I even did not realize I can question Cody having a pill naker until read your comment! anyone other than Cody - i'd instantly though about clandestinely making mdma or smth)
I think there were a couple dollars of gold at most there. He would have tried to recover it otherwise (like, he didn't actually use the anvil after the very beginning, he could have done it on an enamel tile to avoid any losses if there was a significant amount), so while I dunno how cheap the anvil is, it's probably more than the gold.
Platinum is really interesting. The first people for sure to knowingly work it were Incas using a powder based process quite similar to this one. If you do end up processing platinum into a solid piece using this technique, it will hearken back to the first platinum ever purposefully worked by human hands! Neat piece of history.
Nice work! Warm-hammered ("beaten" gold/silver) techniques like these were used in ancient times to make gold leaf only a few micrometers thick, for covering statues and temple relics. It was done in sections, making bigger sheets and cutting out specific shapes or smooth areas from the best part of each sheet to build up the gilding. This is particularly effective for images of "Spirit creatures" covered in geometrically similar scales or feathers. This is referenced in the Old Testament and traces farther back to ancient Sumerian, Chinese, and Hindu smiths and artworks thousands of years earlier. The only more efficient use of material mass was DC electroplating done with early acid batteries, but that technology was rare and then lost for ages. If you want to test the limits of your foil-making for maximum smooth area, try using a ball-peen hammer or (even better) a spherical polished hammer-stone, on a heated anvil surface to maintain an ideal temperature balance. If you are gentle & patient and can tolerate a hot workroom, you could get square-feet of foil per ounce of material.
Where's that list of things he wears gloves for? I'm forgetting a few. Math Nitroglycerin handling powdered gold EDIT: Ah yes, thank you! Uranium, making mouthwash, turkey eggs, gold balls, drinking hydric acid, making Clerci's Solution, and of course handling the notorious butter.
You should polish that anvil face Cody, or at least a small working surface in the center. That way you can work metals without them taking a texture from the machining marks on the anvil. It also allows you to clean the anvil face much faster and more thoroughly. And it keeps the anvil from holding onto dusts from one material and contaminating another with it.
Bob Saget my dad has a generations old anvil. It's made from hardened steel throughout the entire body and traditional forged back in the 1940's, that thing withstands a disk grinder with a diamond cutting wheel with a scratch
Do you mean he shouldn't have gotten a power fist anvil? Those things are about as hard as a good Parmesan or romano. A thick piece of nice hard steel bolted to a splitting log would be much better and still pretty janky. Just my two cents
Nothing to do with keeping anything clean or pure, although that obviously also helps. When dealing with soft metals using polished tools will transfer the same shiny texture to the softer metal, hence removing the need to polish the ball or whatever else you're working on. If you ever get a chance to look inside a goldsmith, take a look at his tools, they're almost mirrors.
I agree, my ocd is crying, i dont care if he thinks the oils from his nasty anvil will burn away next time he heats it up' other people prolly gonna use it someday and i dont think they want nasty stuff like that in it. Gold is all about recycling lol.
I actually think Waterjet channel cut one of those things in half maybe (or some channel showed one that had been dropped). It isn't solid metal. It has plaster and cavities.
Coal rolling is where you have a diesel truck spew out "unreasonable" (for lack of a better word) amounts of sooty exhaust. Rick rolling is where you have someone spew out "unreasonable" (for lack of a better word) amounts of profanities from listening to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley. Gold rolling... Just watch the vid. (And I can't continue the use of the word "unreasonable", anyway.)
Cody'sLab it does indeed have some interesting properties. It is just a shame the"value" is artificially kept very high. Same as Mercury, now that it is demonised and been taken out, it got incredibly expensive, even though it's still the same old Mercury.
This is true - but I have seen him refine plenty of it from almost nothing. I have some silver bars - but would never melt them down and mix them with other elements because I could never refine them back to being pure* again like he does with seemingly little effort..
gold's value isn't artificially kept high. In fact, the value of gold has historically been very very consistent. For a set amount of gold you can typically get the same amount of goods now as a century ago, where the variance is in the value of the currency or the goods and not the metal's value. The majority of gold's value is this property. People buy gold because it has so very many useful properties and it keeps it's value. it's expensive because it is a limited quantity and has such a huge number of uses, not because some artifical intent to manipulate perceived value. There literally is no single industry or field of study in which gold is not of considerable use.
Well, Put water in dirt, put some grape seeds in there, give it a few years, and then squirt out the water out of the grapes and ferment it. Tadaa, wine.
