Making purple gold

which I expected and it was like a normal

gold

bar except it was pinkish

purple

and I was very happy with the result. The only thing I thought was strange was that it didn't look as

purple

as my other piece and this one looked like a light pink, however after lots of testing I discovered this was mainly because it was much brighter which made it look a lot brighter and I will talk more about this. Later, having said all that, being able to do this completely proved to me that it was definitely possible to cast and clear purple

gold

and at this point I was feeling quite excited, however, my mood completely changed when I decided to make a decision.

I looked much closer and was a little horrified by what I saw. Apparently it was riddled with a lot of small cracks and I have no idea how I didn't see this at all until now and I think I was just blinded by all the excitement what made things worse was that it also seemed like the color wasn't very uniform and There were many stains that looked completely colorless, almost as if the metals were not mixed properly in my opinion, although that would be a relatively easy fix and I just had to mix things better and the much bigger problem was all the cracks, this was especially because once I noticed them I couldn't stop looking at them and I couldn't help but think they were super ug ug L what made it even more horrible was that I was in the whole process which meant I couldn't just sand it off and when I looked Looking back to other random pieces I made I realized it was there too.

At first I tried to convince myself that maybe this was what purple gold was like and to test it I ended up buying a small Lee W pendant the moment I opened the box, although I immediately realized that I was only denying it because the surface looked almost perfect and I couldn't see any of those big cracks. It was only when I really got closer that I could see some small flaws on the surface and there were definitely at least some small holes that I could see. I also vaguely see that like mine, the color wasn't perfectly uniform either, but overall it was clearly much better than what I made as a quick side note.

It also seemed to be significantly L more purple than my pink bar, but again this turned out to be mostly a lighting issue and I promise I'll talk more about this later, but anyway, at this point it was pretty obvious that these holes were not intended. to be there and the most unfortunate thing was that I still had no idea. What I was doing wrong, all I knew was that I hated how ugly it was and that, unfortunately, this was something else I was going to have to fix and this project really felt like an endless sequence of problems, that being said.

As before, I ended up trying a bunch of random things and when they all inevitably failed, I desperately looked at the patent and tried searching online; However, unlike last time, I couldn't find even a vague reference to this happening with purple gold. However, I found many sources mentioning a very similar problem commonly occurring with pure aluminum. I also found a really helpful report that talked about this topic in detail and they provided a photo of how I could make aluminum look like everything. of the dark spots were small holes like the ones I was seeing with the purple gold and apparently this was mainly caused by moisture in the air, this is because when aluminum melts it can react with moisture which then causes it to something is formed. of those crunchy oxides like we saw before, as well as some hydrogen gas, I always assume that all of this hydrogen then just floated away, but apparently a lot of it dissolves into the molten aluminum and then as the aluminum cools.

The solubility of hydrogen slowly decreases and just as the aluminum solidifies, everything comes out as a bunch of bubbles. What I found interesting was that they also provided this photo, which is what it looks like if all the hydrogen is removed before it solidifies, there is a pretty obvious difference and all those cavities have completely disappeared and now it's just a piece of aluminum. nice and soft. After seeing this, I felt like it was pretty clear that it was almost exactly the same problem I was having. and this seemed to be confirmed when I looked at some of my images more specifically.

I looked back as the bar was solidifying and could see what looked like bubbles bursting on the surface. When I saw this, I felt it was pretty. Of course, all this was just hydrogen gas expelled while it solidified. The only thing I thought was strange was that it was already using argon to block out all the air and therefore moisture, and I wasn't entirely sure where this hydrogen was. I mean, it was possible that it was because of the short period of time it sat there in the open air before solidifying, but I didn't really feel like that was the case in any way, although I did want to do something that was like that.

How horrible I was going to have to somehow get all the hydrogen out of the aluminum and apparently there were a lot of different ways to do it so I decided to try everything I thought might work and one method I thought was really promising was to just include a bunch of table salt, however, again, most of the things I tried completely failed and after a week of frustration I felt like I only had one real option left for this one. I was going to have to try bubbling up some argon. gas through the molten purple gold instead of simply using it to shield it from the air, this was actually something I had been avoiding because although it sounded relatively simple, it was a bit complicated and I wasn't going to be able to do it.

I just lowered this into my stainless steel tube because at 1200C the aluminum was too angry and would just dissolve it and I saw this happen first hand when it dissolved one of my steel spatulas so I was going to have to change my tube to one with a different material and unfortunately there weren't many other options. I couldn't use other metals because they would probably dissolve too. I couldn't use glass because it would melt and I couldn't use graphite because as far as I can say that small graphite tubes don't exist after thinking about it for a while, although I started to wonder if something like fused quartz could work and I remembered that I actually had a bunch of small tu tubes that I had gotten for free just by purchasing.

