[Introduction Music]
Alright everyone, welcome back to Cody's lab.
So today I'm going to turn this gold bar
into a solid 24 karat gold bullet and
then, I'm going to shoot it. So here's the
mold I'm going to use. I started off with
a regular lead mini ball and I poured
some refractory cement around it. And now,
I'm just going to melt the lead so that it
runs out of the mold leaving a cavity in
the exact shape of the bullet. So let's
put it the furnace, and see if it works.
Just one ounce of gold is probably not enough and
so I'm going to add this other piece of
gold here which, uh, came from some stuff
that I refined. It's also pure gold so,
there you go. That brings our total gold
up to about two troy ounces. Okay, we're at temperature.
Let's pull the mold, and the gold, out of the furnace.
And here's the gold.
Set that there for just a second, and pour in the gold.
There it is.
Hopefully that worked.
Alright here it is after cooling off for
a little while. It's still quite warm but
I'm kind of excited to crack it open and
see how it looks. There it is.
Trying to save the mold. I doubt I will. Ah yeah.
I ruined it.
Alright there it is.
Looks like uh, looks like a successful cast to me.
Let's continue cleaning it up.
Ah it's got a little bit of a pocket
in the side right there. But overall, I think it worked.
Now I'm going to cut this top
part off to make it into a fireable
bullet and to do that I'm just going to
use these nippers and a vice to cut the gold.
Gold's pretty soft. This is pretty doable.
There it is.
Let's repeat that a couple of times and we're good.
Now for some fine tuning with a rasp.
Well there it is. It's got a few
bubbles in the side of it but, it's in a
general bullet shape and I think it will work.
Looks pretty nice. I think the
dimples on the side actually make it
look kind of like a gold nugget. Which it is. Alright let's see how much the lead
bullet weighs. Looks like 24 grams.
And the gold bullet, is 38 grams so quite a bit
heavier. Even though it's the same size and
full of little pits. Just because gold is
so dense. Alright let's go shoot 'em.
I got a new chronograph and I'm gonna shoot the
bullet through that into a ream of paper.
This will tell us how fast it is, then we can
compare it to the gold.
Three! Two! One!
On target. 872 feet per second.
Sounds about right.
And now, let's load the gold and see how it turns out.
So, 50 grains of powder once again
So, here's our gold bullet. I'm gonna put a little
bit of oil on it to lube it.
Here we go.
Alright. Gold's loaded.
Put in the primer.
This bullet's worth more than the gun.
Alright let's see how many sheets of paper it goes through.
Alright in: Three! Two! One!
Oh! That kicked a little harder.
[Laughter]
Did it go right through the block?
Woman: I hope not.
Cody: Well looks like the lead bullet didn't
go through the first ream. Look at that.
The lead flattened out. Totally deformed it...
...and stopped immediately. The gold went all
the way through the ream of paper.
Looks like halfway through the second one.
There it is. All mushroomed over.
You see it took a little bit of the riflings and it's still
warm and it kind of looks to me like a
piece of it broke off. See that?
Is it in there farther? Yeah it is, it's right there.
So it broke it... broke apart after it
hit the paper. Didn't actually do that in the gun.
Yeah, see them
And it appears to have a bit more
penetrating power than lead.
Sort of makes sense because it weighs more. Hey, how
fast did it go? It even went a little
faster! How 'bout that?
So since the first number was so low, I think I'm going to
try the lead again. Since it was the first shot
of the day perhaps the barrel had a
little bit less lubricant on it and
the shot was, y'know, not as fast.
So let's, uh, try the lead one more time, just to see.
Cause I think the lead should have gone a bit faster.
Firing in: Three! Two! One!
Oof!
Yeah, still 890. So the gold did go faster!
So there's a lead bullet we just fired, this
is the gold bullet, and there's the first
lead bullet. So you know they're all
about the same speed.
Man, there's a bunch of little bits of gold powder.
