We've got several tiki torches.
We've got methanol for fuel,
and we've got a whole host of chemicals
that we're gonna mix in,
and see if we can get a nice display of colored tiki torches.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
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A while ago, we had a video showing how to make several different colors of flame.
I thought that worked out pretty well.
On that video, YouTube user redvsbluefanful wanted to know
if we can use the same ideas to make colored-burning tiki torches
rather than just burning the fuel in the little candle receptacles.
Let's look at some of the things we're gonna try burning.
We've got lithium inside of our lithium batteries,
which as we've seen before can make a really cool bright magenta flame.
The boric acid in this roach killer has done a pretty good job
of making it very bright green.
We've had mixed results using potassium chloride,
which is a salt substitute trying to get a purple flame.
It kind of works, although it's not great.
So, normal isopropyl alcohol gives us a very bright yellow color.
And in fact, it's so bright that can often wash out other colors
that we get from burning the methanol.
So, I might try using just a little bit of this mixed in
with the methanol to get a smaller yellow flame.
I've done a couple of experiments recently
mixing calcium carbonate with the methanol,
and I think that might give us another option
as we try and go for a purple flame.
The copper sulfate that makes up this root killer chemical
does an okay job of making a bluish green flame.
We had some mixed results.
And in fact, we had some mixed colors,
we had sort of blueish green with orange mixed into it.
We'll see if we get the same thing when it's burning in a tiki torch,
and then of course, the methanol by itself
does a pretty good job of burning blue
although it's a fairly faint blue,
so if there's a lot of light, you can't see it very well.
That's one of the reasons we're doing this at night.
I've also got this large bag of driveway salt,
which is made of calcium chloride,
and that's what we tried to use to make an orange flame.
It did an okay job,
and sometimes I thought that crushing it up into a powder worked better
and sometimes it seemed like just leaving it as pellets worked better.
So, we'll try using the pellets,
and see if we can get an orange flame... more orange than the yellow color
of other types of fuel.
Here's the basic idea.
We've got some tiki torches and some methanol for fuel.
We've got several different chemicals that we can use
to try and change the color of the flame.
Will it work in the tiki torches
the same way it did in the little candles?
The two that I'm most confident will work out
are the red and green colors
given to us by the lithium and the boric acid, respectively.
I'm so confident those are gonna work.
I'm just gonna fill one of these pots each
with some of our methanol,
and then add our lithium and our boric acid to that,
and see if it burns out through the torch.
I bought these tiki torches at Walmart,
where they were two dollars and fifty cents each.
So, really not breaking the bank if you wanna try this.
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That is like a perfect amount.
12 ounces.
I guess this is designed to hold about 12 ounces.
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Well, that was unexpected.
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Guess let that be a warning that there is a reason
we often say don't try this at home.
Apparently, there is a chance of spontaneous combustion with batteries,
so be careful.
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This one I suspect will be less exciting.
The boric acid, while doing a great job of turning the flame green
doesn't typically you know, react quite so violently as the lithium.
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Now, for these tiki torches to really work,
the wick needs to take the methanol,
and lift it up through the wick to the top,
so it will light and so actually be burning the fuel,
rather than just burning your melting the wick self.
It's a little hard to tell once it's done that,
but the easiest way is if the wick feels kind of cold.
You might be able to tell that it's wet too if it's properly wicking.
You can see that it will bring some moisture up.
of course, methanol evaporates so quickly,
but nothing stays wet for long.
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Boom!
Right there.
I would say we've got a magenta flame and a green flame
going quite nicely.
The magenta one you can see does have a little bit of blue down at the bottom,
and a little bit of orange up at the top,
but overall that's a pretty reddish flame.
As a color comparison,
here's a tiki torch with some regular torch oil.
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You can see how much more red,
and obviously, how much more green our flame is here.
Those are the two I most suspected we're going to work,
and so I just put them directly into the tiki torches and it does work.
Some of the chemicals are going up the wick with the methanol fuel,
and we're getting some great color out of them.
