The Density doesnt really correlate with properties like hardness. Thats because density is mostly affected by the mass of the atomcores, while hardness is mainly affected by the bonds.
You shouldn't be looking directly at the burning magnesium. It produces intense UV light in addition to visible light, so you can damage your retinas looking at it.
@@bartolomeothesatyr Welding metals too. my buddy welded on an exhaust for his car using the look-squint method and was only wearing a t-shirt. he survived the spalling, but he had the worst sunburn on his face and arms I'd ever seen.
@@dumpsterdave3710 If you are saying that to correct them they were right that it would damage the retina not the cornea. It could potentially cause scarring of the retina. That's essentially what the photocoagulation laser does to my eyes when I get treatment for diabetic retinopathy.
In the 1980's working at British Nuclear Fuels the fuel rods were made from magnesium. On bonfire night they would fill an aluminium dustbin with the swarf and light it. I remember vividly seeing the shadow outline of the crowd on houses 100m away. Way brighter than daylight in a full field and so white.
@Beuatifulsmall we also had to great bonfires when I was a kid, a large piece of Magnesium sheet ended up on it, it lit up the whole nounhood when there was a gust of wind. 🙂they also reprocessed the nuclear fuel rod casings, I think we had one a cloths prop for many years! ( see comment above).
Congratulations, the.. "white" light is UV light so intense it completely overwhelms any optical sensors. Camera as well as eyes, to see the true colour of a magnesium flame you'd need one of these temperature cameras that create an image not by light emission sensors but an radiation intensity sensory array and translating it into human-conceivable colours by shifting it into a spectrum the human body can sense (like shifting up or down audio tone pitch to make it comprehensible to the human ear by bringing it inside of the human hearing range and does NOT mean, that it's that colour or pitch in real life.. Colours are an illusion anyway. It's all more or less colourless, but due to different light refraction properties of certain materials and surfaces. When you're adding colouring to something, you're not changing the thing, but the way its surface manages to refract light. Without our eyes, everything is grey, "Eigengrau". The "static interference" in our optical nerves humans and therefore silence used to call "black" but actually is a mix of all the different RGB sensors in our retina glitching out uncontrollably but still homogeneously.. except for when you're high and your mind's pattern recognition feature is basically super- and turbocharged with weed, on Nitro with Shrooms and on TopFuel with LSD, having you imagining vague, random outlines and shadows of things in the static.. no matter if the eyes are open or closed. It's a software-problem more than it is a hardware one, so except for filtering the light input in general, like in sunnies or selectively by frequency, like torch hoods, is only semi possible. It's ike the analogue TV static, just in 240k.. 😅 Sorry, I'm more of a car/microbiology nerd than anything else. 🤪
Metals plastically deform by forming and moving imperfections called dislocations around the crystal lattices of the metal. The crystal structure of magnesium is hexagonal close packed (HCP). HCP metals tend to fracture like you saw because there is a direction in the crystal lattice in which it is very difficult for the dislocations to move, so the material will shatter instead of moving as you hammer it.
In geology/gemology I'd call this Conchoidal fracture. Seashell like/scalloped. i noticed the dude's really shiny piece looked a lot like an arrowhead. Obsidian/flint/chert/agate are non/micro-crystalline silicon oxide Quartz that also has hexagonal structure. makes me wonder if you cooled Magnesium very slowly could you get a large single crystal like a quartz or sapphire tip.
@@Roadiedave which makes me wonder what happens if you quench it. Since it's so densely packed it probably won't do a lot, but if there's a reaction I expect it to be violent.
A friend was at the Isle of Man TT in the early 80s. He described how one of the bikes had crashed (nothing new there at a TT) and then ignited and BURNED. Emergency services were dousing it continually in streams of water for more than 20 minutes with no observable effect as a very expensive bike with a very high magnesium content frame burned down to a small puddle of liquid metal & finally went out.
