Hey guys this is Jason with Mount Baker Foundry and today we're going to be
making some of our own brass out of scrap copper and some of the zinc ingots
we've poured in a previous video. So you can see here we got our pot starting to
heat up, we've got our copper cables in there here on this yellow bucket we also
have a little bit extra copper. Altogether we have about 100 pounds of
copper and then over here we have our zinc ingots that we made we're going to
be adding about 75 to 80 pounds of zinc.
We got our copper warmed up a little bit, the zinc has a really low melting point
so I have to get the copper warmed up a little bit first. And we're adding in our
zinc now. Our goal is to get about a 60/40 ratio of copper to zinc, it makes a
nice yellow brass. And we're doing it a little bit different than it's typically
done, kind of the industry standard is you melt down your copper to liquid
and then you add in your zinc. But by doing so the copper has such a high
melting point and that the zinc has such a low boiling point that you end up boiling
off a large component of zinc, about 10 to 15 percent as zinc oxide. And so I found
that you can actually melt the zinc down into a puddle and the copper will dissolve
in that zinc to form brass without burning off all your zinc.
Now the zinc's molten, I'm just pushing the copper cables down into the zinc, you
can see they turn red and they're just starting to dissolve. Now we have most of
our copper cables pushed down into the molten zinc, and we're going to start
adding in this out a little bit of scrap wire. And once it's all pushed down and
we'll all be dissolved and we'll end up with a nice pot of brass here that we're
about ready to pour.
And here's our finished product. We ended up with 207 pounds of brass and I added
about 3 or 4 pounds of aluminum in to give it a little extra strength, so I
want to get these cooled down and we'll get them analyzed with the XRF gun and
see how it did but we're shooting for that right around that 60/40 ratio of
copper and zinc and then probably about a one to one and a half percent aluminum
in there. Here's the results on the XRF gun of the brass we made, and it's a
little hard to see in the picture but you can see there's about 1.1 percent
aluminum 59 percent copper and 39 percent zinc. The last one
there is tin, there's hardly any tin, and this is kind of a unique yellow brass
because we created a brass with absolutely no lead in it, so this is a
lead-free brass. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video, thanks for watching
and if you have any questions or comments please let us know. Our contact
info is in the description below. So we'll see on the next video.