Welcome back guys, today is an excellent day because the sun is shining, you're here and we're melting some metal. Now, in yesterday's video I showed you how to make this thing. This is our trashcan metal foundry - this is just lined with kaowool and as you might remember it gets very very hot. So today we're going to put it to good use. Now I still have quite a few of the brass ingots left from our brass knuckles project but what I am short on right now is aluminium. You can see from my mini Master Sword and my failed Pokeball attempts all of my aluminium is used up in failed castings. Now I personally love the different looks of these metals but it does make me wonder: what kind of results they would form if we mix the two together? So, the first step is to remelt this aluminium, and cast new mini metal biscuits. You can't see the flames out here, but it's definitely getting hot. Infrared technology! That's way cool...I like that... it's getting toasty! That's a big crucible; it takes a while to bring it up to temperature. Oh yeah, that's starting to melt! Our aluminum has melted so let's skim the slag off the top and pour it into our muffin tray. Oh wow. That's gorgeous. There's a lot of slag on the top there. That all needs to come out... That's no good to us any more... That's all aluminium oxide. And everything underneath that is really good molten aluminium. This might be super hot... All right, one successful transfer, going for the pour...ooh, that's hot... That really is hot... and... slippery... Whoops. That came out a little quicker... than I was expecting; my glove is starting to burn... What happens if we take molten aluminium and pour it into a crucible that's cold? Will it crack? Here we go... Alright, cool; transfer has been made... We can take this one... ...and pour it a little bit more evenly. That's hot stuff! These aluminium muffins are extremely hot right now, so I got a little bit of water to cool them down. Is it possible to liquefy aluminum and liquefy brass and mix the two liquids together to form a new type of metal? I'm no metallurgist but I am interested to see what happens so let's fire these things up and put them to the test. I just finished warming up our small crucible and we've got our new aluminum muffins ready to go so let's go ahead and mix them with the brass. Our first test is one aluminum muffin and one equivalent size brass muffin. How will these look once they're meshed together? Let's go find out. Our brass has just melted and you can tell that because the zinc is starting to oxidize and burn off; that's what the yellow is and that's what all these vapours are coming out, so it probably means it's melted and ready for pouring. Wow! The zinc is burning, it's on fire! Yikes. It's actually glowing... ok so our liquid is actually burning. Let's go ahead and take that out... Surprisingly, we almost got two biscuits back out of it... Amazing...! So quick update guys; you might remember that brass is actually a mixture of zinc and copper, and zinc has a relatively low boiling point so this stuff got so hot, the zinc started boiling out of the mixture. It actually gets hot enough that it can burn and combines with the oxygen in the air to form zinc oxide which is the long stringy stuff, and it leaves behind this yellow residue. That's why, in previous projects I've used a flux like Ant and Roach Killer because that suppresses the oxygen and keeps the zinc in the material. In any case, we got this stuff poured did come out with nearly two full muffins which should be a near 50:50 ratio of aluminium to brass. Okay let's knock these things out and give them a bath... That one's a little bit hotter than the last... Look at that; that's so hot it just cracked the glass and the water's leaking out. That's interesting, look at this big split on the bottom there as well... Okay... well, after all the abuse we've put this through, I think this is just about done. This is kind of interesting; I accidentally dropped one of these 50-50 mixes on the concrete and it shattered into about 7 different pieces This stuff is extremely shiny; it's got a really cool metallic tinge to it, but apparently this stuff's really brittle as well. Really great for looks; not great for durability! Oh wow! It shattered everywhere! Better not drop the other one... Ooh, that's pretty though... not going to lie, that's gorgeous. Wow! 50:50 aluminum and brass... Gorgeous. That's super cool, super shiny. But I just broke it! That's beautiful. Experiment number two: three parts aluminium, one part brass. Let's go. Boom. That looks toasty... Hasn't burst into flames yet; that's a good sign... Oh! Ha ha! I spoke too soon! Wow. It like, spit out half our mix, all over the place... I think that's all we're going to