A guy and his wife from England live next to us in their duplex in North vancouver. He was a falconer when he was in England but couldn't do it here in Canada because of the sheer number of regulations made it virtually impossible. And that included a scrapbook with various feathers from his Birds over the years very illegal. But he also was a salesperson technical support for a brake manufacturer in England and he describes some of the accidents at Isle of Man. One of the worst ones is this chicane where somebody's wall has been run into so many times by out of control bikers that he didn't bother to rebuild it
Honda made a Formula 1 car with a magnesium body called the RA302. Their usual driver, John Surtees, refused (wisely) to drive the car on safety grounds. They put a substitute driver, Jo Schlesser, in the car for the 1968 French Grand Prix at Rouen Les Essart. There was a crash at the six brothers turn and the car ignited and Schlesser was killed. Quite an unfortunate, and worst of all, unnecessary incident.
When forging magnesium, you have a one heat one strike opportunity. If you mess up the heat, it burns. If you mess up the strike, it burns. You need to put it directly into a press with a mold. Heat it, and then press it into the shape of the mold. Do not miss.
It's driving me crazy the masses keep saying magnesium is flammable, so is potassium but you don't see people avoiding bananas. The purity of the metal matters and no one with a brain is going to work a non alloyed magnesium metal period.
I, too, would have my temp set way too low if the alternative was risking a bar of metal that spontaneously combusted into a fire three times hotter than a campfire that is near impossible to extinguish.
My car has forged magnesium wheels, it’s certainly doable, just not in a garage shop as it has to be done in proper atmosphere and the product has to be passivated with special coatings to prevent ignition in an accident.
This video is so cool to see since I work with these alloys on a daily basis, casting, extruding, etc. I work at a company that specialises in magnesium production here in the UK for all kinds of industries. We make the alloys mentioned in this video such as WE54 and Elektron as well as dozens of other alloys. We've made stuff for Porsche, Ferrari, Honda, and even the apache helicopter uses our alloys. And Alec you're right this material is incredibly difficult to work with and is incredibly dangerous but I really enjoy working with it. We need to use cover gas at all times to keep magnesium from oxidizing when heated, otherwise magnesium oxide gets in and you end up with crap material that lacks the properties required. Basically if you don't want something to oxidise, just take away the oxygen!
If forging magnesium - heat it using inductive heating in an inert atmosphere and also forge it in an inert atmosphere. Burning magnesium is normally extinguished with special salts or dry sand, a D class fire extinguisher designated for magnesium would be preferred. Water can cause oxyhydrogen gas to be created and make things worse.
Technically, you can use gasoline or any hydrocarbon based fuels as they don't contain oxygen in their molecule, so it would turn from a metal fire to an oil fire which is easier to handle.
@@drthmik if you're only burning a couple ounces of magnesium, it will consume itself pretty quickly. After that you just have a regular fire to deal with.
An interesting fact about magnesium. After WW1 most of Germanys iron industries were seized as reparations. But they were allowed to keep the magnesium plants. Thus they had to specialize in manufacturing with magnesium, the Best way they figured out was with huge presses, because hammer forging often Leads to these kind of cracks Machine thinking has an amazing video on these huge presses
@@AlecSteele After the war America initiated the US Heavy Press Program for cold forging magnesium for the aerospace industry. You need to go see one, they are insane, the largest in the world in Tyson, the 100,000 ton press in Italy, owned by Giva.
Check out the video by MrGreenGuy. Petrol/Gasoline on a magnesium fire will extinguish it without the risk of explosion. If I didn’t have the correct fire extinguisher to hand, I think I’d rather try to starve it of air with sand.
