I just pulled the carbon rods out of a 6 volt lantern battery, and used them to complete
a makeshift arc reactor furnace. Which apparently, is powerful enough to completely liquify steel
in under 2 minutes. In this project let’s harness the power of electrified plasma to
melt high temperature metals, and take backyard experiments to a whole new level.
Let’s start this project with the AC arc welder we made in a previous project. It runs
on modified parts from a microwave oven, and you can see how I built it in another project
video. Now if we power up the reactor and try touching the two carbon rods together,
they spark up a blinding arc of electrically, that gets impressively hot, impressively fast.
The heat of the arc pulls the plasma upward, but if we tilt the electrodes down a bit,
we can change the direction of the beam and splash it down into the reactor core. Let’s
test the power of the arc furnace on this little aluminum muffin we made in a previous
project. You can see it’s the perfect size, for nestling down into the 2” chamber. With
the lid in place, it’s time to insert the carbon electrodes, and when they touch, you
can see they start sparking, then stabilize into a steady and continuous electrical arc.
The electric light is white hot, and so bright it can burn out your retinas. But if you wear
a protective welding mask with a face shield, you’ll safely be able see what’s happening
inside. I’ll show you what it looks like in just a minute. Now after only 45 seconds,
you can see the rods are white hot and could start a fire, so let’s push them through
the insulating holes in the lid, then carefully remove it from the furnace. You can see the
aluminum’s melted and glowing bright orange, but surprisingly enough, the outside is still
cool enough that I can pick it up barehanded. Now, just for fun I poured the aluminum into
a mold I quickly hacked out with a screwdriver, and ended up with a crude casting of my “King
Of Random” logo. That’s kind of cool. Now you might have noticed this furnace is
made from an insulating fire brick, and I chose this material because refractory bricks
like these, withstand extremely high temperatures. They’re lightweight and extremely soft,
so it only takes a few minutes to carve a furnace, and the best part is, one $6 brick
can make two of them. You’ll see how to make these in another project video. Now to
see if this thing will handle higher temperature metals, let’s clamp an old copper pipe to
my bench vise, and use a hacksaw to cut it into smaller pieces. The melting point of
copper is about 60% higher than aluminum, so I’m really curious to see what happens
when we nuke this with plasma. Now I designed the furnace with a little viewing port so
we can have a look down inside to see what’s happening when it’s in operation. Here you
can see the arc is holding steady and pointed downward, heating the chamber thousands of
degrees within seconds. And if you look closely here, you can see bits of copper liquifying,
and collapsing, under the arc. Alright, it’s been a little over a minute, so let’s see
what happened on the inside. Amazingly it’s so hot it’s nearly too bright to look at.
But as it starts to cool a bit, you can see clearly, that the copper has melted completely.
Now I designed the furnace so the viewing port will double as a makeshift pour spout
as well. This keeps everything self contained, and makes it easy to pour glowing pools of
liquid copper. Now I’m using fire brick to cast my ingots because it’s the only
material aI have that’ll handle temperatures this high. Ok our copper ingots are poured,
and at this point, they kind of look like radioactive egg yolks. That’s really cool.
A couple minutes later you can see they’ve blackened over, but they’re still incredibly
hot. And watch what happens if we touch them with a piece of paper. The copper turns bright
and shiny again wherever the paper touches it, but quickly goes black again when the
paper moves, and the air can get back to oxidize it. I’m super excited this furnace will
take down copper. The question now, is, what will it do to steel? I used a hacksaw to cut
1/4” off the end a steel pipe, and after only 20 seconds in the furnace, you can see
the steel’s gone incandescent, and could easily be hammer forged into a custom ring
of power. Let’s go one step further. I chopped a steel grounding rod into 2” pieces and
threw them in the reactor, then fired it up over 3,000ºF (1,648ºC), which in this case
is hot enough to make a shower of sparks fly out of the view port. This is why it’s important
to have fire and safety equipment nearby, and backup plans, in case something goes wrong.
Now check this out. The power of the plasma is so incredible, that it just reduced this
grounding rod into a flowing fountain of liquid steel, that’s so bright it looks like sparking
liquid light. How crazy is that?! Now to finish up, let’s see what would happen, if we threw
in these 3 small rocks I found in the back yard. I torched the rocks for 3 minutes, and
the electrodes got so hot I could barely hold onto them, but it’s worth it for what you’re
about to see. That’s right, you can’t see anything, because it’s so hot right
now it’s like looking directly into the sun. If we give it a couple of minutes to
cool, then look down at the bottom, you suddenly realize, you’re looking at liquified rock.
I’m not exactly sure, but I think we just cooked up a batch of lava. Well now you know
how to use an improvised arc welder and a 6 volt lantern battery, to power an experimental
arc furnace. With electric fire so hot, it will melt any metal you can get your hands
on, or forge one ring to rule them all. By the way, I tried melting a whole load of copper
tubing, then casting it in a mold made from plaster. Which apparently releases very flammable
gasses because it spewed molten metal all around the workshop. Even so, I ended up with
an awesome looking copper ingot, to add to my metal casting collection. Well that’s
it for now. If you liked this project, perhaps you’ll like some of my others. Check them
out at www.thekingofrandom.com