[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] The Silver Play Button is an award
given out by YouTube to channels who reach 100,000 subscribers.
Well, for whatever reason,
we happen to have an additional or extra Silver Play Button,
and so, we are going to see what happens if we melt this down.
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The channel JerryRigEverything did some tests,
and found that these old-style play buttons are made of about 95 percent nickel.
So, we're going to throw it into our furnace and see what happens.
Our furnace only gets up to about 2,000 degrees,
whereas the melting point of nickel is more like 25 or 26 hundred degrees.
Those are both in Fahrenheit.
But we do want to see what happens if we just heat it up to 2000.
Maybe it gets soft.
Maybe it starts glowing.
I'm curious if the finish is going to get destroyed,
and then if this furnace doesn't work,
we have our backup arc furnace,
which definitely gets hot enough to melt it down.
So if it doesn't melt here, and we'll try melting it there.
Pretty straightforward.
Let's put our play button down in there,
fire up the furnace and see what happens to it.
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That was kind of cool right when it lit,
it like fogged up.
And I thought like, "Oh! It's already ruined."
But then it just cleared right up.
So I guess that was just some sort of vapor.
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Oh!
That. Look at that.
The top corner is-- Oh! On the edges.
Yeah starting to like bubble now.
So I'm pretty sure the surface is actually also made of nickel,
but it's like a cleaner nickel plating that's applied in a different method.
It's not cast with the rest of it.
So they probably, in a mold, they cast the main button,
and then they plate over the whole button.
Now, we're getting some iridescent effects.
Yeah, that surface is getting kind of wrecked.
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Neat.
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That looks awesome.
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Ooh! Wow!
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I think this is melting.
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Yeah, the inside of the cup is now full of liquid.
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Oh well so much for this just being a solid piece of nickel
that melts at 2,600 degrees.
That took about three minutes to completely liquefy.
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So that makes me think maybe this one is zinc,
which melts at about 700 degrees Fahrenheit
instead of 2600 degrees Fahrenheit.
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This right here was the surface of the play button.
About half of it.
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Well, it started out as silver shiny metal, and it's silver shiny metal again.
Fascinating!
Overall, this has been pretty surprising.
I really didn't think that was going to melt in this furnace at all.
But it did.
In fact it melted in like two, maybe three minutes.
It just turned into a puddle down in the cup.
All of the shell that was around It didn't melt.
It sort of fell in and ended up as slag down in the cup
surrounded by molten metal,
but I'm going to see if I can take this molten metal,
and I'm going to pour it into a bowl full of Orbeez,
and I just want to see what comes out,
and then if we can get a cool cast out of it.
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Three, two, one.
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Oh!
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Oh! Limited--
Limited use on those glass containers full of molten metal.
Now, I got Orbeez spilled all over the place.
Let's grab some cool water and cool that off.
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This is just a little chunk of glass from our bowl,
just stuck into the metal here.
I want to pry it out,
but I don't want to push too hard with my fingers
'cause I'll probably end up just cutting myself on it.
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Well, here is our Silver Play Button.
It's-- it's a little bit changed shape,
doesn't look quite the same way it did before,
and because of how low temperature this melted.
I'm now quite curious about what metal this is.
I'm thinking it might be zinc,
or maybe even just tin, which has a very low melting point.
But that melted so quickly and so easily
that I'm positive it wasn't nickel.
Because our furnace doesn't even get hot enough to melt nickel.
So yeah, might have to do some tests to try and figure out just what this was.
It still is. It's still metal.
It's just not a play button anymore,
but I don't know, maybe that would look good,
just on a plaque on the wall too.
I want to display this.
Let's build a little display for this thing.
This is going to be fun.
[Music]
Our Silver Play Button has been melted down and cast into a new shape,
and I gave that a nice little stand.
So we've got ourselves like a new award.
What do you think?
Should YouTube keep giving out this style?
Or maybe should they move on to this one?
I don't know. Maybe it's an upgrade.
Maybe not.
But I like how it turned out.
I am curious.
I'm gonna have to do some tests to find out what kind of metal this is
because it's definitely not nickel.
So maybe this was a different edition of the play button
than the one that JerryRigEverything tested.
In fact, I bet pretty strongly that it is.
So, we'll have to do some tests of our own and find out what this one is made of.
Guys. That's not all, we've got more for you to see.
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Talk to you then.