Mixing Molten Metals. THIS Could Go Wrong. 

Have a great weekend everybody! I hope you enjoy the video. Going to try casting a vase with this method soon. And I've come up with another very interesting casting technique, very much by accident! More content on the way. Thank you all for your support, with a special thanks to my patrons!!

I had a feeling it would flare up but still I was happy to see an expert try it👊🏻😁🍻🍻

Bare skin works great. I've had molten steel blow back on me countless times when using a cutting torch....I use real thin cloth gloves sometimes and when I do..I look down...the gloves are gone all but the wrist bands and my hands are untouched. The molten steel literally bounces off the skin. You definitely feel the hot temp but only for a split second. The water in the skin flashes to steam and the steam protects your skin :D

My “not” favorite is when molten slag falls on leather shoes and burns through the shoe, sock and several layers of skin. No matter how fast you remove your shoe, the hole on the top of your foot takes weeks to heal.

The latent heat of vaporization (energy required to boil) of the zinc is very high. The change of state will absorb a lot of heat from the copper and quickly cool it. I say no explosion.

I scored some great PPE last year from a small art foundry that closed down. I don't use the leather chaps or the aluminized chaps I got yet. The reflective chaps will be great when I get to the point of working near much bigger crucibles than I am set up for now, as they radiate way more heat than my small ones - #6 to #12 - that can easily be solo poured without mechanical assistance. But I do wear the thick, padded eather spats and leather jacket. Over that I have my old leather apron, which covers my legs down past the top of the spats. Steel toed leather boots. Hardhat with polycarbonate face shield, and I have a variety of gloves I wear when working with or near hot stuff. I agree that it is up to the indivudual to learn what the risks are and make an educated decision about how much PPE is enough. For me that means, at minimum, long sleeved jacket and long pants made of leather or natural fibers (burning on your skin is better than melting into your skin, so no synthetic fibers!), sturdy leather shoes or boots, welding gauntlets, leather apron, and face shield. It's worth noting that before I got the spats, I once spilled some bronze on the ground handling an overfull crucible and a single drop splashed onto then immediately bounced off my steel toe, but even that momentary contact with the outside of my shoe resulted in a 3rd degree burn on my foot that took 8 weeks to heal. I had to wear slippers to work for the first 2... Also, the leidenfrost effect may provide bare skin with some protection from instantaneous contact with coppers or cast iron, but I've heard it said that molten aluminum and lower melting point metals aren't quite hot enough for that and will actually stick to your skin and keep burning. Some foundrymen would rather get hit with Cu or Fe than Al for this reason. I had a drop of flying molten aluminum land inside my glove once through a tiny opening at my wrist and it did not stick to me, it just burned me. I don't want to imagine if it had been a real spill and not just a drop... Small burns come with the territory, to me PPE is about minimizing the damage when you do F up, not to impossibly keep accidents from ever happening. IMO there is a fine line, you definitely don't want to get any on you... but passing out from overheating because you are wrapped head to toe in leathers while dual-wielding hot crucibles with your crutch-shanks on a hot summer day clearly won't do either. Oh! I forgot to mention the most important PPE of all: common sense.

Beautiful! I can’t wait to see what you come up with to make using this!!!

I love your channel. It is NEVER boring. Ever! Thank you. I love watching smart people on RU-vid!!

Nice work! After watching the first video. I'm glad you tried again. Can't Wait to see how this experiment evolves.

nice results! you could try to split up the flow of metal into several sprouts, that way could have multiple "mixing fronts". Maybe something that would be possible with a ceramic mould

Not only did I just find your channel but I just watched the previous video to this, now this has just been uploaded! Interesting stuff these videos are great.

Great result in the end!

Hell yeah that result looks great! I can imagine some silverware would look really fancy all shined up!

very cool!!! love that you try things!

Nice. Now, for the vase!

one of my fav channels

There's Cub fans growing at the end of those end of the rainbow! Awesome video! I've just began my mixing metals adventure and found your video!!! Thank you

Got to love it, even though subscribed, didn't show up in yesterdays feed, nor today even when I looked at my subscriptions again after I found this. It showed up on the home though, but really YT, how hard is it to add these into the subscription feed!

