It's Hiding In Your Soda Can

in today's video we're going to try to dissolve the aluminum from a soda can but leave the soda behind hey Callie yeah why did Paul Revere ride his horse from Boston to Lexington why horse is too heavy to carry you sure it's available now she's just amazed at how good that joke was so some of these things look like things that I would want to drink some of these things look like things I probably should never drink ever that's definitely true as everyone knows sodas very unhealthy and so you should never drink it ever but this on me oh you meant the other stuff No so here we've got drain cleaner and soda guys we have had a ton of people sending us videos recently on Instagram and comments asking to see if we can test something out the original video or at least the one that people have been sending to us showed a tall skinny can of coca-cola having the outside sanded off and it was then submerged in drain cleaner liquid the brand of drain cleaner that they used in the video appears to be one that's sold in the UK and possibly some other places but I didn't find it for sale anywhere near me but I looked it up and it said that the main active ingredient in it is sodium hydroxide which is another way of saying why it's a very basic material which means it's the opposite on the pH scale from acidic and it can have some similar results it can dissolve stuff it can eat stuff away and it does react with aluminum so to clarify this is caustic lye now caustic from what I understand means that it dissolves organic matter organic tissue yeah it should be able to eat living stuff for the most part great that means it's high enough on the pH scale that it would you damage to tissue here's the basic idea we're going to test if we can use sodium hydroxide to dissolve the aluminum in a can and reveal the plastic lining full of soda within first step in the video was to take a soda can and aluminum soda can and to sand it all there you go oh look at that a sanded can we took some sandpaper I used a power sandir to see things up so it's got fun little like texture lines in it nice and I sanded all over this it's not sanded on the bottom so this is just whatever was normally there and this may even have a sort of plastic key film over it so that you can't really see and I didn't sand at the top and that's on purpose we don't want to dissolve the top in the bottom we just wants it is all the aluminum on the sides because that we hope will help it keep its shape a little bit better now we have done a couple of videos in the past that are in the same vein you guys may have seen that I have actually dissolved the outside of an egg using vinegar and what's left behind is actually the membrane of an egg so you can actually play with it it's called a rubber egg and it's kind of bouncy and kind of fun we also did one with gallium we did do this with gallium we took our can we sanded some of down and we put it into the gallium and the aluminum acts like kind of a sponge it soaks up the gallium the gallium gets inside the aluminum and breaks its bonds making it very very brittle in this case we ended up with just sort of a portion of our can hanging on that plastic lining and the cans have plastic lining because a lot of soda is going to be acidic probably all soda is at least a little bit acidic they don't want that to start reacting with the aluminum itself so it's an aluminum can for strength with a very thin plastic lining to protect soda from the campus so we have our concentrated lye our sodium hydroxide liquid here and so the next step shown in the video is you open the can and that's for a couple reasons one it releases any pressure because you wouldn't want to pressurize can that suddenly doesn't have its walls every spring want to I wouldn't want a pressurize can with its walls suddenly being missing and then you take a stick fit it through the tab and let it hang down into a cup but first just to measure how much drain cleaner we need I'm gonna do that with water first fill up with water and see what level of drink cleaner we're going to need so this is just basically just looks like slightly thicker water so before we get rid of the the water here I've got some pH strips I want to just kind of show the difference between lye and water itself the water in lye you can see here on our pH scale lining up pretty darn well with our 7 yep and then all the way up here at 14 maybe a little bit higher almost that looks really dark it's true that's our lie lower these down in hopefully our math works out nicely this is something that I've seen on soda bottles a lot people will pick episode at a barbecue and they start tapping the lid and then they open it why do people do that the idea is that it helps settle down the carbonation if it's accidentally been jostled or shaken and they don't want to explode it everywhere it's a myth I've heard for a long time I've never done side by side test so I think we can do a test about whether or not that actually works we're gonna start by shaking up two cans of soda we're gonna try and make them equal amounts and then well Kali tries tap-tap-tapping one I don't know if you want to just do like the three taps or if you want to spend like a few seconds tapping away at it whatever you've heard is supposed to work the best the other one will just sit still as you do that and we'll open both and see if we have approximately the same noticeably different whether or not this works it's gonna make a mess probably shake shake shake shake shake [Music] all right so I'll hand it to you and you do all the tapping you feel like while I hold the other one still see sometimes I even do this I just like tap the or click it alright and I'm just been holding this one steady something we can try and open them like this let's aim them at our camera guy but but hold it up so we don't just have it flowing out it's gonna hit it's gonna hit us maybe ok what's your plan I'm just gonna pop it open but near each other so we can keep them both insane alright ready I think yours are up did more my bubble more i agitated it I kept a jeté ting it after he held it still you hold your steady alright I've never held a soda so carefully in my life ten solid taps on the top great you count three two one they look pretty even that time mine definitely did not seem less explosive than yours maybe more not by a lot but for the most part no real change happened there alright I think we have successfully