What's up guys
I'm Grant Thompson
the king of random and
I am Stuart Edge, today I am the apprentice of random
There you go, and today we're taking some copper tubing
cutting it up, throwing it into a backyard foundry to see
if we can liquefy copper.
the purpose of today's experiment is
to see if we can melt down some copper.
we have played with metals like aluminum
brass, they have a little bit lower melting points
I've never done copper before
and so I really want to know
does this backyard foundry actually melt copper?
So i got Stuart Edge and a dull hacksaw blade
I'm going to put him to work chopping this copper up
into little pieces, and I'm going to fire up the metal foundry
and see if we can get this to work.
Copper is pretty expensive stuff, I went down to the home depot and picked up
these two foot lengths and they were almost eight dollars each.
I got four of them because I'm not exactly sure how much copper we're going to get,
but this stuff is pricey and we're going to reduce it from a stand down into a little ingot
that we can work with a little easier
we're going to do that using this bench vise.
This is going to be a team effort Stuart.
yea
Dude, you just took that out
No time flat we got the hacksaw master
Here we go, master Edge
I can use your back for leverage.
This is like yoga.
I'm just not that flexible.
How you doing? How am i doing your highness?
It's looking good to me, let's see the spoils of our labors, right here.
Yeah
check this out
Stuart, you're doing a mighty fine job my friend
Thank you
Ready, ready? Here we go watch this.
Where'd it go?
I don't even know where it went. Where did it go?
oh oh oh
Quick update guys, we got everything cut. How does that feel weight wise?
Uh, probably about one and a half pounds right there
like a box of butter
Copper is a relatively heavy metal, especially once you shrink it down in size
and make it an ingot like we're about to do
not so heavy when it's in tube form, but very heavy once we conglobulate it together
and make it into an ingot
What you're looking at right here is about thirty dollars worth of copper
People legitimately make businesses out of scrapping copper. Like wires, tubes,
this is like plumbing line
if you salvage that and take it into a metal recycling place, you can make money
recycling copper
exactly! What about pennies?
Pennies are zinc, they're just copper coated
zinc is pretty worthless
Now the reason we shrunk this down in size is because
when we put this in the crucible we want more surface area exposed
so we can get this melting
Once we get a molten pool of copper, it's gonna be a lot easier to start melting the rest of it
so smaller pieces are going to get the process moving a little bit faster
at least, thats the idea.
Now, in yesterdays video we tried
casting metal fidget spinners
and we made ingots.
Now we've got some left over junk in our crucible but
we are gonna set this down in here, fire it up, get it nice and hot
and I think that's cleaned out enough
that we can get relatively pure copper.
Alright, i'm gonna give you the barbecue igniter.
I'm gonna go pump in some gas
here we go
Whoa!!!
I was waiting for that!
I was waiting for that.
That is awesome dude hahaha nicely done
hanging out with the king of random random happen okay were you expecting
that well a little bit my mind was like this is going to go big well I can now
Grant want it just like having me light something and have it well done I think
ok so we're just going to take that lid rolled on top the quick update guys our
furnace has been running for about 10 minutes now the crucible is glowing
red-hot so it's time to take the lid off we're gonna start throwing these things
in one by one and see if they melt a copper like this has a melting point of
almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit something like 1984 Fahrenheit so the
purpose of this experiment is to see if this backyard boundary gets hot enough
to liquefy copper I've never tried anything with a melting point this high
but if it will it will also melt gold silver and everything else because
they're all the same melting points it won't do steel but it will do everything
else so this is the moment of truth this is where we find out if our crude
backyard boundary that took 10 minutes to slap together is robust enough to
take down copper
wowww
look at all the medals from our previous burn are like boiling in there we've got
fired vapors zinc fumes burning off all right here we go we got our first piece
of copper ready for the drop let's do it
it is going to melt I'm thinking probably in the next 30 seconds or so it
is exploding really I don't think so I'd be highly surprised but I wouldn't
rule it out oh look at that the copper is changing
color now you see a certain glow red that's a good sign all right that
thing's getting pretty hot I'm going to press it down we're quick Peck there we
go like that just flatten right out it's not melted yet but it's pretty dang
hot just put the lid on for a second so I just put the lid back on so we can
contain some of that heat because we have this open to expose the air gets to
and cools it down our copper is so hot I could flatten it out no problem so I'm
thinking I'm actually very hopeful so this is going to work and then we can
throw in the rest oh look look actually is liquefying it
is liquefying that oh where to go that's really hot okay this is going to work
let's throw in a bunch more okay let's get like I don't know ten pieces in
there here we go
