It actually, it looks like a little flower vase. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back, in this video today...
we are going to be turning sand into glass. I jumped down into the comments, and I found this one from JC112...
who has been begging us to please make glass from sand.
Today we're trying to make it happen for you. Now to make this happen today...
I had to bring my friend Cody from Cody's lab. You know him. Alright everyone.
We've also got Andy from a channel called How to Make...
Everything you might know him as the guy who took six months to make a chicken sandwich.
He did everything from scratch, including growing the grain and spawning the chicken. On my channel I explore...
what if you couldn't go to a store and buy stuff need to make it from natural sources?
Sweet so I'm looking at this. It's kind of like I don't know what you call that like Power Rangers? *laughter*
We got like all the forces joining together here to see we accomplished one great...
task. Because it's not very easy to turn...
sand into glass. Is it? Especially not clear glass. This will actually be my fourth attempt at it. I've tried various things...
use a different flux of potash made from hardwood ashes. This is my first attempt with soda ash and...
hopefully we'll have some better results. So for this video we're going to put everything to the test...
we're going to use raw materials that Andy sourced himself. We're going to use the materials that Cody refined.
We're going to put them all together and see if today we can actually make clear glass with our backyard trash can...
foundry. Let's dive right in. Alright, so I have ingredients from four different states actually I have sand I collected in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Then in Wyoming I collected sodium carbonate and sodium sulfate from a lake of there. Arizona...
I collected gypsum from an old mine. In Utah Cody helped me find some calcite. So my role...
here is basically the chemistry guy. I helped Andy purify his sodium carbonate I also...
helped him purify the sand a little bit and also sourced the...
nitric acid which we will convert into a calcium nitrate by reacting with...
some more calcite. Oh and if we don't have enough we might cheat a little bit. *laughter*
So the time has come guys we're going to take all of these ingredients...
and we're going to mix them all together and here's how we're going to do it.
We're going to take this sand that's already had most of the iron washed out...
we're going to mix it up with some of this sodium...
carbonate and add a little bit of calcium nitrate and a bit of gypsum.
We're gonna crush it all into a very fine powder.
Mix the mixture together, throw it down in the crucible, and let the whole thing nuke for about 6 to 12 hours in our trash...
can foundry. This is the kind of glass that nature makes this is obsidian that comes out of a volcano...
and you can see it's not very transparent at all. Clear glass is a very cool thing and we're going to replicate it here today.
So I guess I'm mixing the other materials.
Here's the sand, I think we're just going to mix these together.
Kind of guess at the ratios. I'm going to try to shoot for about 30 percent by weight...
sodium carbonate.
Which I'll crush into a fine powder here.
Hulk Smash! Hulk Smash!
Who needs a mortar and a pestle?
It's actually crushing it pretty well. I mean my knuckles are starting to hurt and bleed a little bit but...
I think it's worth it. *laughter*
*laughing in excitement* This is the industrial revolution baby, two fists twice as fast energy!!
Alright, so I mixed together the ingredients now.
Since the sand is still a little wet its weight is going to be off. So there's really no sense weighing it.
I'm just going to kind of mix together an equal volume of sand and sodium carbonate here. Like a one-to-one ratio? Well...
This is a lot less dense than this and we only need about twenty to thirty percent sodium carbonate, so...
I might have to use all of this.
The more of this we use the lower the melting point will be and the easier...
it will be to melt. See this is the kind of cooking I enjoy... when we're cooking with recipes from Cody's Lab.
All right, so a little bit of gypsum... this will release some gases towards the end which will actually...
counterintuitively help...
the other gases come out. So just to clarify... this is that crushed up Crystal that we had from earlier?
Exactly. So a solid form, powdered form.
It's an amazing difference. Yeah. This is the final ingredient just a little bit of calcium nitrate.
This is a...
oxidizer that will help burn out impurities and hopefully it'll turn the sand from kind of a beige color...
into pure white and then it'll melt to clear. Let's just sprinkle a bit of that.
Doesn't really matter if I add too much, cause it'll burn off.
Let's mix it up.
