Welcome back guys, today is an excellent
day because the sun is shining,
you're here and we're melting some metal.
Now, in yesterday's video I showed you how to
make this thing. This is our trashcan
metal foundry - this is just lined with kaowool
and as you might remember it gets
very very hot. So today we're going to
put it to good use.
Now I still have
quite a few of the brass ingots left
from our brass knuckles project but what
I am short on right now is aluminium.
You can see from my mini Master Sword and
my failed Pokeball attempts all of my
aluminium is used up in failed castings.
Now I personally love the different
looks of these metals but it does make
me wonder: what kind of results they
would form if we mix the two together?
So, the first step is to remelt this aluminium,
and cast new mini metal biscuits.
You can't see the flames out here, but
it's definitely getting hot.
Infrared technology!
That's way cool...I like that... it's getting toasty!
That's a big crucible; it takes a while to bring it up to temperature.
Oh yeah, that's starting to melt!
Our aluminum has melted so let's
skim the slag off the top and pour it into our muffin tray.
Oh wow. That's gorgeous.
There's a lot of slag on the top there. That all needs to come out...
That's no good to us any more...
That's all aluminium oxide.
And everything underneath that is really good molten aluminium.
This might be super hot...
All right, one successful transfer, going for the pour...ooh, that's hot...
That really is hot... and... slippery...
Whoops.
That came out a little quicker... than I was expecting; my glove is starting to burn...
What happens if we take molten aluminium and pour it into a crucible that's cold?
Will it crack?
Here we go...
Alright, cool; transfer has been made...
We can take this one...
...and pour it a little bit more evenly.
That's hot stuff!
These aluminium muffins are extremely hot right now, so I got a
little bit of water to cool them down.
Is it possible to liquefy aluminum and
liquefy brass and mix the two liquids
together to form a new type of metal?
I'm no metallurgist but I am interested to
see what happens so let's fire these
things up and put them to the test.
I just finished warming up our small crucible
and we've got our new aluminum muffins ready
to go so let's go ahead and mix them
with the brass.
Our first test is one
aluminum muffin and one equivalent size
brass muffin. How will these look once
they're meshed together? Let's go find out.
Our brass has just melted and you can tell that because the zinc is starting to
oxidize and burn off; that's what the
yellow is and that's what all these
vapours are coming out, so it probably
means it's melted and ready for pouring.
Wow! The zinc is burning, it's on fire! Yikes.
It's actually glowing... ok so our liquid
is actually burning.
Let's go ahead and take that out...
Surprisingly, we almost got two biscuits back
out of it... Amazing...!
So quick update guys; you might remember that brass is
actually a mixture of zinc and copper,
and zinc has a relatively low boiling
point so this stuff got so hot, the zinc
started boiling out of the mixture.
It actually gets hot enough that it can
burn and combines with the oxygen in the air to
form zinc oxide which is the long stringy stuff,
and it leaves behind this yellow residue.
That's why, in previous projects
I've used a flux like Ant and Roach Killer
because that suppresses the
oxygen and keeps the zinc in the material.
In any case, we got this stuff poured
did come out with nearly two full muffins which
should be a near 50:50 ratio of aluminium to brass.
Okay let's knock these things out and give them a bath...
That one's a little bit hotter than the last...
Look at that; that's so hot it just cracked the glass and
the water's leaking out. That's interesting, look at this
big split on the bottom there as well...
Okay... well, after all the abuse we've put this through,
I think this is just about done.
This is kind of interesting; I accidentally dropped one of
these 50-50 mixes on the concrete and it
shattered into about 7 different pieces
This stuff is extremely shiny; it's got
a really cool metallic tinge to it,
but apparently this stuff's really brittle as well.
Really great for looks; not great for durability!
Oh wow!
It shattered everywhere! Better not drop the other one...
Ooh, that's pretty though... not going to lie, that's gorgeous.
Wow!
50:50 aluminum and brass... Gorgeous.
That's super cool, super shiny.
But I just broke it! That's beautiful.
Experiment number two: three parts aluminium, one part brass.
Let's go.
Boom.
That looks toasty...
