Today, I'm gonna be using some gallium metal which turns into a liquid at around 30° C
And I'm gonna be putting it into these molds to try and make something which looks like LEGO
These molds are great, and they're perfect for an ice cube tray, or you could try using them with chocolate
And you get these really cool little figures
Great for cooling your drink
But I wanted to see how well it would work with gallium
It came in these plastic tubes which I heated up in warm water
Then tipped out into the bowl to make nice and molten
Because it's heavier than the water, it sinks to the bottom
I sucked it up in a syringe
And removed any water
Then filled up the molds
I had to melt down a lot more gallium because I used quite a lot
And I didn't have quite enough to fill this blocks tray
It's quite fun to do and they look amazing and shiny so I was really hoping they'd turn out well
I left them to cool down
Then popped the first one out of the mold
And it came out absolutely brilliantly
They're nice and heavy, shiny, and you can really see all the detail
Pretty cool huh?
This mold made me eight little figures
Some of them came out slightly better than others but they were all really good
Next thing was to look at the blocks
You can see a couple of notches on the top didn't actually form properly
I actually found the same problem with all the blocks I made
The gallium just didn't flow properly into the edges
But it doesn't really matter, they still look quite good
So I've got a nice big pile of metal figures and blocks
And of course, because they're made out of gallium, I've got to try melting some
I thought it would be fun to try heating up a metal oven tray, then standing the figures on top to watch them slowly melt
So I placed a couple on
And this block
And this is what happened
The feet just melted and the figures fell over
I left them on there for a couple more minutes but by that time the tray had cooled down too much and it wasn't really melting the metal anymore
So I decided to stand the tray on a couple of cups
And slide a few tealight candles underneath
I tried to stand the figures up but they just kept falling over
I've sped up the video so you can watch it melt into a blob
I think the reason the figures fell over is because once the toes melt they become very unstable
So I thought I'd try slightly melting the heel area of the figure
So I can lean it backwards against the edge of the tray
This one didn't work perfectly but it was a lot better
This one was really good, it just sort of melted into its own blob of liquid metal
And if I reverse the footage it looks really cool
You can of course suck up the gallium and pour it back into the tube
Or back into the mold
As this one was half melting, I poured some cold water over it to set it into this really cool figure
If you want to, you can place it into a bigger blob of gallium and cool it so it sat in a bigger pool
And this one I'm just laying on his back to melt
I hope you enjoyed watching this video if you want to see more you can click on the links or take a look at my youtube channel page and I'll be doing more videos about gallium soon
Have fun, stay safe, and as always, thanks for watching!