He scores
nice shootin Tex oh that that he like get it
all right there we go look at that a few minutes so here's the deal guys the
copper is going to be so hot we can't use a traditional muffin tin to use as
an ingot mold because it will actually fuse to the steel the temperature ranges
are so close they'll bind together so we have to find some kind of improvised way
of making an ingot mold and that's why we're bringing out the standby the
reason we're using stand is because stand is mostly made of silica which has
an extremely a high melting point and even if the ingot did stick to it we
could just brush the sand off dual-purpose let's get busy
so we've got a flat sandy surface now I'm going to take a spoon I'm just going
to carve out little ingot mold that we can pour our copper into to work in
theory right yeah in theory
so now hopefully it all stays in one piece you can go out
That's scary what if it were to just fall out
Then it wouldn't be very good sand, I'd have to make some more
or add some more water at least there we go it provides ingot mold out
of sand oh yeah it's melting gosh that's looking
good okay we got some slag in there obviously you're going to be very gentle
here I see some liquid it's looking good and we're going to make the pour this
wood copper my friends there you go this is working
you'd be full okay so I just knelt down on some kind of slag and a burned a hole
right through my jeans there whoa it felt like kneeling on a rock but quickly
started burning oh wow these things are still fiery hot
look at the way it's still glowing orange its incandescent it's actually
emitting light at this point these are cooling down pretty fast yeah just about 30
seconds to go these were glowing orange and you can see they're already turning
kind of like a charcoal gray color that top layer is probably oxidizing and I
touch it now No can you touch it now let's grab a
piece of paper and see exactly what happens if you do that you know okay
yeah it's on fire like that one second ignition pretty sweet huh see that nice
little rainbow like a little metallic rainbow sweet stuff dude sweet stuff
here we go
that's looking good hot hot hot here's molten copper
everybody looking good
Look at the way the slag flips in the top we will figure that out
doing that is beautiful there's actually not a whole lot of slag in the Copper it seems
It is I don't know why it is
Clean
here you can definitely see the
difference these are glowing orange and actually emitting light and they're
extremely hot I can feel the heat radiating right there now you can see these ones
have been sitting here for a little while they've cooled down quite a bit
more than these have these are still a bit shiny a little bit glossy and we're
very very hot so I'm just going to use these tongs to dig down to the sand pop
them free and then quench them in a bucket of water yep they're definitely
hardened up here's our makeshift ingot oh that is a cool noise that's not it
Oh that is a cool noise
amazing oh wow look at the color color-changing
top it's like fuschia cool you have the next one grab a little time
look at the way that changes color is interesting
you can see how cool the system is because not only do the ingots not stick
to the sand but we can very easily move the sand back to the bucket and reuse it
for another casting at this point these ingots are cool enough I can grab them
by hand I'm just going to use a little wire brush here to take off the sand
around the edges just clean them up a little bit
you can see they very nicely took the shape that we carved out with our spoon a little copper nugget and
here's the finished result four little copper nuggets which looks absolutely
like the holes we carved out in the tin it is interesting that magenta color on
the top go very pretty so this is pretty exciting for me guys I know other people
have melted copper before but this is the first time I've tried it for myself
which means our backyard foundry is getting well over 2,000 degrees
Fahrenheit to be able to liquefy this stuff and this means now we can cast
things out of copper which i think is very exciting the other thing I thought
was interesting and kind of a coincidence we had four stands of copper
pipe and we made four makeshift ingot it also means these are worth about
seven and half dollars each this is super good news guys this means our
metal foundry takes down copper without any problem at all I'm very excited
about that what are something you can make so what
we want to make out of copper we could really make anything I mean fidgets
spinners were going to be the original idea but I think that trend is kind of
played out copper is heavy and it looks cool so
it's really just a novelty casting things out of it put some suggestions
down below and maybe we'll use our green sand to make it happen
and a big thanks to my friend Stuart Edge for coming to hang out today
there's been good happy I thank you so much I'm glad I moved from apprentice so
hopefully court jester or peon or something like that I think we're all
learning something new here today we're glad to have you along for the ride go
check him out he's Stewart Edge on YouTube he's got good family fun he does
street magic and all kinds of useful wholesome pranks to go check them out
but anyway guys thanks for joining us for this experiment we will be looking
for you the next video talk to you then
Hahahahah that was awesome
That moment when you smell
the burning nostril hair in your own nostrils