Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's Lab.
So this house was built well before the seventies
1940's I think I saw on the sheetrock
Anyway, I've been checking around for lead paint.
It looks like on the interior of the house there's no lead paint
but on the exterior here I'm pretty sure this is lead paint
because this is a very pasty white color
which is very different from the other paints
I went and got a lead test here
This contains a small amount of rhodizonate and a solvent
I'll be using this to check for the lead
Alright, so lets score the paint a little bit so we can get in there real deep
just to make sure that we're getting through
I'm just going to crush these little glass ampoules
There we go
There we go see.
This turned a nice yellow-orange color
Get a little of this going into the rag
Rub this on here...
see if it changes color.
Okay I definitely see some red color.
It looks like the paint underneath this outer one actually contains the most lead
see how it turned a nice pink color in there?
That's definitely lead right there
So there's something I want to try now that I have some lead-based paint
This stuff is flaking off so it'll be pretty easy for me to get some
I want to take a bunch of this, crush it up, mix it with flux,
and heat it up and see if I can actually extract the lead from it.
I think that'd be a pretty fun little thing to try, yeah?
Okay so I've got my paint chips here
let's go furnace them down and see what happens
Okay so here's the lead paint, I've kind of been crushing it up a little bit,
it's sort of flexible so it's a little bit difficult to crush
but that shouldn't be that big of a problem.
So I'm going to mix it with flux
So I have some Borax here
I'm going to mix in a little bit of this
To help make the material runnier and the lead droplets that form fall out of solution
Crucible here, a little graphite crucible I picked up on eBay for about $5
I'm just going to fill this right the way up.
as much in there as I can get
This will probably be a few grams of this lead paint
so, not very much.
so I shouldn't really expect very large pieces of lead droplets coming out of this
but if it does contain like a percentage of lead
I should be able to easily detect it
And this crucible comes with a lid so I may as well use it
So now it's all sealed together into a little...
bomb
And now I can put it inside of my furnace.
Where I'm going to heat it to about 1,700 degrees
Fahrenheit
Alright, lets lower it in.
The carbon in the paint and in the wood that is stuck to the paint chips will react with the lead to make it into elemental form which will
be metallic and that'll precipitate out and hopefully form a nice little bead
Alright
Let's close this up
Let it heat up over the next probably hour or so
And in the meantime I'll clean up all these little lead chips that I spilled
Okay, we're at almost a thousand degrees Fahrenheit
We've go a little bit of smoke coming up
Let's have a look in there
Oh, caught fire
Yeah there's definitely carbon in that paint then.
Alright, so it looks like the furnace is around 1700 degrees
Lets crack this open and see what we got
Oh yeah, it's very hot
Pull this out
Pull this lid off of this
There we go
Yep, definitely had carbon in there still.
Most of it just vaporized out
Lets pour this off
Do you see any metal?
Oh, I see metal
Right there on the edge
See that?
Right there?
As it cooled off it broke into several pieces
Lets take these out
Doesn't look like these pieces have any lead in them.
maybe there but I'm not sure
but this piece definitely has a chunk of lead in it
You can see that nice shiny bead of lead
Let's break it out of this
So that we can actually see the thing without the flux attached to it
there's slag I guess at this point
Oop, there it is
Flew off
Alright, so a nice little tiny piece of lead there
looks like about one to one and a half millimeters across so it's very tiny but yeah
definitely shows that there is in fact lead there,
in probably a fairly large percentage
because I was able to actually extract it
Lets rub it on the paper, see if it leaves a mark
Yeah it definitely leaves a mark on the paper, see that?
Alright, got a little piece of lead here, extracted from lead paint.
That is cool
Hope you guys enjoyed, I'll see you next time!
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