The "Elektron WE54" Alloy is about 91% magnesium. Pure magnesium would be way softer than this alloy here. Magnesium is soft enough to cut it with a knife kinda like wax-like maybe a bit tougher. More reactive as well. Apparently, the Yttriumin in the alloy gives corrosion resistance, meaning less oxidation/rust and harder to burn it. If it were to be pure %99.9 magnesium I doubt you can put it out with just water even if it's small in amount it would explode. If you like to know here are the contents I found for it. Element Content (%) Yttrium, Y 4.75-5.5 Neodymium, Nd 1.5-2 Heavy Rare Earths 1-2 Zirconium, Zr 0.4 Magnesium, Mg Remainder
Yeah I remember playing with some pure magnesium tape I liberated from my high school chemistry lab, and it was quite soft and easy to tear by hand or cut with a knife. And would light on fire quite easily with a butane lighter.
I wondered about that- I've worked with pure sodium and lithium in the chemistry lab, and my impression was pure magnesium was similar: soft enough to cut and shape with a spatula, and reactive enough that it + water = fire
Had a 125cc two stroke motorcycle called a Cagiva Mito that utilised magnesium extensively in it's construction. It's power to weight ratio was such that it could exceed 100mph, crazy for a bike that size, it was pure joy, I highly recommend taking one for a spin if you ever get the chance.
@@mitchdabeast_2103it was a two stroke, there's been several 125cc two strokes that made 100 The real issue with 125s hitting 100 is that they're legalled limited to ~15 bhp now for CBT/European laws They can (probably) make 125s that push 25-30 bhp on four stroke now, but the law (and the lack of a 125cc racing class, with moto3 moving to 250cc ) means that it's not worth the effort to develop
@@gibbogle Thanks' for the correction, but even in that regard the bike did 0 to 60mph in 5 to 6 seconds with an engine the size of a can of baked beans.
It filed worse because it filled the chip reliefs more. The saw has significantly larger spaces after the cutting edges that don't get loaded up as easily.
My favorite thing about magnesium, is that it does both heat and cold. Chips burn very hot, but a bloc transfer heat very very quick, and that makes feel cool to the touch. Love it.
Materials Scientist here: Magnesium and its alloys were quite big before and during WW2 specifically in Germany. That was because Bauxit, the mineral from which Aluminium is synthesized, couldn’t be mined and bought by the German Government. Magnesium was seen as the alternative and in fact, Germany became the leading country in Magnesium research, production and processing having its center in Bitterfeld - Magnesium was known as the „German Metal“. After the war, a lot of knowledge was destroyed and lost (some estimate a 60-year-set-back) and researchers are still catching up in a few areas of research. A lot of what was left went to the UK in the form of Magnesium Elektron (today known as Luxfer MEL). The material WE54 (W = Yttrium (5 wt%) and E = Rare Earth (4 wt%) like Neodymium, Gadolinium etc.) is one of the alloys developed in Bitterfeld for high temperature usage. Magnesium and most of its alloys have a hexagonal closed packed (hcp) crystal structure with a c/a ratio close to ideal. This means that there is only a limited number of glide systems for dislocations (less than 5 independent ones at ambient), resulting in a very limited formability and forgability as you demonstrated here! I was somewhat surprised that at higher T, the forgability is also quite low, as at high T more glide systems become active in theory. However, Magnesium has a low heat capacity meaning it looses temperature quite quickly. Due to its low ability to deform uniformly and without breaking, parts from Magnesium are mostly produced by casting like high pressure die casting.
Do Bismuth next. It is a REALLY pretty metal and forms cool shapes when heated and worked with, and will throw Jamie's idea of all metal being grey out the window!
The colors of bismuth are from the oxide layer, but only when it has a specific thickness (called thin film interference). The metal itself is grey. Copper and gold are the only elemental metals with strong colors. Though cesium is a silvery-golden color, and osmium has a slight blue hue. Most metals are silver to grey. Everything else is either an alloy, has colored oxides, or the color is from oxide thin film interference.
Can't really do bismuth easily because of its low melting point, I think. Also, it's extremely brittle. I can tell you right away one hammer blow will be a shower of pieces.
