cheap bench top power supply I don't really feed a whole lot of power to it at all in fact this is a really slow process this takes a bottom-up I got these little helping hands here this is a help hold the wires and everything together but first I'm going to get this bent up and well I'm gonna go ahead and stand it first and then I'm going to go ahead and get it bent up and get it ready to accept crystals in here okay so I went ahead and got this sanded down took the surface corrosion off of it and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bend it up so it will be the cathode inside this the fish here first thing I'll go ahead and do and make a hook and what this will do this will hang on the edge and give you something to break you're getting clip on and then we're just going to go ahead and bend it up so we can get a lot of surface area with into the solution of copper sulfate and it doesn't have to be perfect by any means I mean you just growing crystals it doesn't really matter so much the pattern you use back and forth what does make a difference is what is closer to the a mode so if you can make it all you know two-dimensional that is that is the best way to do so that I found otherwise if you have a part that's jutting forward the crystals will grow from that and not from anything else you wanted to grow on as much much of the copper that you can okay this is too much okay see this is a going down and touching the bottom that is something that you don't want because you're going to get a lot of sediment and everything down at the bottom and then we'll conduct the current and that will short out your your cell here and you just won't get any crystals so swish this up here we go okay it's getting better but it's still pretty close to the bottom you want to leave a decent decent amount of gas there there we go perfect as you can see there's about that much between the cathode in the bottom now the next thing I need to go ahead and do is get the solution of copper sulfate mixed up this copper sulfate I couldn't really I've had this stuff for a long time so it would be really hard to say exactly where I sourced it but I do know I had gotten a lot of it from say like Home Depot or Lowe's and is used as a stump removal all right not a stump remember a root killer for septic systems and it's pretty much pure copper sulfate so I'm going to do I got this other strand of copper this is let me go ahead and use it restore rod and I'm gonna get discussed water go ahead and start getting it dissolve now I could tell you already there is some contaminants in here and I'm probably not removed from the last time then it crystallized the stuff out you shouldn't get this greenish color it should be straight blue so what I'm going to end up having to do is I'm going to have to go ahead and get everything in here dissolved and then hopefully this is a precipitate that I can filter out so we'll go ahead and get this filtered out once I get everything in here dissolved and we will see if that clears it up a little bit and here you can see the obvious difference that if filtration will make we're going from this greenish sludge stuff to this nice bright blue and that's the color it's supposed to be whenever is that saturation I'm just filtering it through a coffee filter and cotton end model okay so now that I have the solution filtered it's time to go ahead and get this thing up and going this I had got picked up earlier and we're just going to go ahead and cross it in like that we'll let it hang and then the anode here I put a zip tie on it that's just to help hold it up so it doesn't fall over and slosh this thing's got quite a bit of weight to it and this is what I'm going to use the helping hands for help hold that up now I find you want to have as much distance as your whiskey as your dish will allow between the end of the cathode if you have problems remembering which side which polarity the and it is or the cathode the way I always remembered it is the anode starts with an A just like AD and you know ad is like positive and so are those remember anode is positive ads okay so I've got the Gator clip hooked up in that little hole that I drilled up at the top and then I've got the other side of the helping hands holding on to that piece of plastic that zipped I'm and I've got the negative side that I will hook up here that's not I mean once the crystals get larger it'll have some weight to it but right now you don't really have to worry about keeping it held up then I'm going to turn on my power supply as you can see it's about 1 volt I'm not even showing that it's drawing a current but now let's go in terms of voltage a little bit just to be sure that there is a connection okay so there is current going through I'm going to go ahead and pull it down to one to point to one point three volts the purpose for that is is you wanted to take a nice long time the longer that you wait for these crystals to grow and the slower you do it the bigger they will get if you do it real fast say in a matter of days so you get these really fine hairlike crystals and those just they fall apart and they oxidize quickly and they're not very cool but I let this grow for about a month and you get some really nice beautiful crystals out of it I'm gonna go ahead and take video periodically draw the growth of this and and then I'll get everything compiled together at the end okay so this is after about a day and a half gross pull these out as you can see we're starting to get some crystals growing on here nice shiny ones and these are going to want to be the crystals that get really large this is probably to be the last time I take it out of the solution once the crystals start to get fairly large they get fairly brittle at least at the edges or where they connect to the wire they'll fall off and then they won't grow anymore and then I got to fish them out as a bottom but from here on out I usually take a flashlight