(Intro music)
Hi everyone, welcome back to "Cody's Lab"
So about last October, I reached 100,000 Subscribers
An awesome milestone indeed
Now Youtube was going to send me a silver play button
For reaching this milestone as kind of an award
And... They never really did
It has been 7 months and I still haven't received the little notification they were supposed to send me
I've sent them emails asking about it, but no response
It might just be that Youtube is notoriously slow at sending them out, and it can take up to a year
But... at any rate, I've reached 250,000 subscribers now, and I have decided that I'm going to make my own
And since I'm making my own, why not use some actual silver
And possibly some gold that I have refined myself on the channel
I think that would be incredibly awesome, because nobody has got a silver play button actually made out of silver
So here is the wax mold that I am making
Eventually this will be made out of solid silver
I just poured a sheet of wax over some water, so that it would be perfectly flat
And let it cool
And I have just been carving it away
To give the triangle, and I am now currently working on the bevel
To bevel it, you get the idea, I've already done it in here
And once I get that done, I'll take this, and lay it on this piece
So that you get that recessed amount there
It's going to be a rather thick piece of silver
So I have a bit of gold here. It is actually the gold that I refined in episode one of my precious metal refining series
And I am going to put it on this anvil
And now, I am going to smash it flat
(Hammering)
So I've got it pretty thin
It's probably thinner than a sheet of paper at this point
And it is starting to become very difficult to flatten out
And it is starting to crack at the edges a little bit
So what's happening here is that it's work hardening
In fact, it's uh, for gold it's very hard right now
You see, I can actually take this hammer, and I can lift it, using this gold plate
See that?
Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to heat this up
With a torch
To a bright red hot
And I'm going to let it cool down, and that should soften it again.
(Torch)
Alright
Let it cool
Now that I've annealed the metal, watch what happens when I try to lift the hammer with it
(Laugh) It just bends
That means it's much softer now
(Hammer)
Alright, so I think that this about the size that I needed it to be
Look at that
Huge piece of... gold foil, basically
And yet it is still remarkably heavy
It's got some heft to it
Yep, there it is
Now, I'll just cut this into shape
And that will be the little play button thing
Let's pour in the plaster
So here's the mold, I've removed the wax and baked it in the oven for several hours to drive off all the water
And uh, it's looking pretty good
Now I'm going to need to figure out how much silver I'm going to need to actually fill this
And I have here all of the silver I currently own
Here is the stuff that I have been refining in that refining series
Uh, these are uh, a couple of actual silver bars that I bought
This one I bought with my friend Arthur
About a year ago, back when the price of silver started dropping really low
This I actually bought with my first ever paycheck from my summer job at Utah Fabrication
Back in, oh gosh, that would have been 2009 or something
I actually bought, uh, $600 worth of silver back then, and it was about $17 an ounce
So I had quite a few more of these bars
When the price of silver went back up, it went up to like $40 an ounce, I ended up selling most of them
And I ended up doubling my money
That was one of the better investments I ever made
was with my first paycheck.
I kept one for sentimental value.
So this is probably out for melting down coz I'd like to keep it.
Here's a piece of silver that actually came from the mine.
This was an attempt to making a silver coin.
See it's pretty nice. I can melt that down with this stuff.
This here which actually came from silver contacts, like for switches
and I've refined all the lead and cadmium out of it
and this is down to pretty much fine silver.
So I can use this as well.
And here's a little silver ring that's really too small to fit anyone, so I could melt that down as well.
So now I'm gonna figure out just exactly how much silver I'm gonna need.
The distance between here and here is 9 1/2 cm, that's 9.5
This is 13 1/2 across there... 13.5
This is just an estimate real quick
cuz you try to go to the middle, of course it's going to change the volume of this.
And it was 6 mm deep.
Times 0.6 cm
That gives us 76.95 cubic centimeters that I need to fill.
Now times that by 10.1, the density of silver
Means I'm gonna need 777 grams of silver.
Now, I know I've got that much
But unfortunately the amount that I actually processed in the videos
is not gonna be quite enough.
I think I had 620 grams of silver for that.
Let's see... yeah
Running at 620 there.
And this here...
is gonna make a mess
coz I've made it into shot form
785, that's, what... just over 25 ounces of silver?
Alright, I think that'll be definitely enough.
Let's put it in the mold, and melt it down.
So, just leveled the furnace, and you can see it in there.
Hopefully the silver will just melt into place and fill the mold.
And then I'll just let it cool inside the furnace.
And that'll give me a nice play button made of silver.
Now I decided I'm gonna add this coin in there, that way it's got some silver from the mine.
Figured that was appropriate.
Also it's not lost on me that this is 25 oz of silver.
That means I've got 1oz of silver for every 10,000 subscribers.
I thought that was pretty cool.
And... it's on the floor of the thing...
Dangit.
Let's turn it off.
Look at that dissolved oxygen coming out of it.
I'm gonna have to rethink this.
Here's the molten silver.
Let's pour it into the mold.
It's not gonna work.
Shoot.
After those failures, I decided to make a mold out of clay.
So this is a ceramic now.
And that'll be able to handle the heat much better than the plaster will.
Let's just put the, uh, silver in there.
Oh dear
Is that what I think it is?
Yeah, that was molten silver.
It's never a good sign to have metal fall out of the furnace when you open it.
(laughs)
So I've broken off most of the clay of the mold.
And it's beginning to look... sort of... play-button shaped.
It didn't turn out nearly as well as I would've hoped though
Look at all these bubbles and voids there.
Perhaps if I ground it smooth and then used the oxy acetylene torch to weld up these pockets
It might be able to work.
Alternatively what I could do is take this back side
polish that smooth, and then just stick my gold piece to it.
This side looks like it ended up being pretty smooth.
oops
Well, that answers that.
Even with the torch on full blast, I wasn't able to melt the base metal of the silver.
It just pulled the heat away much too fast, coz silver is just too good of a conductor of heat.
Since I wasn't able to weld up those holes, I think I'm just gonna start grinding on it.
And see if I end up with something pretty.
I guess I'll collect all the shavings and re-melt them down.
And that might be an episode of refining.
(grinder whirs)
As you can see, I've now got it shaped into a rough rectangular prism.
The back side here still looks a bit rough, as you can see.
Still got these deep bubbles that I wasn't able to weld up.
And it looks so nice like that.
But I think this is the side we're gonna use.
So now, I just gotta round off the corners, and then polish it up.
So we got some polishing compound here
It's about 1500 grit.
Well, it's not a mirror finish, but it's certainly a lot shinier.
So I just marked out the triangle that I'm gonna cut out of the gold piece
It's about as big as I can make it there, it's about 4cm wide on this edge.
So, hopefully this will be right.
I'm just gonna cut it out with this pair of scissors
right along that line
Alright, it looks good.
Hopefully this works.
I've marked out where it needs to go in pencil.
Let's put a little superglue on there.
And see if I can stick it down.
That right there...
right there...
There it is.
I think that looks pretty cool.
Now, I was gonna make the frame myself
but I saw a person on ebay was selling the fake silver play buttons.
And their frame looks so professional that I had them make me one for the 250,000
A little bit larger than the silver one, and of course, saying 250,000 instead of 100,000
They did a pretty good job. I'll put a link to the ebay listing in the description.
I think eventually at some point I may actually pull this gold piece off and move it and move it over just a fraction
coz it looks like it's a little off-center, and that's gonna just bother me.
But other than that, it looks pretty nice, I think.
Hope you guys enjoyed. I'll see ya next time.
(camera operator laughs)
- You caught that, right? - (camera) Yeah, I did
(laughs)
Well... umm...