Melting and combining 19 elements! Does it make a Super-Alloy?!

hey guys backyard scientist here today we're gonna be trying to combine these 19 different elements to create one super alloy we're gonna see what its properties are and maybe make a knife out of it or maybe it's all just gonna catch on fire who really knows it's never been done to a corner let's try it most alloys of coppers steel and aluminum only contain a small number of alloy elements and only a small percentage of those at that so when we combine all of these we get something really crazy first let's start with the elements with the lower melting point I think that we have to start with aluminum right so here we go a little bit of aluminum Oh toss it on in there next up is copper two ounces of silver right here each ounce of silver is about 16 dollars so we're gonna put both of those on in there all right so this right here is a piece of gold that weighs one tenth of an ounce one tenth of an ounce and it costs a hundred and fifty dollars anyway here we go ooh man that hurts I'm probably never gonna see that piece of gold again all right now instead of listening to me ramble on about metals for 20 minutes and hearing me say bloop 20 more times how about I show you this cool box from Kiwi Co it's a monthly subscription service and it comes in seven different categories based on age and interest and they're all tested by experts and kids so you know that you're getting something cool each kit comes with all the materials and kid-friendly instructions so you can just get right to it right out of the box we didn't have Kiwi coke crates when I was a kid growing up but my parents still always find me educational and science kits like this and I loved them and if we have these back then I would be super stoked to be getting these every month and plus you only have to bug your parents and get them to get you at once and it comes every month instead of bugging them every time you go to the store this is the box that they send me let's take a look and check out what's inside is so here we go we have the instructions the magazine that comes with all sorts of more information about the experiment to like further read about it and all the materials right here all right so this is what I built check it out it is a glowing pendulum whoo it looks pretty cool but we'll have to take it into a dark room to see what it really looks like oh and did I mention the Kiwi cow is a great gift for the holiday season it is the gift that keeps on giving show your support for my channel by checking out this great offer that Cuba Co has to offer for viewers of my channel viewers of my channel get their first Kiwi Co box free so head on over to Kiwi cocom slash backyard and check out with subscription boxes now I guess I got to get back to the video but this thing is just too much fun now where were we oh yeah that's right we're trying to melt tungsten but it's basically impossible well again this is a very high melting point compound and we're probably not going to be able to melt this so I'm hoping some of it will just dissolve but I think that just because it's not hot enough to melt it it can still dissolve in the metal because sometimes if you're using a stainless steel crucible to melt aluminum or copper eventually the metal will melt through the crucible or won't even melt through it'll just kind of like dissolve the steel so so I'm hoping that will happen with some of our elements and that they will just dissolve into the pool of molten metal all right so these are all the elements that we melted we have aluminum antimony bismuth boron chromium copper germanium gold indium iron manganese nickel silicon silver tantalum ten tungsten zinc and zirconium and the reason we're melting these metals is because some of the other metals would kill me some of them are flammable and some of them are just radioactive they're gases and they're too expensive so I think this is a good group of elements to mix together and I know it kind of seems like we're just messing around throwing a bunch of elements together all willy-nilly and we kind of are but this is actually a new emerging field of research they're making these alloys called high entropy alloys and it's relatively new because it's pretty difficult to mix 20 elements together these researchers are using specialized tools and equipment and pressure chambers so I pretty much don't have a chance to make anything super crazy with this bad boy I think the metal is all Melvin so what we're going to do is take it out and then we're going to pour it into this mold which is just a normal sand mold and it has a hold that goes down there that's roughly the shape of a knight so we're going to cast it into there and then pour out the extras on the table and hopefully we can get something that resembles a knife to see if we can sharpen it there all right are you ready all right now here's our extras and here's the stuff that wouldn't melt you can see the cube well so far everything looks pretty good let's pull that knife out and see what it looks like oh you see this it's breaking apart okay so we're gonna quench it first let me show you this event I polished it up a little bit you can kind of tell the color of the metal it's pretty silver I thought it might be a little bit gold based on how much copper and gold did I put into it but nope it's pretty silver maybe with a tiny tiny tiny hint of gold now back to making this into a knife when I was pulling it out of the sand mold you can tell that it kind of broke as I was pulling it out like the top of it broke off so I don't think I can hammer this into a knife I can't forge it into a knife like a normal piece of steel I guess we can try though so we'll get this piece right here and hit it with the