I had an idea to try to obtain your goal: melt some copper and pour it in a preheat cast iron skillet, forming a shallow pool. Then randomly (or artistically) pour some tin pieces over it! Or other metal with lower melting point than the copper. After melting the pieces you can let as is, or take a inox spoon or stick and make some moves to partially mix them, make some art.. . It may offer what you seek! And i'd love to see the results! Thanks for the videos and inspiration!

Having worked in steel melt shops for 45 years, I can tell you that your denim blue jeans and jackets with heavy welding gloves were the preferred clothing for working around molten steel in the days before aluminized safety gear came around. The cotton is a natural fiber and it will not melt and stick to your skin, it also smokes when it gets hot & tells you that you are moving too slowly. Bu the way, when water turns to steam it has a 1600 to 1 volume increase.

Your stuff is great. I have plans for a small foundry and forge but have no space at the moment.

great stuff

Found your channel when you had less than 100k subs, I think its about time I gave you a little support, especially considering that I am running ad blockers :) I really appreciate your content and production style!

Cool Beans!

"We have to be careful with this one but we're going to try it anyway" - atta boy, John! 👍😂

You could make some sick coasters with that.

Was waiting for you to release the white/yellow smoke!

Would look incredible if you could forge/fold it several times, but I guess the zink part will be completely liquid, before the bronze parts are getting formable. Bronze-damast even sounds cool.

If you want the metals to "mix like swirl, you need to cast horizontally, not vertically so the heavier metals doesnt just sink.

You’ll never catch me wearing a welding blanket, too itchy 😆

Was not expecting the end of the rainbow rant. 🤣

Best protection is to be behind a barrier, no dumb clumsy hot clothing to impede your movement / escape. Build a frame with small supermarket trolley wheels on it. Car door glass is tempered, front window is double layer tempered. I'm certain you know were this going.

It would be cool to see this in something like an ingot. I think that would allow the metal to take on a more splotchy pattern, if they were poured randomly. also copper and lead could be interesting. Anyway, looking fower to seeing your next castings.

Not only is safety a personal choice but safety is also different for everyone and the supporting evidence is everywhere. Skill, experience, practice, muscle memory, personal tolerances and preferences. You may require a piece of PPE simply because you don't like the discomfort of oils or sparks on your skin, you may work in a metal shop in your underwear cause you can ignore the existence of sparks and oils and you're ability to focus and work safely is not affected. A personal example, I am a bladesmith and I never wear gloves if I can find any way to avoid them. I've never burned or cut my hands to a degree that affected my ability to keep working. My brother will occasionally come make hunting knives with me and he won't touch a hammer without gloves, he has also never sustained an injury. It's all about weighing the pros and cons and being aware of the risks and the ways to mitigate those risks. Also being familiar and comfortable with the type of injury that you can get from the type of risk you take. On another note, there are plenty of other options for clothing made from naturally self extinguishing materials that are treated to be flame retardant. Firefighters and the military use a light weight rip stop denim made from fabrics like 100 percent cotton, 100 percent hemp or 100 percent silk. These materials don't self ignite, they do self extinguish, they don't transmit heat, they don't melt, and when treated the hot material won't stick to them. Not nearly as good as the flame proof suit you have, but certainly not any worse than bare skin.

Nice result with the Zinc and Copper! Would love to see more experiments with that... Others have stressed the importance of heating up molds to avoid explosions from water - have you found that makes a difference?

Very interesting

The trick seems to be getting the copper to solidify before it completely diffuses into the other metal. The zinc cooled the copper down fast enough for this to work. With the other metals I'm pretty sure you could take a chunk of aluminum or tin and drill holes in it of the correct size so when filled with molten copper it would allow for some mixing but cool the molten copper down with out liquifying the "container" metal. The math seems like it would be pretty straight forward to calculate how much copper you could pour into a cavity in a chunk of aluminum before it would melt the aluminum.

Oh that's neat!

Nice!

Holy shti. Super-cool. 👍👍👍

Very cool. Make a little ceramic coating statue same methodology and let's see what it does.

is there a way to use finer grain sand for casting? Love your videos and experiments!!

👍 A long leather apron would be the most appropriate attire for pouring molten metal, combined with high leather boots. Add welders gloves, to protect your hands and forearms, and you're probably as good as is reasonable. Protective glasses/facemask, would be an obvious addition. This is both cool to wear, and would protect against splashes. If you look at old films of men working in foundries in the early part of the last century, that's what they wore. 😊 To get the metals to mix, the use pellets and melt them in the same pot, and stir well as they melt. .

