Oh, yeah look at that. That's beautiful.
Hey, what's up guys welcome back to the workshop.
I'm hanging out again with my buddy Nate, and we are getting ready to play with some colored pyrotechnics
We scrolled down into the comments and found this request from Benjamin Yonkers that says "make colored smoke bombs plz plz plz"
Making colored smoke. This is something that I've been trying to do for about six years with common ordinary chemicals.
I've tried using colored crayons, I've tried potassium nitrate,
I've tried all the recipes I found online in all different variations with absolutely no success.
I've also reached out to my friend NurdRage, and
contacted pyrotechnic companies and the feedback
I'm getting from all these sources is those recipes online may not actually work. If you've tried any of them yourself you'd probably understand my
frustration.
So in this video we're going to show you step by step how to make colored smoke bombs that
actually work. Now unfortunately, we do have to crush your expectations; to get this to actually work,
we had to reach out to a pyrotechnics company and order specialized chemicals, but now that we've got them,
we're gonna tell you what they are and what recipes we're using to achieve these results
I think we can all be proud of.
The chemicals we're using for this recipe, our potassium chlorate, lactose, magnesium carbonate, industrial dyes and good old-fashioned baking soda.
Now I got my potassium chlorate and lactose from a pyrotechnic supply company; You can synthesize potassium chloride, however
it's not very easy or practical to do at home. Now Lactose on the other hand, you've heard of people being lactose
intolerant and that's because lactose is extracted from cow's milk. That's where this stuff came from. How does this stuff taste?
(THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME)
It's a little bit sweet, but I wouldn't recommend eating it by itself
I wonder if you can mix it with water and make milk.
Magnesium carbonate is an inorganic salt
that's obtained by mining a mineral called magnesite, so this stuff feels kind of like powdered sugar, but it's even lighter and less dense.
The industrial dyes you see here came from a company called Walrus Enterprises,
now they deal on massive scale they're used to dealing in 50 pounds or more
So for me to get 1-pound samples was very difficult and very expensive, but here they are, and of course household baking soda,
which you can pick up at the grocery store.
So before we color our smoke the plan is to make a double batch of all the white ingredients
So we'll separate those into six different piles
then we'll measure out the dyes and add those to the six different piles giving us our different colors in theory. So that'll give us
six different samples to play with, so we can test whether or not they're even gonna work. Let's get busy!
*makes evil concoction*
So here we are guys, We have a hundred and twenty-eight grams of our smoke composition and base. the recipe that we used was 27%
potassium chlorate, 18% lactose, 16% magnesium carbonate, and 3% baking soda. So what we're gonna
do now is divide this white powder into six different piles, just over 21 grams each,
then we're gonna measure out 12 grams of each of the colored dyes, mix those in, and theoretically we should get some colored smoke.
*makes colorful concoction*
Now we've just made our first composition here.
This is the yellow smoke. We put it in a penny wrapper with a fuse sticking out the top here,
We're just gonna test this off to make sure they're even gonna work at all.
Oh, back up!
Oh yeah, look at that. That's beautiful.
Oh, that's beautiful, and a very rich yellow.
It looks like we got the ratio right. If this were too little,
it wouldn't be burning off at all, if it was too much, the dye would actually be turning black. So we found a very good
Ratio here--Ooh, and it's getting hot yikes! *inaudible*
Dang!
So our first test was very successful getting them to go off in the penny wrappers. My question now is, what happens if we
just let this burn in the open air? So let's set the powder down in a brick, and use a lit fuse
to see if we can get it to ignite.
*Lights fuse* Ready?
Ha-ha-haha, it just kind of blows it away. Whoa!
Oh, Look, a little bit of it's burning. Oh, and it's spreading. Yeah, a little bit of it's burning it did catch, and
I definitely see yellow smoke coming off that.That is thick yellow smoke. I got to back away.
Whoa?
That's--uh, some of yesterday's flash powder. Now it looks like we are pollinating the neighborhood.
All right guys. I'm calling that a success. Yellow smoke bomb is in the bag. Let's go load up six more.