hammer and see what happens yeah it's it's super brittle like if that was a piece of like you know steel or copper like a bronze sword you would be able to hammer it flat they're not flat but at least it wouldn't splinter like that something else I noticed is on one of the pieces of metal as it cooled it forced all these tiny little beads of metal out through the surface also when I tried to reheat the knife to reshape it I noticed that the metal started sweating like molten metal certainly just coming right out of a surface like that so anyway the plan was to get it red-hot and then flat to get more of a knife edge on it but when I did that the whole thing fell apart oh geez this isn't working at all so this does not seem like a good metal to make a sword out of or even a little knife all right so maybe we'll try making a little blade out of this piece right there all right so I've managed to turn that little tiny piece of the metal into a little blade here so what we're gonna do is try to cut up this piece of cheese right here there's a little slice for you yeah so it's strong enough to cut cheese yeah all right what's next alright now we're gonna try to cut this aluminum can here I scrape the paint off of it yes can I cut well there's not really a sharp end but maybe you can just force it through and then cut and it can do that that was pretty good now let's try this a piece of steel not harder than steel I'm only scratching away the rust nope you're scratching away tonight I am scratching away the knife I think if I want to make a proper night that's made with a ton of different metals what I have to do is do it the old-fashioned way of getting one base metal and alloying all of this metal into it in a smaller percentage so say like 80 percent copper and then the rest of it would be this all this melted down into the copper that'll give us a really interesting knife but it will still have a pretty decent mechanical properties because we tried this right it's cool but I feel like I could just break this bit right here like like that that's not a very good knife this is 19 elements mixed together which is pretty cool but maybe I'll save a piece of this just because it's neat and the rest of it will turn it into a better knife we're gonna be using this pink foam insulation to make a mold with the knife first I'm just gonna cut the rough shape of the knife out of the foam then I'm gonna use a sander to bring it to the final shape then I painted the phone with her frack dirty cemento just a couple light layers at a time and build it up and let each layer dry then once the refractory cement was dry I dissolved out the phone with some acetone methyl ethyl ketone or ethyl acetate would work better than acetone if you have it the mold on itself is pretty fragile by itself so you have to support it with sand alright let me get a drum roll guides because this is the main event trying to pour this metal and this is a very nerve-wracking experience not because I'm worried about spilling it on myself but because I'm worried about the mold not working right I hope everything turns out okay well unfortunately the knife didn't turn out too great it's curved there's a lot of holes in it so I think we're just gonna abandon the knife idea and try something else that I've been wanting to try for a while well you know I tried my best to fix this knife but I hit it and it just cracked in half I spent a lot of time grinding and polishing it and then it just broke and you can see there there's another crack oh well we're gonna melt it down because I wanted to try something else for a while now so if you remember the video where I take the molten aluminum and I pour it into the hole tank full of Orbeez I think that works awesome I love it but those Orbeez are kind of toxic especially when they get really hot from the molten aluminum that fumes that come off of that water like it stings your eyes so I wanted to go with a more natural approach so I'm thinking grapes will work so we're just gonna fill this bucket with grapes and water then see if we can get a cool cast out of that instead well I poured in the grapes and I melted down the old knife in the foundry and would you just look at that metal I mean you can watch it oxidizing right before our very eyes I don't know what it is but something about this alloy creates a ton of ton of slag like whatever is in here just does not like to be oxidized well everything's ready to go let's see how this turns out alright here we go it's kind of fuller than I thought oh it's heavy it's very heavy probably heavy because there's so many grapes trapped in there oh you know you should do what should I do you should give this to your mama's again and accidentally forget agreed and call her in a month and see which is it sorry for toilet paper in your house I like this this one is one of them mm-hmm one of a kind so here's the finished product and I notice something really cool about it the color it's not quite in brass aluminum or copper it's kind of a mixture of all three at the same time and I think it's pretty unique well I'm pretty happy with how this turned out and I noticed that's pretty funny that the grapes smell exactly like burnt watermelon so it's a scent that's very familiar to me and it brings me back anyway this is pretty cool it works out a lot better I like it like this instead of the knife because it's a super fragile material and if it was a knife it wouldn't works and this is just nice to look at so well I hope you guys enjoyed watching this and see you guys next time bye

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 2,325,024

Rating: 4.8803296 out of 5

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Id: hz8vFcUv-B4

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019