debunked the tap test I don't think it makes that much of a difference of anything it may add jeté tit a little bit more [Music] did that one stay together no is it just sticking to the side I'm not sure what it's stuck to at the moment is it actually that's full it's got some liquid down at the bottom of it I don't know what the composition of that liquid is partially soda partially partially acid that's actually like very similar it's where we had we just got like this part at the bottom is also plastic so we just have like a little metal ring that didn't quite dissolve yeah little pieces just hanging on I'm gonna try and get this down into our water rinse it off a little bit being very careful not to breathe in the fumes except I'm still getting some orange smell so I think absolutely as you can tell aren't orange soda did leak out just like the others but I think there may be some left fingers crossed uh-huh that's soda colored oh he'll be safe way better I don't where we go I don't know exactly where the rest of soda would actually I think I do know where the rest of the sudden went see the counter what I yeah I went there it went into the cup because we only filled these two here yeah but they still home battered and went everywhere I talked about this when we were starting put them in and I noticed that the cans weren't really sinking down into the liquid check this out I think maybe you didn't sand this part quite so much I didn't say in the bottoms of any of them huh interesting this Fanta can for some reason survive a lot better so that's pretty cool let's pour this one out I would go slower killed it once again just a little bit at the bottom of the aluminum they just held together and so it's just like pulling it down it's just the thickest part is slowest to dissolve it is hot oh yeah is it reacts with the aluminum it just warms up I got all of these are warm yep well and as you saw all of these are putting off fumes as we're blowing around that one's probably gonna fall a little bit just a blob oh and their cups not a strong plastic see how this one's done it didn't have the ability to float up the same way oh that has worked so much better that one is not gone as long as the others however this is really cool you put tape on it so that you get did it did it work I'm still there I think so but it's hard to tell how I try and peel the tape off I'm worried about that I'm not sure that he's a tape and just gently pulling that direction this is basically saran wrap and I'm trying to peel tape off of saran wrap and it doesn't love that in like foil what we're doing pretty much but if we can in the stores over here alright just finish pulling that off you can see these so even even without the plastic and you see the shape that we were getting there and it actually came super close to working look at that we've just got like these strips of metal left we're gonna try this one more time I'm gonna set up just one can this time it's been sanded I am going to dilute the drain cleaner just a little bit by adding some water to it I'm going to do that because I'm trying to lower the density of it this is squishing our cans so much that it doesn't float so I'm gonna start with drain cleaner but then and the Watertown and this will probably make it less potent it might take longer do we want it to be as high as I would like it if it still can dissolve the whole can right and we're gonna be adding weights yes well I guess really quick I can just see if this one sinks all the way in now that I've added water to it so close I'm I don't want to add more weights because I'm worried about tearing I'm gonna just start thinking as you along them yep let's leave it like that for a while and see if it turns into anything cool noise [Music] [Music] oh well it worked for a second and then it broke I'm thinking that might be the reason that in the other video they used one of these tall skinny cans is it just had like more structural side support [Music] you got this you got this you got this I think it will rupture if I try and take it out Wow holy cow stay away from this I don't know what happened in that original video that made it just hold its shape so nicely and not balloon out like this they didn't leave it in as long I guess that's possible so is it possible I'm gonna say yes I don't know what they did only that we're not exactly like how specifically why dissolve lied to water ratio that's probably better we we use highly concentrated stuff so I don't know if it's the drain clear that's reacted to the plastic or if it's just that it got so hot as it reacted with the aluminum and the heat is what did this and we've left it in too long who knows so to the very very many of you who sent a video to us asking if this is possible yes it is possible the exact method they used in their video I'm not sure the plastic walls on there can definitely held up better for them that it did for us but we were able to dissolve the metal from around the plastic we were able to see the soda inside the plastic squish it we had some very similar results to them in some of our tests if we just wanted to keep trying this over and over I'm sure we could get to something that was more similar to what they did the important thing it does work the drain cleaner will dissolve the aluminum following the same steps they did we didn't have an identical result but I believe that what they showed was real you know it showed them squishing the sides of the plastic hand pouring the whole thing out I think it really happened I think they really did it and we would just have to play around if it a bit more to get their exact results oh boy [Music] guys it's not all we've got more for you to see click the box up at the top to check out the most recent video and we'll see you in the next one talk to you then

Channel: The King of Random

Views: 4,247,546

Rating: 4.8373446 out of 5

Keywords: coca cola experiment, experiment, science, science projects, science experiments, chemistry, home science, video, experiments to do at home, cool science experiments, discovery science, easy science experiments, life hacks, coke, lifehacks, magic tricks, science tricks, physical experiment, mel science, mel chemistry, fun science experiments, chemistry lab, chemistry help, science experiments at home, cool chemical reactions, at home science experiments, aluminum can, cola, secret

Id: TtElfzx0SHw

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2019