@@MostlyPennyCat Gold is gold color. If anyone said it's red without an oxide layer or something, that's just not true. Like the old myth kids in school pass around that your blood is blue until it touches air
Not just that, but Tig welding was originally developed for welding magnesium. Specifically, it was for a prototype fighter for the US, the XP-56. Some of the really old dudes in welding still call it heliarc.
The shop called 'The Guild of Automotive Restorers'(a bit pretentious, but, frankly, it's fitting for the work they do lol) built a 'replica-restoration'(for lack of a better term) of a 'lost' magnesium bodied 1930s Bugatti. Absolutely incredible work, apparently it took them quite a while to get down the process for welding thin magnesium sheet metal. I believe Jay Leno covered the car on his YT channel, look for 'Bugatti Aérolithe'. It's a fascinating story of a concept car that was shown once or twice in the '30s then lost(thus far), and The Guild started with an original Bugatti rolling chassis and recreated the magnesium body from scratch based on pictures. Their work is second to none.
you can put out a magnesium fire with gasoline. the gasoline burns at a lower temperature and eats up all the oxygen, putting out the magnesium. Then you just have to out out the gasoline fire.
There was a titanium plant near me. Some time ago, they had a fire catch in a barrel of titanium milling chips, and the two guys nearby panicked and forgot their safety training. Instead of following procedure, they dumped a bucket of water on the fire to douse it. The resulting explosion lifted the roof off the building and shattered windows half a mile away. There were empty casket funerals, as there weren't even dental remnants remaining of the two millworkers.
@@amogusenjoyernot really. We’re so used to things operating as they are intended to that we forget the incredible power that we have harnessed. A gallon of gasoline can move you around 20 miles, but atomized it can level a small building.
A common camping tool is a magnesium rod, which is essentially a chunk of magnesium connected to a striking surface. You shave off pieces with a camp knife and then use the flint to strike a spark that you use to light the magnesium to start a fire. Very flammable, but also soft enough to shave with a standard camp knife.
Ford Kuga cars in South Africa were recalled when the they started catching fire and the magnesium chassis would burn and essentially be unable to put out.
Another common form of magnesium fire starter is basically a ziplock bag full of chips/shavings. You can light those with a match and they'll get your fire going.
@Rosewayforge Ferrocerium is used in lighters to strike the flame, it can be used as a firestarter but the thing they're talking about here is a piece of magnesium that you scape bits off of to use in place of kindling, to start fires even if it's wet.
Titanium and Magnesium need lots of pressure to forge - the USAF sponsored 50,000 ton presses to work these metals and their alloys for plane parts. The Germans used presses up to 30,000 tons during WW2 for Magnesium plane parts.
ive see a lot of footage from when they were making the wooden planes. saw a lot of "factories" from ww2. I've got to go back and look at the plane factories. My grandmother built tank parts for the Bendix corp in Iowa. some wild stories from her time, i was a welder too for a short time. My grand mother and great grandma were 5,1 and would do all the out of position welds. How they both lived to 90 is crazy to me as they used no respirators and the saftey was on par with 3rd world countries standards today. she took more than one person off an electrified environment. they had wooden hooks and 2x4s everywhere they had power running.
For you to remember the conversions 100 Celsius is about 212 farenheight. Despite being and living in america I actually like celcius. The conversion from Celsius to farenheight is F = C x 1.8 + 32. And to convert from farenheight to celcius its C = (F - 32) / 1.8
The Convair B-36 Peacemaker, a holder of many records had an airframe consisting of a lot of magnesium. This massive plane (230 ft wingspan, the longest of any military aircraft ever) had no fewer than 10 engines, 6 piston and 4 jets. The piston engines were of a pusher design, meaning they were at the back of the wing. This lead to several issues, as the carburator did not have proper heating, leading to carburator icing, which caused the engine to overheat and catch fire. While the B-36 had a solid saftey record for the time, crashes are inevitable, and the magnesium airframe burned very easily. It also was a nuclear bomber, and these problems did lead to a few broken arrow incidents. (Sry for the yapping, its just i like planes and magnesium is involved in the b-36 and the video) Sry
The deterrent system at the time was such too that a portion of the fleet were meant to be in air at all times so they did rack up flight time fast. Its a cool project, with the later modification of additional jet engines and all.
