Hello everyone, today we’ll be growing beautiful single crystals.
Crystals can be grown from almost any salt, however, for a
better result I suggest using the copper sulfate one.
Of course, you may also use an ordinary table salt
for growing the crystals.
The very first thing you should do before you’ll start growing a crystal is to make a growing seed.
Seed is a small crystal that is immersed in the solution,
and that will grow there. It should be about the size of a pea.
At first, lets take a glass and pour there a third or a half
of the amount of a salt. Next, pour some hot water into the cup and stir it all.
If you’ve added less,
then you’ll need to keep adding salt until it’s no longer dissolvable.
And after the salt is no longer dissolving and the
solution become saturated it must now be filtered
to get rid of various impurities. After filtration,
add to the bottom of the glass a little copper sulfate
and leave this glass for a few days to let the crystals form.
After a day or so you should find at the bottom of the glass
that there’s a lot of beautiful crystals has been formed, about the size of a pea.
Now we merge the solution into another cup, to pick open interlocked crystal mass.
Take any knife or any other sharp tool
and drill the crystal mass. Once we’ve scratched it all,
pour everything into a bowl. Choose the smoothest and large crystal.
Also, I advise you not to take the copper sulfate
with your bare hands, it is better to do it with gloves on.
Once we’ve chosen the largest crystal, it must be now tied to a thread.
To do this, I came up with an interesting system
in which you can conveniently change the height of the crystal.
Also with this system the cup is protected from dust.
We hung the crystal to a cup, and now
all we do is wait. Growing crystals requires
a lot of time and patience. When I was doing it
before I was also growing a crystal out of mixture of potassium chloride
and sodium chloride in parallel with making the crystal
of copper sulfate. Here there’s 60% of potassium chloride and
the rest is just sodium chloride.
If you want to get a very smooth and a beautiful single crystal,
you’ll need to filter the solution every two weeks
to maintain its cleanliness. If the solution is dirty,
a crooked crystal will grow and you’ll get polycrystal
instead of that single crystal we want. Polycrystal
is when a lot of crystals fused together. Now am going to show you my crystal growth
stages.
Sorry, I’ve not filmed all the stages, but anyway.
The first week,
second week, third week,
fourth week, and so on. After 2 months
and one week, I’ve decided my crystal was big enough,
so I wanted to stop its growth. And to do that,
take out the crystal from the solution and dry the surface using a cloth.
Next you will need to cover the crystal with colorless nail polish,
one or two layers is enough. It is necessary to protect the crystal from further
destruction.
My second crystal mixture of sodium chloride and potassium chloride
has grew enough, I’m covering its surface with lacquer. After the lacquer has dried,
the crystals can be taken with bare hands. As you can see, the crystals
are very beautiful and quite smooth. And now, ladies and gentlemen,
as we have done a long journey growing these crystals.
Let's just enjoy their beautifulness without
any further comments.