Interesting. Should try casting the lower melting metal with a rough side, let it chill completely, then pour whatever on top.

Very cool looking about what i expected i would think you would need a larger volume dumped directly into the copper to get a bleve. And safty 3rd as one of my favorite yt says lol

That's wild dude. Maybe keeping the copper very close to the freezing point will help you get that differentiation. Essentially you are using zinc as a coolant to quickly solidify the copper in some random state, and the zinc just happens to fill the voids. I'm so curious to see where you take this. It's going to take just as much creativity to control the pour. Maybe consider a mold on a lazy susan and a slow pour to induce some randomness with larger projects.

heck yeah nice!

Pouring into a preheated shallow ingot form would allow you to direct where the blending happens. I think pouring the zinc/tin first and the copper shortly after would get what you are looking for

Have you thought about pouring with 2 sprews that go to the bottom of the mold either side and have the metal enter at the bottom either side and work their way to the top to a vent mixing as they rise. This may create a more "swirly" pattern as it rises.

Cool Beans. Loved the artistic end product. Not even Jackson Pollock could have pulled that off. But he was drunk pretty much all the time anyway. But in metals, just too cool. I must add I am always curious as to how one cleans their Crucible? It would seem to me that a residue of past experiments always would want to tag along and there must be a way to minimize this. Oh, my prediction. It is not all that unbiased essentially because I saw another's brief comment prior to adding this feature. Without having seen beyond 'what do you think will happen' I am guessing the 'burnt eggs and home fries' once again, but with a bit of a bang.

Under argon or nitrogen blanketing, could you use sheets of tin and copper and laminate them together using induction heating?

The bronze-age had bronze knives..... this could make some interesting looking semi-functional blades....

what is how do i make hard cast lead? i have been with you for a long time and i enjoy everything you do

Since the rainbow is between you and the stable, do bluebirds fly in your stable? You know, somewhere over the rainbow. 😂

At 13:28+ you’ve created a accurate sculpture of a Beluga (sp?) whale. Nice!

The comment on no clothing at all being second best is indeed correct, as at this temperatures, everything will be burned through before you could even start to react to it and any sort of burnis easier to take care of medically and has a better healing chance when no further foreign tissue (like clothing) has been burned/molten into the skin/bone It's somewhat similar to dry ice or liquid nitrogene, contact to skin is not that big of a deal (if it's not forced and prolongued) as it will just 'slide off' (it's way more noticable with liquid nitrogene then dry ice [solid CO2] though)

I had a rainbow once just like that, could see both end points, made me laugh like a madman when I realized it!

Hi! Since I really like your way of explaining stuff, can you do a video on the "right to repair" issue? I heard John Deere has really been behaving like douchebags towards the farmers.

Safety,,, I’m so sweaty usually just bounces right off

I wonder what the corrosion properties are on that final piece? Copper and zinc are pretty far apart on the corrosion index, so I would imagine they would have a pretty decent reaction going in even something like high humidity. Might be worth it to shine the whole piece up, cut it into strips and let it sit in various environments to see if it develops any interesting or destructive patterns.

Great video as usual but sure miss Gun Craft videos.

This video is hot. Thanks for making them its always a pleasure - have you considered selling stickers/mech to financially aid the channel? An aluminum can receiver sticker would sell/ plenty of iconic moments here that would resonate (AvE seems to do well with his, but it does have an initial cost and of course time) thanks again for the great ideas, always excited to see what you do next

Success with Cu & Zn!!! Good work!

You have in theory made a thermocouple, look it up and measure any voltage/current produced when one side is hot and the other side is cold

I wonder if you used a flat mold or just one side and alternate the two different metals if that would achieve the look you’re going for

can you make 2 reservoirs with small spouts that face each other so you can fill them up and they slowly spew the liquid metals at each other and into the final mould?

I wonder if you could Braze together some Copper Wire & some Zinc Wire for a Copper/Zinc/Bronze Damascus

How well would it work if you had the 2 crucibles ready to pour into the mold but poured one crucible into the other just before pouring into the mold? Would it allow just enough mixing to get the effect you want without completely alloying before solidifying? Or maybe pouring both into a wide funnel that goes into the mold instead of directly into the mold, that could allow more swirling for a more random pattern

Hi John.

