How To Make Synthetic Ruby In The Workshop

[Music] [Music] hi everyone in this video I'm going to be showing you an extremely easy method to make gigantic synthetic rubies in your workshop the way that I learned about how to do this was through another youtube channel called element maker now I've been following a series on element makers channel for about the last year or so where he has developed different ways to make synthetic rubies himself now I want you to go check out his channel after this video so that you can go see element makers series in coming up with this process to making synthetic Ruby in the workshop he was really kind to allow me to make this video for all of you to see and so I'd love if you'd go check out his channel so this is the largest Ruby that I have been able to make with this process and to do this I am using a carbon electrode in my arc welder this is an extremely heat resistant material these carbon electrodes are actually sold for arc welders I found mine on eBay a 50 pack for about $20 now previous to this I had used carbon rods in my arc welder which I scavenged from these old-style 6 volt Lantern batteries there's 4 carbon rods in here and they work really well for this process but you have to cut a battery apart in order to get at them so using these rods I also use a piece of graphite for a crucible to create these rubies I started off with a piece of round stock graphite I got this from a friend but you can buy graphite blocks or rods or crucibles all over the Internet I took a piece of this graphite rod put it on my drill press and drilled a little cavity inside so that I have a little bit of area that I can fill with the material that I will use to create my rubies now rubies are primarily composed of aluminum oxide this is sold as an abrasive media for use with sandblasters this aluminum oxide composes lots of different gem stones like sapphires rubies and others now what makes a ruby a ruby is the contaminant that's in it the contaminant that is in a ruby that gives it its red color is chromium so I also have this chromium oxide and you notice that it's green green chromium oxide is for a chromium compound rather non-toxic there's not a lot of health risks related with this but I would still not do this process without really good ventilation as you should do with any welding process so what I did is I measured out 99 grams of this white aluminum oxide to one gram of this chromium oxide and by that ratio you can tell that this bag of chromium oxide is going to last me a very very long time compared to the aluminum oxide I measured them out I mixed them together in this Cup I thought about grinding them in my mortar and pestle but aluminum oxide is an abrasive it has a hardness on the Mohs scale of like 9 compared to diamonds 10 so there's almost nothing that can grind this down except for diamond so rather than grinding this I just mixed it up and called it good enough fortunately we're going to be melting this with the welding arc and that should allow these individual molecular components to really well integrate with each other when they melt so my first test in creating ruby was just to take some of this powder which is the aluminum and chromium compound combined and putting it on a graphite plate and then struck an arc with my arc welder right against the powder and tried to kind of push the powder around with the arc and this blew a lot of the dust into the air but some of the powder did melt together and create tiny little rubies this was my first successful result it's the first time I tried making Ruby and I actually created many little rubies you can actually see all over my workbench if I if I shine a UV light on my workbench you can see little dots of fluorescence which are the Ruby that actually shot off of the welding arc and landed all over my workbench like little grains of dust that is how easy it is to create Ruby with this method my workshop is literally covered in rubies right now so that was my first attempt at creating Ruby and that is approximately the same method that element maker used to create rubies on his channel with his first attempt with an arc welder now this first time using the crucible I think I got the carven arc a little bit too close to the Ruby material and I think I transferred quite a lot of carbon that was slowly eroding away off of my electrode into the Ruby but once I had this Ruby finished put it under fluorescent light it does glow brilliantly which is a sure sign that I've created Ruby because the base material it's green ruby is pink this base material also has no fluorescence at all so you can tell something has inherently changed with the properties of this material by looking at how fluorescent it is after this process that's a sure sign that we have indeed created Ruby now my second attempt with this crucible I did something a little different I tried to heat the crucible from the outside in so that I was depositing less of the carbon from the electrode into the Ruby material and I think this did help in the initial heating of my base Ruby components heating this aluminum and chromium powder together however I was not able to get the powder hot enough to actually fully melt just by heating this crucible from the outside in I eventually did have to take the arc and put it over top in order to get it hot enough to melt and now you can see the result as I pour my little Ruby ingot out onto the surface of my workbench this process makes a really smooth surface on the portion of the Ruby that was directly exposed to the carbon arc but the underside as you can see is still pretty rough which actually I think this might be a useful feature we might be able to use this process to make pure Ruby abrasives maybe Ruby files by melting the surface but leaving the underside rough with the alumina powder still embedded in the surface and that could actually make a really fine abrasive that would be really great for working steel now I tried taking this over and polishing it on my sander but as is to be expected with Ruby being just as hard as the abrasive that is on my sanding belts I were away the sanding belt just as fast as I wore away the Ruby so besides being a really good way to destroy a sanding belt this really didn't work for polishing my rubies so my next step in this process to create the best Ruby that I could was to put the Ruby that I had already made back in the crucible upside down so I could expose the rough surface that was formerly on the bottom of the Ruby to the carbon arc directly so I struck up my carbon arc and remelted the bottom surface of this Ruby until it was smooth and this actually worked really well again we can watch as this cools down and I tried to cool this down a little more quickly by spraying some isopropyl alcohol onto the Ruby and we get a really cool laid and frost effect as the Ruby is cooling down and you can see how dramatically the color shifts as it cools to room temperature and now of course this is the final result I have a Ruby roughly the same size and shape as my little graphite crucible this I think is an incredible process because it is so easy check out element maker on YouTube again I really appreciate him letting me make this video and I want to give him a big shout out he does some really cool stuff on his channel and I'll put a link to it in the video description below it's worth checking out and especially to see his previous methods of making Ruby and he himself is really early in the process of experimenting with arc welder techniques for creating rubies and I have no doubt he is going to come up with some great advancements in the future far beyond what I show in this video so thank you for watching this has been a pretty casual video I threw it together Justin about an afternoon here in my workshop so I hope you forgive it not being quite as polished as the usual content on this channel thank you for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 1,441,822

Keywords: Ruby, How To, Homemade, DIY, Science, Experiment, NightHawkInLight

Id: MLV1pPvTpIw

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020