Now so there's what's left.
A bunch of pieces of the lead.
The lead just pancaked out when it hit the
paper. The gold stayed together mostly, as
you'd expect from a little bit harder
metal and, uh, looks like some pieces of the gold
broke off. It looks like I can recover most of it.
Let's put the gold back on a scale and see just how much I was able
to recover. There's a bunch of little pieces here.
Yeah so, it looks like most
of it. There are some other little bits
of dust that I just mixed in with the
filings here but, there you go, I didn't
really lose much of it. Now that I've got
a little bit better lighting let's have a
closer look at this bullet. You can see
there's some rifling, it's just barely in
it, it really didn't dig into the riflings all that much.
Eh, I kind of expected that since the gold is harder
the, uh, back of it didn't flare out as much
and didn't hug the barrels tightly. But,
it obviously still worked and I think
the reason why the gold broke up
is because especially down here, towards
the bottom of the bullet, it cooled
very slowly so the gold had a lot of
time to crystallize. I think it would be
better to start with a solid piece of,
say, extruded rod and then machine the
bullet but, I didn't really have the
capability of doing that.
So, there's a few reasons why we use lead for bullets.
First of all, lead is a fairly dense
material which means it has a high mass
to cross sectional area so that it's
more easily able to punch through things
such as the air or flesh you know when
it impacts something there's a lot of
weight right behind it over a small spot
so it creates a lot of pressure. Second,
lead is a soft material and so, when it
hits the target, it'll deform, spreading
out and dropping all of it's energy all at once.
You see, it's not the piercing of the animal
that kills it, it's the shock. And lead
is soft enough that just a flat, blunt-pointed
bullet is enough to get it to
spread out very quickly.
Gold definitely has the density thing down, being nearly
twice as dense as lead, so it's able to
punch through the air or whatever
without losing as much energy.
But, of course, gold is a little bit harder than
lead so it didn't come apart it didn't
spread out and deliver its energy as soon as
it hit the target. But I think you can
solve that problem by giving it a hollow-point
rather than a blunt tip.
But the main reason we use lead is because it's cheap.
Gold, is not cheap. In fact, this
little chunk of metal has a fair market
value of like fifteen hundred dollars
which is just crazy.
I think what surprised me most about these experiments, is that I
measured the speed of the gold to be
about the same, if not just a little
bit more than, the speed of the lead bullet.
Now, for a given speed, this is going to
have a lot more momentum because it has
more mass. By having more mass, means it
has more inertia and when it hits the
target it's going to be a lot harder to
stop, it's going to have more energy. But,
that also means that it's harder to get
going. I think there's two main reasons
for this result. First of all, the gold
bullet, since it didn't expand
and fit the barrel as tightly, you didn't have as
much friction in the barrel like it
wasn't, uh, grabbing the riflings as
hard which means it wasn't spinning as
fast. Y'know less of its energy went into
spinning. But I don't think that accounts
for all of it. See there's only so fast
that a given amount of gunpowder can
push something out of the gun. I think
even if the bullet was made out of something
lighter, say, wood, it would have wound
up around the same velocity. 'Cause as the
gases expand, they cool and they have to fill
up the barrel of the gun. Also there's the
speed of sound issues which I've talked
about in another video. The pellet gun with
helium. But basically the gun would shoot
the object the same speed no matter what
which means, if you got a heavier object,
it's a more efficient use of your
gunpowder. Now if I would use more
gunpowder, say, the 65 to 70 grains of
gunpowder that's actually recommended
for that rifle, then the lead bullet
would have continued to be accelerated
all the way to the end of the barrel and
the gold bullet might not have actually
obtained the full velocity before
leaving the barrel. So, there you go.
I definitely want to try shooting gold
with a more modern gun, say, something
that is already designed to shoot
bullets made out of brass, but of course
for that I might have to have somebody
machine the bullet for me. Anyway, hope
you all enjoyed. I'll see you next time.