After folding it over again and again you should rip or cut it on the bias and look at it under a microscope. I would be interested in seeing the layers of cold welded gold
A thought occurs; Could the bubbles be caused by trapped moisture in the gold powder, and not air..? I don't think air would expand that much... Did you try heating the powder to drive off any moisture before cold-welding it? As usual, Awesome vid.
That explanation of work hardening is amazing. You are a really good teacher. That's something I've never understood but that explanation just made it all make sense.
Nice I love the longer videos I could seriously watch two or more hours of Cody doing anything he could be taking a fat crap the whole time and I'd be like you go brotha almost there lol😅
Cody I know I am one of the many people commenting on your video however seeing how it is becoming more like summer in Utah I for one would love to see the gardening serious make a comeback as it was always great watching those sorts of videos and learning how to possibly do it in my own home.
I'd think the bubbles are from moisture in the gold powder, cooking off under the flame. wouldn't think trapped air would expand that much, compared to the potential of moisture going to gas.
There might be moisture, but as any student in jewelry making will tell you, air alone can do worst than this. You can actually get similar result by just laminating an ingot with a wrong technique. Tiny cracks form at an extremity, then spread to the center and, when you heat it up, it makes bubbles, even if said ingot is still a few millimeters thick, regardless of being exposed to water or not.
Hi Cody. I have read some info about gold and it melting point. The thing is that all depends on particle size, The tinest the particles are the lower melting point they have. So you can even melt gold in a room temperature. So when you have made this pill during the process you just create a net of melted nanoparticles that hold together those bigger size together unmelted. Next by apply the heat to around 800oC those bigger size particles melted together still way below solid gold chunk melting point.
Great concept. I would think that unless your good is very pure, wouldn't the impurities stay inside with a cold weld? I would love to see platinum done though!
DustedAsh3 That's not a scientist... at least not in the strict sense of the word. A scientist will say "I think this will do that, let's see if I'm right"
You need a miniature pizza docker - the kitchen tool that is used to poke holes in pizza dough prior to baking that prevents bubbles from forming due to the trapped gasses. ------------ Haha!! I googled 'poky roller tool' and found a Wartenberg wheel! You can use it with your vibrator in the vacuum chamber! ...lmao - I think you'll understand why I'm laughing after you check the pricing from several different sources. It's made of stainless steel and I think it will resolve your bubble issue if you roll it back and forth a few times over sheets of gold. I love your channel! Thanks for the entertaining education.
Congratularions Cody, Now that you have encountered Cracking, Work Hardening and Heat Normalizing in metals, while hitting them with a hammer on an anvil you have become a blacksmith!
Can you cold weld the gold dust or other metal dusts in a vacuum chamber? If that works, couldn't you do a mold of sorts, where you just have to anneal it? Just googled it and there are no mentions of what would happen.
Eternia Kerbal In theory, other metals (gold is not very reactive) form an oxidative layer on the outside that prevents cold welding. If he puts them in a vaccuum, works them over (gold is particularly maleable, so this will be difficult) so that the oxidated layer is no longer covering the outside, then he can cold weld other metals, too.
I don't know if this has already been said but Material Science Engineer (in training) here and this process is called sintering. When the loose 'snowflake crystals' are packed together to form a rough shape then the material is heated without liquifying it, the crystals undergo growth and densification happens, as voids in the material shrink and the individual crystals form grain boundaries between each other. I don't think that the material is work hardening because there isn't a microstructure before the pellet is formed but Still a great video!!
The way I understand it, no. Basically the atoms of any metal in a complete vacuum with no oxidation or other film of non "like" atoms don't have a way of knowing that two pieces of the same metal are separate so they should combine when pressed together as if they were the same piece of metal. This would mean that each powder particulate can't recognize other particulates as being separate when crushed together and therefore a lab wouldn't be able to distinguish them either. I would think that the only way a lab could distinguish a pressed vs melted difference would be if there were impurities that were not uniform throughout the metal sheet. I would imagine something like taking two snowballs, dying one, and pressing them together. One side of the snowball would be dyed and the other would not. If you melted the two together and re froze them, the dye color would be uniform throughout. I am certainly not that caliber of scientist to know for sure but that's my best guess.
If you really go science you can probably detect the cold welding with a polarising microscope which shows you the grain size and orientation within the material
Work hardening is an essential part of making bronze blades and tools. Having a home made foundry/forge myself I learned this when I tried to use a non work hardened bronze axe. Aluminium bronze is much more prone to work hardening than normal bronze and in fact can become close to as hard as some weaker steels.
Signs Cody’s got that RU-vid money now: he keeps hammering the gold he knows is brittle and in his head he’s like “I can refine an ounce of gold from my feces and fermented urine with a little bit of hydric acid plus I don’t show RU-vid my Ferrari I just show them the library”.