and shine it in to take a look and see what's going on in there and you can see there's a little bit of dust around this anode that's probably things like flux and the whatnot that was still on the brick from when I cast it it's just falling off in into the solution at the bottom but as you can see it's a really slow slow growth like I said this is after about a day and a half I'll probably take another picture or shoot some more video after about a week hi guys so I wanted to give you an update this is about a weekend on the crystal growth and as you can see it's quite a few growing in there I'm not going to kind of tucked away it looks like it's doing that big enough that they would break so come take a look real quick go focus come on Oh thought it was going to there it goes as you can see they're starting to flush themselves out now these crystals are going to get a lot bigger like I said I'm hoping to get maybe probably good ten centimeter long well if you could fit 10 centimeters and I want to get it as close to this as I can without it touching so these are the crystals at about the two week mark you can see they're really starting to grow out and as the crystals grow the power consumption of this is going to increase a little bit not a whole lot it's using about 138 million between hundred thirty hundred and forty million and I drop the voltage down to one volt just to these pick it up a little bit so they don't become so thin you can see on the anode didn't eat in a way you can see all the dust at the bottom [Music] and the stuff that's fallen off is things like copper oxides the flux that was on the bar metals you know that aren't copper one curious thing is there's a hole being eight minute it to be deep in there not sure why it's being eaten away like that but we'll get a better look at it once we pull it out of the solution so we are right around the three week mark now and you can see there's quite a bit more growth going on as well as power consumption increase I drop the voltage a little bit more and the current is still going up which means that's because of the increased surface area of the cathode okay give you another update here this is day 47 on the growing of these as you can see they're getting quite large thickening up I don't know how well you can tell through the camera with these crystals really shiny at least up front they are back here in the back they look really dull the only way I have found to prevent that is by moving the anode and respect to the cathode essentially behind the crystal and then that will replace the back and give it a shine again however the really large crystals like that one shooting off to this side for the most part looks good all the way down so the crystals that you break off and keep usually look pretty good even though you get these darker ones you can see the anode is getting eaten away pretty good at some point I'm gonna have to submerge the rest of that into it you'll see all the crud sediment at the bottom I show you in a previous video what I do with that after I filtered out I'll put a link down in the description if you haven't seen that yet okay so this is what the crystals look like after 67 days it's getting large enough now though that I'm going to go ahead and pull them out and we'll see how they look now one thing you're going to have happen dia if you try this is you're going to have the crystals of copper sulfate growing up the side of the glass here there's not a real good way to prevent that but to deal with it what I do and I just use a squirt bottle and I go around and support the edges like this and it'll wash most of the crystals back in and dissolve a good chunk of them and you can just do that once a day all the way around and you need to keep it under control and you'll get it all around the outside here as you can see I did slack on it a little bit but that's the way it works sometimes okay so this is done tom to go ahead and remove them from solution we go ahead and turn off the power and scooch the power remove the anode first before I sit down I'm gonna go ahead and spray it off the cleanest while I'm gonna try to do is I'm going to try to push this underneath so I can spray it I'm going to drip now these crystals are really brittle so I'm probably going to break some and it takes him out [Music] get off here I'm going to get as much of that copper sulfate out as possible and we will let this sit and grip and dry for a few minutes and then we will go ahead and click the crystals off and here is the copper bar the anode that I was plating from you can see the crystals for the copper in there but for during cooling when I poured this pretty interesting looking but as you can see there's still quite a bit left here that I'm going to be I can plate from and I'm gonna go ahead and do that and once I pick these crystals off I'm going to think that back in and will keep growing off this okay so now that these are dried I'm going to carefully place them on a paper towel and a hole the big press is off now this one is the biggest [Music] I put a quarter here so you can kind of see the size comparison this one is going to break in the middle yeah okay there's still pretty large crystals [Music] as you can hear we have a newborn to attend to as well now some of these crystals are darker color especially when you get down to the base and what I do for that is I take my dremel with a tiny wire wheel and just quickly go over and it shines it right up like the rest okay I think that is all I'm going to pick off this one I might pick a couple more these smaller ones but I'm going to leave the rest on here so I can go ahead put it back in solution and keep growing you

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Views: 649,789

Rating: 4.7375622 out of 5

Keywords: copper, metal, electrolysis, grow, crystals, ingot, sulfate, purify

Id: HQeY6c8ztgI

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2017