Oh! Actually, there's one more ingredient we're missing... that's the lime.
So here's the lime.
This is actually hydrated lime, or calcium hydroxide this is what happens when you add the calcium oxide to water and this will be our...
lime part of the soda lime glass.
Now we're probably not going to add very much because it will raise the melting point, so it will increase the...
chemical resistance of the glass.
Making it insoluble in water
So yeah, we just add a few percent in there.
It won't be the best...
drinking cup glass, but it'll probably work for...
It'll look yeah, pretty good for a window or whatever.
Alright there it is.
Still a little wet, but I think that'll work.
We've got our powder crushed up ready to go, our crucible is still pretty hot from we fired it earlier...
it's ready to go. So let's mix it all together fire up the foundry and get ready to rock. Yeah!
That sand looks a lot more white now, that
you mix everything into it. Yeah.
*soft, cheerful music*
So now Andy since this is your fourth attempt. Why don't you tell us what you think is going to happen here today?
I'm still pretty skeptical it has kind of turned into our 'White Whale' of actually making clear glass.
I think we can get pretty close.
I'm pretty confident Cody's ability to actually refine stuff.
But I'm expecting that it's not gonna be perfect probably a little few bubbles.
But I think we're going to get pretty close. That's of course assuming that the metal foundry is going to get hot enough to actually do its job.
So we're going to put it to the test.
We're going to throw everything in, fire this thing up put the cap on and...
basically just let it marinate on high heat for about 6 to 12 hours.
Alright. Put that in there. Just as a little bit of insurance...
I'm going to have a second batch of glass going, a slightly different composition. You got another furnace over here.
And if this doesn't work out well, we'll have something else that...
I think is a little bit more likely to turn out those nice clear glass. Oh, so it's the competition of the equipment?
*laughter*
So, for the second batch I've got some sand which is probably a little bit more pure...
and I'm going to mix this with, instead of using a soda lime...
I'm going to use soda lid, so this is a mixture here of lead oxide so PbO and...
sodium carbonate. This is actually very heavy because this is over half a lid right here.
So I'm just going to mix this in with the sand.
And this theoretically should make crystal glass
This should melt at a lower temperature, so I think we might have a little bit better luck with it.
Here we go. Let's go put this in the other furnace. Got the crucible here...
heating inside the furnace.
Just going to pull this out and add our material
Which hopefully will flux down make something that resembles clear glass. I just have this kind of going alongside.
When it gets
up to 2,000 degrees.
It should melt.
All right.
All right now. We wait. Hopefully we get something good.
Alright guys, it is the moment of truth our foundry has been running for six and a half hours.
So this has been completely molten. We stopped it a couple times...
released the lid and tap the crucible a few times to let the bubbles rise the top theoretically.
We're not really sure how clear the glass is yet. But we've got some tools...
we're going to use to pull it out and see if we can blow it mold it and perhaps...
make a small improvised window. Let's see what we got.
WOOAAAH!!
My goodness that is hot, hot stuff.
Oh that's cool. Just like that? It's drippy, drippy wet
Oh wow, is that metal?
Cody: Yeah it is.
Oh, that's cool. Is it going to stick to the steel? No?
Cody: I dunno.
Alright, so we made the transfer. We got the glass in a little bin. Let's talk about what just happened there.
We got two pieces of glass in our container right now. One is from the trash can foundry...
we had a little bit of trouble with it because when I was putting into the heat it touched the side of the crucible...
It got sticky and then working it around it actually got little bits of K-Wool stuck to it.
So it wasn't perfectly clear and we tried mashing it down, it was very very hard and started cracking, all kinds of problems.
But we think we saved it. Ran it through a few more batches and put it into a container where it can cool down without...
cracking. Also got the other bit of glass with the leaded glass.
I ended up pouring that out onto the plate along with a bunch of lead because it had reacted with the crucible and flung metallic...
lead. We just poured that out on a steel plate, mashed it down and then transfer it over to the container as well.