get. We put in four, we only got out two; that's because when I took the lid off and the air got to it; it exploded and splattered metal everywhere. So, things to watch out for when you're casting brass(!) The water's hot! Dang! For our third and final experiment, we've got three parts brass; one part aluminium. and stand back...! Cool... all right, is it going to explode in my face...? Hopefully not... Cool, we're halfway there. Four went in, three and a half came out. Not too bad. Interesting how it changes to different colors up there; kinda like purple, magenta tinges on top. We're knocking them out! Oh! Those fell right out! Couldn't be easier what do those things are kind of Look at those things. They're kinda pretty. Oh wow, look at the bottom! We got teal blue, we got all different colors of the rainbow here we got blues, greens, a little bit of yellow, some purple, magenta... Rainbow biscuits, that's pretty cool! I probably why the glass cracked it cracked from the bottom what happens if I drip a little water now I'm going to see if we can buff theses things up a little bit so guys our castings are complete we got some really cool different metallic colors of the rainbow. unfortunately I dropped the 50-50 mix on the concrete and it shattered into a bazillion pieces, showing that this composition is a little bit brittle, but if you look really close at the crystalline structure on the inside it's very very shining very pretty, actually its absolutely gorgeous the way it is. They're absolutely gorgeous. Now if you look closely at the different compositions of the metals we've just casted you see a wide array in the color changes we go from the top to the bottom. Starting at the top we've got one hundred percent brass then 75% brass twenty-five percent aluminium our 50-50 mix looks pretty cool but it's in a bazillion pieces. Down here we've got seventy-five percent aluminium with twenty-five brass and on the bottom one hundred percent aluminum. if you weren't aware of this already there's a huge weight difference between aluminum and brass the brass at about three times heavier than the aluminum and I compare the aluminum discs it with the one that's only got twenty five percent brass I can already feel and noticeable weight difference. Rose gold. Of course seventy-five percent brass is even heavier but what I love about this is if you look at the coloration its almost got kind of a rose gold tinge to it. it's not the bright shiny yellow color where you're used to seeing in brass, it's more of a rose gold color instead, it's got more of a pinkish purple fuchsia hue to it. very cool and very pretty and this is probably one of my favorites. Now as far as durability is concerned we already know that the 50-50 mix is very very fragile but I went ahead and smash tested the other ones and got some surprising results I went through each of these alloys with a hammer and smashed him with a good amount of power and all of them stayed intact except for the rose gold I had a little bit of chipping and one of them actually did break in half but other than that they all held together so it's kind of interesting to see that a hundred percent brass is very very resilient but what you start mixing an aluminum it becomes very brittle so cool experiments guide let's quickly recap what we just learned here today we took nuggets of aluminum and brass and we melted them down and mix them in a fifty-fifty ratio that made a new metallic composition that was extremely brittle but very very pretty and we were able to smash it down into a powder next we tried mixing 75% aluminum and twenty-five percent copper and we got a nugget that was very very similar to the aluminum itself just a little darker in color and a little bit heavier and finally we tried 75% copper and twenty-five percent aluminum which gave us a really cool rose gold looking nugget these are some of my favorites because they look really cool but there's still a little brittle and I was able to smash one in half. We also saw the hot molten brass is extremely sensitive the air making a burst into flame and sometimes explode making a mess all over your sidewalk. So what happens when you try mixing brass with aluminum? You get a wide array of new metallic composition each with their own personality. Thanks for joining me for this video guys I'll be looking for you next one talk to you then. Ooh, that gouged the concrete and this thing is still intact sweet, lets hit is again. wow that is hard this one didn't really do that.
He's still a fuckin idiot
Just watched the video, and thought you guys would like a cringe or two, don't be calling /r/OSHA for this one.
this guy is a danger to himself...
Just looking at all that zinc oxide fumes gave me a headache.
Okay, I laughed.