Looking at them, they seemed to be more or less the same as regular glass, except unlike regular glass, they were made from almost 100% carbon dioxide. silicon, which would make them significantly more resistant to high temperatures and there should be almost no risk of melting or cracking. I really didn't see why it wouldn't work. I also had a lot of faith in infused quartz after the IID used some to burn diamonds and it had survived being red hot under a stream of pure oxygen, so I decided to give it a try and was very excited to get started, but then I got I realized I didn't actually have any gold left because in all my random attempts I had apparently used up all 99.99 GS and now it was just a bunch of random garbage.

It was a huge pain but I really had no choice and I quickly redissolved it all in a bunch of acid and processed it the same way as the original gold bar and after a couple of days work I had a nice crispy gold. dust except when I weighed it it weighed only 95G, this meant that IID somehow lost about 5g of gold along the way and this didn't make sense to me because I had been extremely careful and thought I had also collected absolutely everything. I finally got to try out my new method, so I went back to my furnace and poured in the 95 G of the gold I just purified.

This is because I didn't think it could be done on a very small scale. If I really wanted to be able to bubble gas through it, I felt like I was going to need as much molten metal as possible with all the melted gold. I then carefully lowered the quartz tube and, with it in place, slowly turned on the argon. Then on top of this I poured the aluminum which melted quickly and this time I stirred it with a graphite rod. This was also what I should have used from the beginning because unlike my spatula it wouldn't dissolve and when I finally felt it looked good.

I lowered the quartz tube and slowly increased the gas flow. My goal was to make it bubble as much as possible without splashing too much and the idea here was that the argon would draw the hydrogen out of the metal. to some extent it would also help mix the gold and aluminum and when I felt it was going at a steady pace I covered it with some insulation then had to leave it like that for a while to make sure it came out as best as possible. as much hydrogen as possible and from what I read online about 20 minutes seemed decent so basically I just had to wait and in the meantime I went to get my mold which again was just a simple bar mold, this It's because I had to make something that I could compare to the previous one and see if this process had really made a difference, but anyway at this point about 20 minutes had passed, so I started blowing the mold with the blowtorch and when I finally felt it looked nice and hot, I quickly took down the whole degassing setup and as quickly as I could I poured it all into the mold, then I waited for it to cool and when it reached a round room temperature I took it out of the mold and started Cleaning it almost immediately, it was already pretty clear that there was a major improvement and even after very little sanding it looked like most of the cracks were gone.

However, he could only be sure when everything was nice and shiny. so I went ahead and many horribly painful hours later I annealed it and this was what I finally had without even comparing it to the other bar, this one was clearly much better and what I was very happy to see was that it didn't seem to be riddled with little holes to tell really how much better it was, although I was going to have to take a photo of the old one and the moment I saw it, the difference really surprised me; actually, it was somewhat uniform.

Uglier than I remembered and it was pretty undeniable that the degassing step had made a significant difference. I mean, if I really got closer I could clearly see some very small holes and it definitely wasn't perfect, but overall I still thought it was really nice. and I was very happy with the result, the only thing that was still a little off was the color and like the other bar it was definitely more on the pink side, however as I mentioned a couple of times before it turned out that This was all it was just an annoying lighting problem, this was actually something that really messed with my head for a while and honestly it's sad how much time I spent looking at little pieces of metal and trying to compare their colors which really bothered me. solved things was getting that.

Lee wa pendant that allowed me to compare my stuff to professionally produced purple gold. I also started using a polarizer for my camera that allowed me to eliminate some of the reflections and suddenly it became very clear that they were the same color to me. It really showed that it was all just lighting and I think my bar is a lot brighter or something which usually makes it look like a brighter color, although at this point I finally had what I felt was a decent way to do the purple gold and then months of going around in circles, this was a huge relief, however of course I wasn't done yet and the last thing I still had to do was make my ring, which was the reason I started this project, the only part Worrying was that I still wasn't entirely sure how to do this and was a little worried I'd end up in another horrible pit of trial and error to try and avoid this, although I decided to use the simplest method I could think of. and the first thing I did was buy a ring sizer on Amazon.

I then tried several of them on to see which one fit my finger best and this was extremely important because as we saw before, purple gold was not completely malleable and this meant that any cast I made had to be a near perfect size. That being said, when I finally found one that I thought fit, I was able to make a super basic 3D design and now I just had to turn it into a mold with regular gold, there are some common ways to do this, like with lost pla casting, but I was worried that everyone would end up having problems with purple gold, so I decided the best idea was to do it in a graphite mold that I was now very familiar with and knew would probably work.

The only tricky part was that I couldn't just buy a mold and to get it to fit my finger perfectly I would have to customize it - in theory I probably could. I found someone online to do this for me, but instead I used this as an excuse to buy a CNC machine and learn how to carve my own graphite molds. It actually ended up being a lot of fun, although it was a little frustrating at times. and now I can make pretty much any graphite mold I want. That being said, for this project, everything I hadWhat to do was make this super simple and with it ready I was finally able to try to make the ring, so again I quickly repurified all the gold that wasn't used to make my big bar and remelted half of it in the oven.