So only time will tell now. We're going to give it about a half an hour to cool down...
and then take a look at what we got. So while the glass is cooling...
we're sticking it into a bucket full of vermiculite. Which is going to help that cool down it a little bit slower rate...
it's going to help the heat stay as long as possible to prevent the glass from cracking. Now...
ideally you'd want to actually anneal...
this glass so that it doesn't crack in the future. If you use this as a window pane it would eventually crack...
due to the weather the temperature things of nature. So it would need to be annealed however for this video...
we just want to show proof of concept and I think we did it.
Check it out guys. We have successfully turned sand into glass.
We are most of the way there.
We've got like a little bit of a greenish tinge to these which means there's still a bit of iron in there.
But for the most part this stuff is looking pretty good, and it definitely is glass. Look at this piece of cody has here...
it's acting a lot like a lens. This is cody's bachelet it was the leaded glass. It's got a really cool blue tinge to it...
it's very interesting. There are some bubbles in there...
but it is clear, it's relatively clear. So maybe if we cook that longer we could have got it even more transparent.
Little chunks of lead stuck in there.
Gives you a whole new appreciation for like windows and glass bottles and things that are everywhere. Definitely.
So we also attempted to blow some of the lead glass and put it on the end of the rod...
and we blew an air bubble inside of it. It actually looks like a little flower vase.
Where you can grow your little apple seeds!
This actually turned out fairly decent. That's cool. I like the blue tinge too. And we also made a little marble, a little purple marble.
I'm not sure where that coloring came from? You know my guess is probably cause' it had lead on the pan.
*unintelligible* But that's pretty cool, how cool is that we made our own marbles.
So marbles, little tiny flowerpots, broken glass all part of an epic adventure.
So let's take a second and just briefly recap. How we got to this point today.
We started off with sand Andy collected from the Mississippi river. He brought it out here and used Cody to help purify some of the...
chemicals and we put it in the trash can foundry and let it marinate for almost 7 hours.
We noticed that the sand actually melted into glass within about half an hour. We stirred it up a little bit...
and we watched it and gave it about 6 more hours after that to melt down and hopefully let some of those bubbles release.
Now just for fun we reach down into the crucible with a steel rod...
we got a little bit that glass out and...
tried rolling it into a ball and then flattening it out the idea was maybe we could make some kind of an improvised piece of...
window? I'm not really sure that's what we got, but we definitely got glass and if you look at it...
it's relatively transparent, a little bit of a greenish tinge, but all in all it's really not too bad considering...
we just made this in our backyard. It's definitely glass, and it's definitely transparent you can see through it, but...
still has some bubbles so it's not quite like optically clear, not perfect for lenses, but... really close.
And I think a little bit more tweaking and baking along in the kiln...
and we probably have it. Might even be able to crush this up and remelt it now. Because now this is glass..
it'll be much easier to work with now.
I think if we had maybe a bit more skills with the glass working. We might have been able to do it.
Yeah. So it's not clear glass, but it is glass we can crush this up.
We could remelt that we can use it again.
And this is really just a first attempt to any kind of glass working at all.
I think if our skills improve and we happen to run into the right people with the right kind of talents....
perhaps we can actually end up making crystal clear glass. That is the goal that is the end achievement.
We're just starting out on that journey. It's been a ton of fun
Thanks so much to Andy and Cody for joining us for this experiment today. As I mentioned...
I've put their links down in the description you go check out their channels.
They do some incredible things on their channel like Andy spending six months to make a chicken sandwich.
Just so you can appreciate what goes into it. And Cody doing all kinds of mind-blowing chemical experiments a lot of things that you shouldn't...
do at home That's why I like them. So I like these guys.
Of course a big shout-out to our friend...
JC112 who put this request down in the comments and got over 1100 likes good job man.
Go check your YouTube inbox for sending 25 bucks. Thanks for joining us for this experiment today.
We'll be looking for the next one. Talk to you then.
You're a Wizard Harry!
Hey guys, there is an event called CVX Live that I'm going to be at August 3rd through 5th. Stage presentations meet and greets...
there's even a special superfan experience where we can hang out one-on-one.
So click the link in the description and I'll be looking for you at CVX Live. :D