Hasn't burst into flames yet; that's a good sign...
Oh! Ha ha! I spoke too soon!
Wow.
It like, spit out half our mix, all over the place...
I think that's all we're going to get.
We put in four, we only got out two;
that's because when I took the lid off and the air
got to it; it exploded and splattered metal
everywhere. So, things to watch out for
when you're casting brass(!)
The water's hot!
Dang!
For our third and final experiment, we've got three parts brass; one part aluminium.
and stand back...!
Cool... all right, is it going to explode in my face...?
Hopefully not...
Cool, we're halfway there.
Four went in, three and a half came out.
Not too bad.
Interesting how it changes to different colors up there; kinda like
purple, magenta tinges on top.
We're knocking them out! Oh! Those fell right out!
Couldn't be easier what do those things are kind of
Look at those things. They're kinda pretty.
Oh wow, look at the bottom!
We got teal blue, we got all different colors
of the rainbow here we got blues, greens,
a little bit of yellow, some purple,
magenta... Rainbow biscuits, that's pretty cool!
I probably why the glass cracked it
cracked from the bottom what happens if
I drip a little water
now I'm going to see if we can buff theses things up a little bit
so guys our castings are complete
we got some really cool different metallic
colors of the rainbow.
unfortunately I dropped the 50-50 mix on the concrete
and it shattered into a bazillion pieces,
showing that this composition is a
little bit brittle, but if you look
really close at the crystalline
structure on the inside it's very very
shining very pretty, actually its absolutely
gorgeous the way it is. They're absolutely
gorgeous.
Now if you look closely at the
different compositions of the metals
we've just casted you see a wide array
in the color changes we go from the top
to the bottom. Starting at the top we've
got one hundred percent brass then 75%
brass twenty-five percent aluminium our
50-50 mix looks pretty cool but it's in
a bazillion pieces. Down here we've got
seventy-five percent aluminium with
twenty-five brass and on the bottom
one hundred percent aluminum. if you
weren't aware of this already there's a
huge weight difference between aluminum
and brass the brass at about three times
heavier than the aluminum and I compare
the aluminum discs it with the one
that's only got twenty five percent
brass I can already feel and noticeable
weight difference. Rose gold. Of course
seventy-five percent brass is even
heavier but what I love about this is if
you look at the coloration its almost
got kind of a rose gold tinge to it. it's
not the bright shiny yellow color where
you're used to seeing in brass, it's more of a rose
gold color instead, it's got more of a
pinkish purple fuchsia hue to it. very cool
and very pretty and this is probably one
of my favorites. Now as far as durability
is concerned we already know that the
50-50 mix is very very fragile but I
went ahead and smash tested the other
ones and got some surprising results
I went through each of these alloys with
a hammer and smashed him with a good
amount of power and all of them stayed
intact except for the rose gold I had a
little bit of chipping and one of them
actually did break in half but other
than that they all held together so it's
kind of interesting to see that a
hundred percent brass is very very
resilient but what you start mixing an
aluminum it becomes very brittle so cool
experiments guide let's quickly recap
what we just learned here today we took
nuggets of aluminum and brass and we
melted them down and mix them in a
fifty-fifty ratio that made a new
metallic composition that was extremely
brittle but very very pretty and we were
able to smash it down into a powder next
we tried mixing 75% aluminum and
twenty-five percent copper and we got a
nugget that was very very similar to the
aluminum itself just a little darker in
color and a little bit heavier and
finally we tried 75% copper and
twenty-five percent aluminum which gave
us a really cool rose gold looking nugget
these are some of my favorites
because they look really cool but
there's still a little brittle and I was
able to smash one in half. We also saw
the hot molten brass is extremely
sensitive the air making a burst into
flame and sometimes explode making a
mess all over your sidewalk. So what
happens when you try mixing brass with
aluminum? You get a wide array of new
metallic composition each with their own
personality. Thanks for joining me for
this video guys I'll be looking for you
next one talk to you then.
Ooh, that gouged the concrete
and this thing is still intact
sweet, lets hit is again.
wow that is hard this one didn't really
do that.