hi I'm Brady and you might remember last
year the professor met a man named Max
Whitby the element collector he's a guy
who makes real life periodic tables and
we remember what Max told us I I'll
invite you to our lab and see some being
melted which is quite F quite a nice
thing to see so I've been down to London
to make a few videos with Max and well
here's the first
one we're in the world world
headquarters of um the red green and
blue company RGB research which is where
we make our periodic tables the displays
that we make here are really mainly for
museums and for schools and occasionally
for very wealthy individuals who fancy a
periodic table in their study and
actually what I'm about to do now is to
go and make a sample to go into one of
these periodic tables this is what we're
starting with and it's um a beautiful 1
kg jar of silver sadly if I bought this
about a year ago I could have got it for
maybe
£200 uh but now silver shot up in price
this is one of the terrible uh uh
problems of being in the element selling
trade and now this is almost £1,000
worth of silver and what I'm going to do
I hope is to turn it into a beautiful
cylinder um this is even more expensive
uh yeah feel the we just feel the we to
that oh yeah what's that well what
you're looking at is pure gold so that's
1 kilogram cylinder um and um if we make
an equivalent size cylinder in silver
it's going to be about half the weight
it's going to be about half a kilogram
um so I'm hoping I can get two cylinders
out of this now the very first step in
making a cylinder do you know what it is
you have to do a risk assessment because
what we're doing is dealing with hot
molten metal and so um we've actually
gone through quite carefully thinking of
all things things that can go wrong and
Brady we've actually had a chat about
that that's why I'm going to be standing
out here yeah and I'm going to load the
furnace you see that's glowing nicely
red hot this is a graphite Crucible in
fact stay there and I'm going to go and
turn the light
out is that glowing still yeah yeah so
that that is hot um I've set that to
1,50 Dees Centigrade so it's quite a bit
above the melting point of silver um so
I'm going to start by just filling that
up and now of course doing this is going
to reduce the
temperature uh very
considerably um so once we've filled it
up with
the pieces of silver we then you can
actually see it Cooling and silver is a
superb conductor of heat that's got you
know quite a lot of thermal inertia you
can see that's gone almost now back to
the color of graphite cuz all the heat
that was in the graphite's gone into the
silver very very quickly superb
conductor and now we're going to close
the little lid and leave it to
leave it to cook
[Music]
so well this is uh slightly Overkill but
it provides a full face mask gloves
again and uh fingers
crossed
fantastic now that's a sink hole
appearing hopefully that will fill up
the
sinkhole
um okay well I'm very relieved that
seems to have come out okay it's SP like
making jelly only 1,000° celsus more um
now what's going to happen is that's
going to cool down and then we'll take
it to our marvelous engineer David
brutnell and he will machine it down to
a beautiful cylinder 55 mm long and 35
mm in diameter and then it will go to
America to periodic
table