You can put out a magnesium fire. You need a special kind of dry chemical fire extinguisher designed for metal fires (class D), a lot of dry sand, or you need to replace the air with argon or an another inert gas (magnesium will burn in nitrogen too). Halon doesn't work BTW. Magnesium does not oxidize itself. But it will separate the oxygen from water and continue to burn, while producing flammable hydrogen gas. It's also an exothermic reaction (produces heat) that reacts faster as the temperature increases, causing a positive feedback loop and runaway reaction.
Had an 02 BMW M3, the engine(S54) is made of a magnesium alloy, had to break out a the tap and die set, and... pain. But had a good bit of metal shreds after cleaning up,and my dad wanted to show me a neat trick with getting rid of certain metal shavings, and turned a oxygen gas torch on the pile, after seeing it go up, made me very happy we cleaned up after rethreading some stuff on that engine block.
As a physicist and a chemist: No, the density of a material has nothing to do with any other characteristic (hardness, colour, how it will behave in a forge, etc). And even if you have just one material, you may have different "versions" of it, which may have widely different characteristics. Take Carbon for example: If you burn stuff like wood or coal, you get soot on your furnace. This soot is basically just carbon, really soft, black, basically no structural integrity. However, if you take this soot and put it into an environment with really high temperatures and incredible pressures, you get diamonds: The hardest material we know of and transparent. If we go back to metals: Remember tungsten? Really hard, heavy, incredibly high melting point. Now let's move a few steps to a theoretically similar metal: Quicksilver. Also really heavy, a liquid at room temperature and thus quite soft. (I have now information of how frozen quicksilver behaves). I could explain to you why it is like this, but not in form a youtube comment. And as a fellow blacksmith: Always think about the oxygen, when you work with hot metals: Of course you can tig weld, because you work with protection gas, which prohibits any oxide layer or fire. If you would have a method to both heat and work your metal in an protection gas atmosphere, you could use higher temperatures, which would make the metal softer and less likely to form cracks. But that is a lot of effort for next to no benefit.
@@Corvinus_swe I'm not sure that's really comparable... Mercury is liquid because it has a very low melting point. That being said, I'm unsure of the hardness of mercury in its solid state.
Magnesium rims are rolled at WAY more than 400°C. If the oven is 400°C, the billet inside isn't necessarily. Magnesium forgings are usually die forgings with large hydraulic presses. Not so much impact forging. I haven't seen drophammer forging of Mg yet. It may also be a thing, but I don't know it.
A decent rule of thumb to determine if a metal is malleable is to look at the crystal structure. Hexagonal close packed (HCP) is typically brittle, face-centered cublic (FCC) is typically very malleable, and body-center cubic (BCC) is usually in between the other two structures. Magnesium is HCP hence the cracking and chipping when forging. Aluminum is FCC. Steel is BCC at room temoerature, but at forging temperatures, it transitions into FCC, giving it better malleability.
I did an apprenticeship at an aerospace firm. Whenever working on magnesium, you had to have the fire cart next to the machine. That was basically a huge fry powder fire extinguisher with a long lance nozzle.
It seems like the cracking happened cause of the heat not being consistent through the whole piece. Since the core of the metal was starting out colder than the surrounding material you ended up getting internal stress in the metal. Induction heating would have given you a more even heat through the whole piece and a better chance to produce the shapes you wanted without cracking.
As a scientist: No, density is not directly related to hardness. An example would be lead, very dense but not hard at all. The hardness of a material is mainly related to the type of bonds that hold the material together (covalent bonds or ionic bonds, for example) and, in the case of metals, the material composition and the associated structure of the crystal lattice.