*makes more colorful concoctions
Alright guys update now that we know that our test smoke bomb worked
We divided all the powder up into tubes
And we got 21 different smoke bombs that was enough for 3 from every color
And we had a little bit extra so we have three that are all of the colors mixed together so now that we know these
things work
there's only one thing left to do that's to take them outside line them all up and let them off at the same time so
we can see how all the colors work together through outside. We're gonna set off a test of blue smoke grenade
just so we can see which way the wind is blowing then we've got a whole line up we're gonna set up all at once.
You're on the GoPro
That was kind of interesting we had all kinds of different colors there we had like violets blues live with gray smoke
But I'm calling that a success because it was colored, so let's go ahead and get the whole lineup and light them off at once
There we go
(RAINBOWS)
We're all kind of going the wrong way, let's look at that there
(MORE RAINBOWS)
And still went for the white car
That's pretty cool. All right so that first test didn't really work out so well
We actually lined everything up so the smoke was blowing right in line with each other so this time
We've offset it a little bit. We should get a little bit better flow
I got him. That's why we have a backup.
Oh, that's pretty
Red has such beautiful orange in it
So that one worked a lot better
We actually put it so that the wind was blowing it this way and we could see all the colors
You could see we actually had red orange yellow blue
We had two violet we had the black all didn't seem to work really really well in this mixed color
Wasn't just black smoke was it Nate. Yeah, it was just kind of a black mix with maroon a really dark purple maybe.
Kinda like an Ursula purple, that's like that dark evil purple, which is really really fun
We got a few left over, so we're just doing it one more time
So from our experiences so far, guys, it looks like these are working every single time. We're getting very consistent colors
we've got thick smoke, everything looks really good so for one final experiment,
why don't we make a legitimate smoke grenade out of PVC pipe light it off and throw it off and see how that goes
*makes evil components*
*makes evil, colorful grenades*
So update guys, we just made some really cool
looking smoke grenades each of them are a different color, and there's quite a bit of composition, so they should burn a little longer
I'm thinking these will actually be safe to hold on to the bottom of it before it heats up too much
So I'm gonna try that I'm gonna hold this in my hand light it off and watch the smoke waft off and observe the results
Light it up
Cool
Moment of truth; is it going to work? Is the red smoke grenade gonna work?
Booya, I think that's yes
Oh, that's gorgeous; look at that. Look at the way it's wafting up into clouds there. That's gorgeous
(I HAVE THE POWER)
You know what awesome thing is you could probably throw this thing like smoke grenade style
And just like have it roll into a building if you're playing airsoft or paintball would that be an epic smoke grenade
I'm gonna go get that before it stains this
It's still going that was awesome we got three more. Let's light another one
Yes
(Grant) Yes. Wow mine spitting off little... yellow- spitting fountains (Nate) There's the green, that's got some good burn[?]
(Grant) That is actually pretty cool. Look at that. (Nate) Oh, so is the blue.
Did it get hot? No.
Whoa, that's beautiful. Let's interchange them; let's mix them like this
That's getting dusty[?]. Yep. Yep it is
That was amazing. That's a lot of smoke
The PVC actually is a better thermal insulator in this case than steel; that steel got really really hot
The PVC worked out really nicely though
I can hold this and it's actually really cool to the touch the steel on the other hand you got to like play hot potato with it.
That is quite warm, quite warm to the touch
What would have been cool is if we would have juggled these while they were blowing smoke
That would have been epic. In any case, I think we've got a pretty good show we learned something here
we got colored smoke to work. I'm calling that a success. So you have it guys,
that's how you use potassium, chlorate, lactos, a little bit of baking soda and some colored dye to make yourself some colored smoke, the right way -
the way that actually works. And a huge shout out to our friend Benjamin Yonkers for putting this suggestion down in the comments below,
you can go check your YouTube inbox Benjamin, we're sending you 25 bucks
We've got a lot of materials left over so if there's anything you want to see us do with it
tell us about it in the comments. That's right and thanks for joining us for this experiment today guys,
we'll be looking for you. The next one to talk to you then.
Oh, look at that you can actually see like all the ash leftover on the inside. Wonder if that means these could be reusable
Whoop. Ha-ha-haha
Colorful[?] smoke. Here we gotta... get a different direction
Hey guys, I want to jump back in for just a second to invite you to come follow me on Instagram
I've got a very active page where I post daily pictures and stories of behind the scenes and every day is an adventure
Just take five seconds right now to click the link in the description to come follow me on instagram at the king of random
I'll see you there
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