Making Petrified Lightning ...with electricity??

hey guys backyard scientist here first thing first you probably see my arm is all scraped up no I didn't get in some crazy industrial accident I actually got into a fight fight yeah you should see the other guy I hit a mailbox I hit a mailbox on my bike this video is sponsored by helmets no actually actually the spot this video is sponsored by Kubica today we're gonna be trying a project that I've wanted to do forever so right here I've got a big bucket full of metal bb's a bunch of tiny little metal Dedes and I was always curious what happened if you took a welder or a car battery and melted the bb's together could you melt them together so they look like a lightning bolt or a Tesla coil frozen in time that would be really cool speaking of lightning bolts they cause a naturally occurring phenomenon just like this called fulgurites except when they strike sand and they create a molten tunnel of sand right where the lightning bolt strikes on the beach and they're really rare and hard to find and they're pretty fragile so really quickly let's try making our own phone rings with our own high voltage transformer [Applause] notices beautiful Zen garden that Sandra made a cool thing about sand is it's not conducted but when it eats up it is conductive so allows me to stretch this out really far whoops it's hot looks like the electricity is just growing right off the carbon rod like that that's pretty cool it's like some sort of demon claw oh it's hot hot hot hot okay we're gonna let that cool down for a minute I mean I'm trying to hold it together or let's see if we can clean these up a bit it's cool they're red from the copper cuz look if these are super red and then these aren't clear and this is because I used the thick copper wire and then these are red because I think I used the thin wire and it was melting I noticed as I was doing it the wire kept getting shorter it's like from the molten copper mixed with the glass so these were kind of cool these little sand fulgurites we're pretty cool but what I'm really trying to do here is I bought 50 pounds of these shot blasting steel beads they're like little bb's basically little tiny steel balls that you would use to like clean off metal or something after it was cast or cleaned bricks or paint or something like that I don't know the idea here is that I can use my welder and use it like really high current in the welder to fuse these steel balls together and get some really cool long Lichtenberg figures and like 3d electricity shapes out of these so let's try and see what happens if you're curious about how I set all of this up so I have the welder here and I've set it on to DC TIG welding but I have the stick welding electrode holder so what I'm going to be doing is just controlling the power like this so basically I can control the power with my foot to decide how much energy to put into this thing otherwise to is on stick welding as soon as I touched it it would just be full power immediately maybe I should wear this I like having the retinas alright let's see I put one here then one here oh you can kind of see it they see it could you see like the path that I was taking you could kind of see right through the metal babies like see if this is cool wow that's hot I need a science tour cut and I'm it's not a joke these are actually science works because Sandra doesn't let me use the nice Forks for science experiments anymore not after the incident well yeah let's Who am I kidding everything's been an incident oh yeah look at that it's like a little you know electric Lichtenberg figure so I noticed it's all taking the same path back you know Oh see that was a weird path that it took I thought it would take the closer path back all right so these came out super cool check that out they look really cool but they're also two-dimensional so yeah they're a little bit fragile and two-dimensional but I've got an idea and I think I can fix both of those problems so my first idea was instead of pouring all the metal bb's into a shallow pan we're going to be using a tall flowerpot that way we can get cooler more natural looking shapes and I also built to this platform right here that we can set this on and if you notice under the flowerpot I have this little tube sticking up right here and this is connected to argon gas the other problem that we're having is these things are kind of fragile and I think it's because the steel babies aren't really getting hot enough to melt together they're kind of just getting really hot and fusing together but they're not really fully melting together fortunately I have this this is 33 pounds of silicon bronze wire the plan here is to chop up the silicon bronze wire mix it in with the steel biddies and it will act like the glue holding the steel together and hopefully it'll make everything a lot stronger let me show you how I cannibalize my table saw to chop up some wire so basically what I have here is a roll of silicon bronze welding wire there's a wire feeder device and it comes out right here let me show you how it works hopefully this doesn't hit the glass so we won't die okay ready to go so now you get these nice little slivers of wire that are pretty much exactly the same size as the steel bb's so as I was experimenting with this trying to get it to work I was running into a problem the normal saw blade has a lot of little blades on it to make a really smooth cut the problem was it was just shaving the tiniest little bits of so I bought these blades which are made for something called a dado or dado or daddy saw I don't know what it's come but there are only two blades so that means even a full speed this is still going around and so that means that this wire has more time to advance before this chops off so I get nice big bits of wire instead of tiny little slivers of wire everything works fine but by my calculations this wire feeder can only feed 12 meters per minute and this role has a lot of meters on it so it'll basically take eight hours to get rid of that so like I said this thing is going to take eight hours to chew through all of this wire so you take the next eight hours to tell you about Kiwi Co you've heard me talk about Kiwi Co before Kiwi Co is defining the future of play by making it engaging and rigging and seriously fun they create super cool projects and toys designed to expose kids to the concepts of steam and make great tools for learning at home each monthly crate is designed by experts and tested by kids and teaches a new theme through hands-on learning and fun Cuba Co offers eight subscription lines each catering to different age groups and topics each box comes with all the supplies needed for that months project which means a no extra runs to the store [Music] Kiriko also has a store that allows you the flexibility of purchasing individual projects or even value packs that cater to different ages and topics with no subscription needed use my code backyard for 20% off everything on the site both subscription boxes and in the store see the links in the description down below all right so this thing has been running for a long time so let's check out what we've got Oh would you look at that gold all that silicon bronze that actually worked out really good there's some bits of sawdust and aluminum in there still all right so let's see how much of everything we have steel babies forty five point seven pounds 27 point two so that's about 50% I think that'll be a good ratio so two bits of steel for every one bit it'll be you know what I'm talking about guys all right I got all the steel and copper mixed up nicely so we'll just turn on the gas and let's do this I think okay whoa now there is huh I'm gonna let this cool down for a minute then we're gonna come back and see what this looks like let's see what we got these are really so cool this is working out perfectly but how do I grab it it's still kind of hot whoa still hot still hot but these are coming out so cool some of the stuff on here is pretty fragile but most of it is again this is really cool this is working out great I found out the trick to making really cool-looking ones is making them in layers so you pour some into the flowerpot hit it with electricity pour some more and fill it with electricity and I did this a couple times that ended up getting four or five really awesome ones I got to tell you guys I am super happy with the way this project is turning out I mean this is exactly how I envisioned it in my head each piece looks super unique organic like some kind of coral or petrified lightning that's awesome that worked out perfectly I had another idea this might have been a bad idea because it involved me separating all the steel bb's with the magnet which was very time-consuming but I want to try using just the cut silicon bronze wire to see how that works that was a bad idea because it turns out that didn't work at all I think what happens is the copper is just too conductive to the heat so it sucks up all the heat away from the arc and nothing can really heat up enough to melt together so I just have a bunch of hot copper wire in there alright guys like I said before I am super happy with the way that these turned out and I figured out a good way some of them are still a little bit weak but I figured out a good way to make them strong it just code them in a little bit of epoxy and then plus if you do that you can add in a little bit of glue Lonardo pigment so it really glows in the dark that's it for this video guys see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 2,862,856

Rating: 4.9530783 out of 5

Keywords: backyard scientist, backyard, the backyard scientist, frozen lightening, petrifier lightening, lightening, electricity, make, diy, electricity sculpture, sculpture

Id: m7YznIKe7bU

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Spidey3518]

It's a video by backyard scientist where he's making petrified lightning.