My father used to tell me the story of where he worked in the 1950s, they had a huge machine shop doing lots of military contracts at the height of the Cold War. As a "Safety Lesson" they took a month's worth of magnesium shavings from all the lathes (he mentioned it was about a train car full) piled at one end of the parking lot and lit it up, burning 6 feet (almost 2 meters) through the asphalt, dirt, and stone. I'm sure they were very careful after that...
Magnesium work hardens like aluminum but is very brittle. The forging of magnesium is not usually forged as it is not an easy to work with metal. It is usually either cast or machined to shape.
The first rudimentary camera flash was just a small plank with a bit of magnesium powder on it that that the photographer would burn while taking the picture because it burnt so quickly and brightly
Firefighter here, when I was young we responded to a shop fire of a guy that liked to restore old VW bugs. He said he had about 8 old magnesium engine blocks in there. We stood back and just kept the fire from spreading. Wasn't any hope of us wasting time trying to put the shop out and saving anything with the supplies a backwood volunteer fire dept had (water). The dumb old coot found a dumber lawyer to try to sue us because we didn't try to spray water on it and save anything. Our lawyer had them both laughed out of the court room. Last I heard his insurance refused to cover anything because he never disclosed all the "dangrous" mag engine blocks he had stored together in a small space.
Play stupid games - win stupid prizes, I guess. I watch a guy, who is RC/jets/automotive enthusiast, and he is building his own formula-something car (a really small class, though IDK which one, I guess he will use it just like a track car) from scratch. Every time he is working with magnesium (turning wheels, for example), he clears the working area, has cement floor + brick walls, and does so like it is the last thing he is doing at his shop. Also some salt, but he doesn't believe it is reasonable to use because you need to get close to put salt on it, and specialized salt fire extinguisher is quiet expensive. He got something like two or three magnesium fires, but because of preciouses and awareness it just kept burning in a lathe tray without damaging anything each time. And a long ventilation needed, because of the smoke.
@@Llyd_ApDicta first of all, sand is a bad idea - magnesium is so insane, it mogs silicon of oxygen and burns this way) Second - bulk Mg alloys are fine, chips are dangerous. Pure magnesium is pretty wild and could be dangerous even in bulk (though usually it is still ok if you are careful), but alloys are much more tame.
Chevy pickups often have magnesium steering columns. Copious amounts of water do extinguish them, and the fireworks are amazing, but don't be too close because they will ruin fire gear.
C->F is 1.8(C) + 32. F -> C is (F-32)/2 then subtract 1/10 of that from itself. Yes, you can do multiply 9 divide 5, or whatever way you want, but that’s the easiest I’ve found for me to get to Celsius from Fahrenheit.
if you put a magnesium bar in vacuum chamber at a few hundred c it sublimate super fast and basically turns into swiss cheese . god that was a mess to clean
@@nikkiofthevalley neither did we at the time we were trying to just melt it and cast it. and were like hey if we do it in vacuum there no air so it can't burn. but never got it to melt it sublimated away to fast. coated the inside of the chamber with like 1kg of the stuff took several days hunched over in that chamber scrubbing the walls with acid and water
2:47 Diamonds, quartz crystals, silica carbide grinding disks are an order of magnitude lighter than any steel, yet scratch and cut the steel. And steel is harder than lead, which is much denser. Hardness is not a property of mass but atomic bonds that form crystal structure. When you heat treat steel, you are editing these bonds until the hardness is suitable.