Hey have you ever thought about float plane?

Also wonder if you were to melt all the metals together what would come out

I wonder if mixing in small flakes of either the tin or alumnium into moltern copper thats not far above its melting point would get the effect youre looking for in the final solid?

LOL 8:45... "THERE'S NOTHING THERE! >:U"

I wonder if the rough surface of the sheet on the copper and tin was due to tin compounds boiling away. Tin oxide's boiling point is only 1400C, and other tin salts have far lower boiling points (tin chloride is about 650C). I could definitely see these impurities forming small bubbles of vapour, rushing to the outside, and knocking the sand around as the vapour freezes.

I kinda have the feeling that using a shallow horizontal pool would yield better results, you might even be able to cast the lower melting-point metal first, let it cool slightly, then cast the second one on top. Cause so far it seems that most of the metal just mixed at the bottom and you only get a small region at the top where they stay somewhat separated.

you should try copper with nickel and then add around 10% aluminum

If 2 molten metals are going to blow up ,will it do it soon as it touches or need mixed together a bit.

Those gloves don't just cover your arms. They're also a fashion statement, dahling! bwahahahahahaaaa Educational and fun as per usual. Keep'em coming, good sir!

Metal will bounce off yor skin, burning you but shallower than with nylon (tergal) clothing. Garage cotton overall with leather booth (hard top) with the trouser ABOVE the shoes! Thanks for putting Degrees Centigrade on screen, you got to be the first American to do that!

100% about the safety. And I am a super safe father of a boy and a girl who've survived into their 20s, despite firearms and heavy machinery and refined sugar. lol

awesome

Tin might work with copper if you pre-cast a copper shape and kept it just shy of it's melting point, and then poured tin over it. Should have a non-flowing integration zone where the tin would 'wick' into the copper structure, and you'd have some control over that zone because the work's exposed and can be quenched at a given time, determined by experimentation.

I imagine a lot of violent sputtering and some sad results~ I think what you're really looking for are two eutectic alloys with different colors but similar temperatures. The problem is that raw metals solidify at different temperatures, so they won't really freeze in that "poured" state, I think. I have covid so I've been rewatching your back catalog in between sleeping. Thanks for all the entertainment!

This might reduce the quality of the molding capabilities, but what if your pour exposed more surface area for mixing? Is it the hydrostatic pressure and relative density that is allowing so much separation? Also, if the amount of the cooler melting metal is very small in the traditional alloy final product, what if you used like a tiny foil amount that was solidified inside the mold (pre pour), and then poured the hotter of the two metals over it? Would that improve the chances of spontaneous alloying?

Suggest leather apron

What if you mixed in a crucible and stirred it first then made the pour. Really know very little about it but what heck I would try it

Would it make sense that both metals would need to have similar melting points in order for them to become marbled when poured together?

I've got a brief observation on your choice for pouring the molten metals. Isn't there a release agent or powder that keeps the sand from sticking to the object that you're using as the pattern? I would think also that pouring the metals horizontally and with vent holes would give you a different outcome?

And that's why I pour metal naked.

Can you mixed iron and copper? It's like gog and magog wall

I wonder what would happen if dropped a piece of solid tin into the molten copper crucible and then shortly thereafter poured it into the mold.

much dope

Can you mix titanium and tungsten

That crying property was super cool to learn!

I've suffered greater injuries riding my mountain bike than you have with molten metal. Moral: Don't smelt metals whilst riding a mountain bike...

And that's why I weld in flip flops. The sparks burn through tennis shoes and burn my toes.

Can you mix platinum with titanium

What happens when you mix molten stone and metal together?

The other end of the rainbow is where the treasure is: inside your house!

Seems like way too much tinn and thus diluting it too much. Maybe weigh the cast piece, then calculate the amount of the two metals to get this mass at x percentage each, then melt and mix those two defined batches. Also, heat the tinn up (much) higher, to allow for mixing. Oh, at 11:15 its 0 to 100 °C, not 1 to 99 °C. Water (or anything...) only starts transitioning to another state when the freezing/boling point is reached and then more energy is added/removed. So heating water from 0 to 100 °C will not cause anything to boil, unless you keep putting heat into the water that now reached 100 °C. Well, there are some details around superheating at the contact surface etc. that we dont need to get into, but thats how it works.