For the rest of the tests,
I think we're going to try some smaller scale things
before moving on to the full-size burns.
We've got a red. Let's see if we can get a nice yellow.
I know we can get a nice yellow by just burning the regular Tiki oil,
but I want to try and get a smaller yellow flame
so it's not drowning out the others the same way.
I'm going to have mostly methanol and a little bit of isopropyl alcohol,
See if we can get a nice yellow color, but smaller yellow color.
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Hey, that's a yellow flame.
Oh, where did it go?
This is safe.
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That's a yellow flame on the top.
Let's see if we can get ourselves a nice orange
by adding some of the calcium chloride pellets.
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We've got quite a bit of our calcium chloride inside this container.
Let's fill it up with our fuel,
and see if we can get a nice color out of it.
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That's got some orange to it.
It's also almost got a little bit of purple to it.
It's not too different from some of the purple tests we've seen before.
Question is whether it will keep that same color
when we've got it coming up through a wick.
Screw on the lid,
and try and gently encourage some of that liquid to go up through the wick.
See how this looks.
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Well it's got some color.
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Not bad.
I think that's an okay orange.
It's not a super vibrant traffic cone kind of orange,
but it's certainly more orange than pure methanol.
We got some of this salt substitute,
which as I said before is the potassium chloride
trying to get a purple,
and this is one that's always giving us sort of shaky, iffy results.
Let's see what happens if we try and burn it through a wick.
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Now with this we are hoping for purple.
To me this is looking pretty yellowish-orangey.
Not too different from the calcium chloride.
Don't know if I can call that purple.
We got sort of a middling response using the potassium chloride.
Let's see what will we get using the calcium carbonate.
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Gotta say that mostly just looks blue like plain methanol.
So maybe this test isn't going to work out so great after all.
We'll try it through a wick and see if it's any different.
Here is our calcium carbonate next to our potassium chloride,
and both of them have maybe little hints of purple down at the bottom.
But for the most part they're kind of just orangey yellow.
These colors were already sort of iffy,
getting it to show through with a wick,
makes it a little worse I'd say.
It's just not very purple.
One final color test.
Let's see if we can get anything worth mentioning out of this copper sulfate.
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]That is just the color of methanol right there.
Little bits of green jump out in these tiny little spurts.
There you go.
So, if it's constantly being agitated,
we can get some cool green in there.
Agitation and air.
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Some of it splashed.
Kind of a cool effect and some kind of cool colors
but really not something that's gonna work very well through a wick.
We've got five torches set up here,
and I'm not 100% convinced that all of them are gonna work.
This is a bit of a final test rather than a final exhibition.
But let's light them up and see if we can get some good colors.
I'm hoping for red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
The blue is pure methanol,
which through a wick might not burn the same color.
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Our calcium chloride looks almost identical to our pure methanol at this point,
which makes me think that the calcium chloride
isn't really doing too much to change the color.
Maybe it is changing color,
but only the same amount that the wick is changing the color for the methanol.
Honestly that might be...
That might be a better blue than the one that's supposed to be blue.
Maybe we should switch our blue and our orange
for better blue and orange.
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The green works excellently.
The magenta is not too bad.
It's not the strongest color.
Not compared to the green at least,
but it's pretty good.
The yellow works pretty well by adding quite a bit of isopropyl alcohol,
and you can probably burn pure isopropyl alcohol,
and get a similar result.
Although in my experience, that does make a little bit bigger of a flame.
Not necessarily a bad thing.
But if you're going for a bigger flame in this color,
then you can just use the normal tiki torch fuel.
Getting the orange, and the blue, and the purple didn't work out so well,
so I would say, you probably want to stick to the green or the magenta.
One other thing,
they did have this much larger tiki torch available as well.
I've got some green tinted fuel in this one.
We're gonna see how much bigger we can really get this going.
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The idea with this one I believe
is that it's supposed to have the fuel vent up to the top,
and you can get a much larger flame
because it'll come out all the way around the wick.
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redvsbluefanful, thank you for your suggestion.
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