We used to machine magnesium castings on a CNC lathe and the only thing to extinguish the swarf, well smother it, was a very finely powdered baking soda. We had to clean the swarf every 30 parts or so, depending on how big they were, as they almost wrote off a £180,000 machine as the heat melted the switch gear and wiring looms, it cost £120,000 to fix it. It was a Boley BDN160. Gaz UK
@@user-gy7dx8qx3n #1 Providing relevant and important info, even years after the fact, is still plenty useful to many who may come across it. #2 Still doesn't matter if it was in the past for Alec. If he didn't learn about it inbetween the time of filming and publishing, he's providing Alec that relevant info. Even *_IF_* Alec doesn't plan to forge anything out of magnesium, that doesn't mean he won't _fabricate_ with it and end up with more chips that he might goof around with by burning again. Never knock someone's efforts in sharing knowledge. 😉👍
Lol! Burning magnesium was an experiment in chemistry sets when I was young. I burned magnesium when I was 8 years old, it's harmless and is no brighter than a bright torch.
@@guyincognito. Children's science kits came with uranium once upon a time as well, so your anecdote falls short. Even moreso with a few seconds of research... _Yes, burning magnesium can hurt your eyes:_ *_Ultraviolet light:_* The white light emitted by burning magnesium contains ultraviolet (UV) light *that can permanently damage your eyes.*_ _If you're working with magnesium, you should: Wear safety glasses with UV filters, similar to what welders use._ _-Sit at least 2-3 meters away from the flame_ _-Avoid looking directly at the burning magnesium_ _-Observe from the side using your peripheral vision_ I could also mention all the things that were easily obtainable in the late-1800s early-1900s for ailments or weight loss... but I'm certain YT's autoKaren system would remove it, so I won't bother. 😏
@@guyincognito. Children's science kits came with ☢️ ore once upon a time as well, so your anecdote falls short. Even moreso with a few seconds of research... _Yes, burning magnesium can hurt your eyes:_ *_Ultraviolet light:_* The white light emitted by burning magnesium contains ultraviolet (UV) light *that can permanently damage your eyes.*_ _If you're working with magnesium, you should: Wear safety glasses with UV filters, similar to what welders use._ _-Sit at least 2-3 meters away from the flame_ _-Avoid looking directly at the burning magnesium_ _-Observe from the side using your peripheral vision_ I could also mention all the things that were easily obtainable in the late-1800s early-1900s for ailments or weight loss... but I'm certain YT's autoKaren system would remove it, so I won't bother. _(just as it did on the first attempt at posting this comment, due to the U-word I used before replacing it with ☢️)_
Table salt for magnesium fires. The specialised fire-extinguishers (Class D if memory serves) for metal-fires (lithium, magnesium, titanium) usually sport either that or some other (really well dried) salt with no oxygen atoms in its molecule. The salt melts, coats the metal fire and strips it of contact with oxygen. Avoid baking soda (usual powder fire-extinguishers have that in them) or water, because the heat strips the oxygen clean off the molecule and you just fed live oxygen to the metal fire. And yes, table salt is hygroscopic so it will have some water from the moisture found in air so if you want, you could bake-dry some plain table salt and keep it in an airtight container for emergencies if you indend to machine spooky metals. Or just spend a couple of thousand pounds on a proper class-D fire extinguisher. And one more thing... AluMag powder (mix of alluminium and magnesium) was used in some unstable homemade thermite or explosive or something, I cannot quite remember, but shavings of those two together might be particularely hazardous. Source: trust me bro. (so do double-check) Please, do more fancy metals sometime! 🦾
I was curious about the alloys, so I looked up the composition. Both are >90% magnesium: ZK60A: 5% zinc 0.5% zirconium WE54: 5% yttrium 2% neodymium 0.5% zirconium 2% random heavy rare earth metals
Remember being a Ford tech and we had a Ford Mondeo come in, had some electrical gremlin and ended up having a hard short on the block, the block was made from magnesium, once it started we just had to sit back and watch it, even when the fire team showed up, they just isolated it and let it burn too.
I’m not a scientist but I think something’s ability to be cut is more based on that material’s covalent bonds rather than the density of the atoms. Lead for instance is much denser than steel but because it has weaker covalent bonds, the atoms can be pulled apart from one another easier.