I did this so I could make at least two attempts and was just hoping that 30g of gold and about 7G of aluminum would give enough volume for degassing. Then I let it sit there and after about 15 minutes I started blasting the mold with a blowtorch and finally I was ready to try pouring it. Honestly, I was very worried that he would do it. Either it was failing completely or the metal wasn't flowing through everything, but it turned out to be totally fine. All I had to do now was wait for it to cool, except for this part which I was actually more worried about because I knew this was going to make it shrink.

This was also a big problem because it meant that the inner side of the Ring would begin to shrink while the outer side would stretch and since purple gold had no real malleability or ductility, this would almost definitely cause it to break. To try to avoid this, I intentionally angled the inner edges of the mold in hopes that when it contracted, it would come out without cracking at the same time. I really think there was a narrow window of time when it was possible to remove it manually and I kept trying to get it out, however I apparently wasn't skilled enough and it ended up splitting in half, it just broke.

This was also very sad because the ring had actually been molded super well and now Unless I want to spend days purifying everything again, I only had one last chance, so I eagerly prepared another batch, heated the mold red hot and poured everything with Be careful this time, though somehow there wasn't enough metal to fill the entire mold and I was sad about this at first, but it actually turned out to be a good thing because it prevented the ring from connecting completely, so when it contracted it didn't just squeeze The middle part and it broke and I was able to get it out of the mold, huh, huh, what I had now was not exactly what I expected and it seemed like a failed attempt, but at the same time I felt that this different shape was something cool and I decided to move on.

I then spent the next few days sanding and polishing it and this time I also used the Dremel which made things much easier. The part I really had the most trouble with was just I came up with a design that I liked and most of the time I was really worried that it would eventually turn out absolutely horrible, although I was able to make something that I was happy with, so I polished it as much as possible. best I could and then I knelt down and this was the final result. Honestly, it was so much better than I ever imagined and I found it hard to believe I had actually done it.

I finally had my ring that was made entirely of purple gold and it was probably one of the only ones in existence and after months of work I think it was worth it. What was also nice was that it wasn't as fragile as I thought it would be and although I won't vouch for it. I don't think it will break if I drop it. I also don't think it would be a problem to use it casually as long as you're careful and you'd probably have to avoid accidentally hitting it into things with All that said, when I started this project, I was honestly really worried that it would be a total failure, especially with all the things that I had read online;

However, it turned out that purple gold wasn't all that bad. I worked as I thought and with a relatively simple setup. I definitely think it is possible to make some pretty jewelry. I also think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the method I used and I already have some ideas I want to try, for example something I really want to try is using higher purity argon, which has less moisture, and I want to try changing my quartz for something like alumina. I'm also tempted to completely switch to a different degassing method like ultrasonic and most importantly I think there are definitely some better ways to melt and mold it for now, although I think I'm a little tired of melting and grinding purple gold and, instead, I'm going to work on some more.

Tasty projects like turning air into alcohol. Well, in the end this was probably the most tedious and frustrating project I've ever worked on and what made it even worse was that I somehow kept losing gold. I honestly still have no idea where he went. because I was very careful with everything and I'm a little convinced that it just evaporated or something with the aluminum, although I'm very happy that it's finally done and I want to say a big thank you to my sponsors for

making

projects like this possible and to Opa for sponsoring this video. I've been using Opera on desktop for a while and in my opinion it's still the best browser I've ever used, not only is it really fast and intuitive and loaded with a ton of extra features, it's also just received an update to its Lucid mode , which I think is great because with the click of a button it is possible to immediately enhance any video and now with this update it is also possible to manually adjust the sharpness. and there is also a button to easily see a before and after in addition to Lucid mode, although another feature that I like is this sidebar which I think is really useful because it allows me to easily access all the social networks that I use often, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram. and Tik Tok and it even has a built-in music app where I can listen to things like Spotify and Apple Music.

On top of all this, they even have a built-in VPN service and ad blocker, as well as some built-in AI tools in particular. They have Arya, which is Opera's native and completely free AI service and is similar to GPT chat, except it has even more features. It's also completely optional whether you want to use Arya or not and will only be activated if you choose to subscribe in addition to all the However, what I also really like about these tools is their tab island feature, which really helps me have all my tabs under control and this is especially useful when I am researching for a project.

That being said though I have been having a great experience. It's a good time to use Opera in general and I still think it's worth trying with just the sidebar. Of course, it's also completely free to use and you can download it right now by clicking the link in the description, as usual. Thank you very much to all my followers on Patreon. Everyone who supports me can watch all my videos at least 24 hours before posting them on YouTube. You will also have access to all the older videos that I had to delete and if you support.

Me with $5 or more you will get your name at the end as you see here.