[Captions by Mary V. at Y Translator] In this video we're going to experiment with melting epsom salt,
In this video we're going to experiment with melting epsom salt,
also known as magnesium sulfate.
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YouTube user Dallas Woiken was curious what would happen
if we put epsom salt in our foundry.
Will it melt down into a liquid the same way table salt does?
Here's what we want to learn.
Can we melt Epsom salt in our furnace?
And if we pour it out into a mold, can we cast something out of it?
Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate,
and it's most commonly dissolved into water,
and used as a mild first aid for things like sprains or bruises.
This is also used as a saline laxative.
Meaning you mix it with water, it turns it into a salty water,
and it helps you go of your stopped up.
But it is a type of salt,
and we're going to see if we can get it to melt down into a liquid
similar to the melting down table salt.
[Music]
It's kind of bitter.
I really don't enjoy that.
It doesn't taste at all like table salt,
like none whatsoever.
It's not terribly surprising.
It's entirely different compounds.
It's entirely different chemicals.
It just happens to look similar, and it is a type of salt
but it's not table salt.
But let's see what happens when we melt it down.
Can we get this to turn into a puddle of clear liquid?
[Music]
Don't know why one is blue and one is green.
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It does look like something is happening around the edges of the cup.
So I'm inclined to think that maybe this is going to go somewhere.
However, magnesium sulfate is supposed to melt at quite a bit
higher of a temperature than table salt.
So we are going to put the lid on and let it sit for a while,
and see what result we get.
After we look at the melted epsom salt,
I wanted to try casting it,
and I was trying to decide on a good shape,
and I thought, well, it's a crystal,
what if we make it look like a bigger crystal?
So I took this piece of wood, and I cut it and I sanded it down
to sort of look like a crystal growth,
then I fit an eye bolt in the back,
and we're going to try and mold this wooden crystal in some dirt,
pull it out, and then cast our magnesium sulfate in that crystal shape.
Our epsom salt has been in the foundry
for probably 30, maybe 40 minutes at this point,
and it's just starting to liquefy.
However, the steel cup that it's in is starting to fall apart.
The added heat makes it oxidize a lot faster,
and it's possible that the magnesium sulfate does something to it as well.
But I think we've started losing part of the sidewall of our steel cup.
We're going to take a look at what's happening inside this thing.
It's all very bright.
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So we've got some liquid down there.
It's sort of like a thick liquid but this cup was solid when it went in,
and it's just now falling to pieces.
Very thin-walled steel cup.
I'm afraid if we give it any more time,
that cup is just going to completely going to disintegrate.
In fact, it might already.
It might just fall apart as I try and take it out.
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And leaving the top off of the foundry cooled it off enough
that whatever liquid we did have at the bottom of that cup is just gone.
By gone, I mean it's re-solidified.
I have a crucible that is now full of regular table salt,
and we're going to try and melt it down here.
And the reason we didn't use the magnesium sulfate in this crucible
is that these crucibles insulate quite a bit more,
and since I knew that our foundry was only barely able to get
to the temperature that melts the epsom salt in the first place,
I didn't think it would be able to melt it through this crucible.
However, the table salt has a much lower melting point,
and we should be able to liquefy it in here.
[Music]
It has cooled down, turned back to being mostly white,
but it's still very hot.
So let's pour some water on, and see what happens.
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Oh, a lot of steam.
That's some weird formation.
The shapes that this is turned into on the sides is pretty funky stuff.
Rest in peace stainless steel measuring cup.
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Completely destroyed the integrity of that steel cup.
It's just gone.
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And here's our salt.
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To mold our little wooden crystal,
we're going to mix some water in with this dirt that I've sieved a little bit
to get all of the large pebbles out.
And we're going to try and use these two by four pieces
of sort of box to hold it together.
I'll press this in and really press all of the-- I guess we call it mud,
but it won't be quite so wet as that,
and we'll try and make a mold then pull this out.
Hopefully it comes out nice and cleanly,
and we can pour our salt into that.
Okay,
the inside of that looks pretty good.
That's going to be our mold.
We'll see what happens when we try casting salt into it.
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Oh-oh.
[Music]
I believe the force of the salt hitting the water in the mold
broke the mold apart,
and we started having our liquid salt flowing out the bottom.
I admit I did have some suspicions that something like that would happen.
[Music]
Lots of salt flowing over there.
[Music]
Some right there. There is still some in the mold,
but I'm not sure if any of it stayed in intact in there,
like the shape of the mold might be completely destroyed.
I don't see any clear exit points though.
So that could all just be salt that bubbled over off the top and ran.
It might not have broken out of the mold.
It might have just bubbled up from the mold.
Let's give that a couple minutes to cool down.
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Well, I wouldn't say it casted up very pretty,
but we did get the shape of the crystal a little bit.
[Music]
Attempting to melt epsom salt did not really work very well.
We were barely able to get it to melting temperature,
and by the time the heat had caused our steel cup to oxidize so badly
that it lost all structural integrity,
and all we got were some lumps of half-melted salts.
Melting down the regular table salt,
we then tried casting that, and it was mixed results.
We cast it in really wet dirt,
and the salt reacted with the moisture in the dirt unsurprisingly,
and a lot of the salt bubbled up out of the dirt,
and what didn't bubble up had a tendency to stick to the dirt itself.
So there's dirt sort of embedded in the salt.
There have been a lot of questions asking whether or not we can cast salt.
A lot of people have commented wanting to see that,
and this is by no means a definitive answer.
We got a fairly poor result, but we did get a result.
It took the shape that it was poured into,
but it's so full of air bubbles,
and the dirt of the substrate that it was being poured into,
it's not a very good representation.
But there's lots of different things you can cast in.
Just because it did not work in this one method,
doesn't mean it won't work at all,
and we might want to try some other methods in the future.
Hmm.
Salt and dirt. What a great mix.
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