Density does change as the atoms get closer together, thats why nuetron star matter is the densest matter in the universe prior to black holes. But Density can also be effected by the mass of the atoms themselves. That same Nuetron Star Matter is basically a singular large atom made solely of nuetrons. Magnesium isn't less dense because it has less atoms, its just that the atoms themselves are less dense, each carrying less mass than Fe, or Iron, Atoms.
That explaination of density was right, if you substituted it with the right words - denser metals aren't heavier because they're more packed together, they're denser because the atoms themselves are physically heavier with all the extra protons, neutrons, and electrons they have.
If that was the totality of the reason, density and the periodic table would be an exact match, the higher on the table the denser the material. Which is not the case. Molecular density, the amount of molecules (well, it's a metal, but still) in a certain volume also plays a part. Or am I mistaken? It's been 15 years since my last chemistry lesson, lol. Metals could be an exception due to the lattice structure.
@@Elechte this is very true, especially when talking about gasses and such, thank you for adding that on, altho a correlation mass and density is mostly true in the cases of metals. The reason why it wouldn't line up exactly when comparing it directly to the periodic table is because the masses you see are an approximate average of all of the isotopes of an element. Its also why copper and chlorine might have their masses rounded to the first decimal point while the rest have theirs rounded to the nearest whole number, despite the fact that the most common isotopes of the two elements have whole number masses. (Edit: finishing a sentence I forgot to complete)
Metallurgic engineer here. When I was studying Uni, I had this crazy but brilliant teacher wanted us the students to make an alloy of Lead-Magnesium, (Pb-Mg). Obviously the lead melt down first and because of Mg density it didn’t went into the alloy properly, then it started reacting with the air around so we start having like fireworks on a little oven/ forge at the Public Uni at Mexico. A mess, but my teacher quickly took it out (using safety equipment obviously) at control the situation like a pro 😮. The best lessons in the world ever 🤣
I worked at what was at one time the largest Magnesium extrusion plant in the world. Wasn't that big, but we were one of the only ones, so... I'm here to tell you, controlled Magnesium fires are a blast. I'd collect saw dust off my band saw for a week before going camping. While UNCONTROLLED Mag fires are a nightmare. Years before working there, my dad was a crew leader when a welder repairing our fence started a fire in the yard. An errant spark is all it takes. Stacks and stacks of product in bins and stacks of banded Mag round Billet, picture 20-35 foot logs between 7" and maybe 15" diameter, all caught fire. The fire dept shows up, has no idea what a Magnesium fire entails and starts setting up their water hoses. Words and punches were thrown trying to save those firemen's lives. Water and burning Magnesium do not play nicely. Burned holes straight through a 30" of concrete slab and spread some very noctouse fumes around Aurora CO.
Magnesium carbonate is what is used as a laxative not the metal also it is use on some sports and claiming on your hands, as it pics moister very well.
Magnesium Hydroxide is another variant. It starts as an anti-acid, reacts with gastric acid to become magnesium chloride (+water) which is the actual laxative.
Years ago some roommates and I put a magnesium transmission in a campfire at the river one night. After about an hour it was just glowing white. For fun we chucked rocks at it and made some super cool white sparks fly off it. Eventually the rocks just punched thru it and it fell apart. Only took about another 45 minutes for it to turn into a greyish clump.
Back in high school chemistry class, we were doing an experiment with magnesium ribbon and HCl. I mentioned to my lab partner, Joe, "I wonder if that burns," while looking at the spool of ribbon. Into the bunsen burner the end went, and burn it did. He dropped it in the sink and proceeded to melt a nice channel in the porcelain. I can still see Mr. Geiken standing there with arms crossed saying, "Joe, Joe, Joe..."
You’d love where most of my family worked, the Wyman Gordon facility in Worcester, MA. They have a 50,000 ton forging press that was predominantly used to forge magnesium alloy components for aircraft and such.
my grandpa was one of the first people to use magnesium in his race car frame WAY back in the early days of the north american racing circuits. he was a drag racing pioneer!
For what it's worth, I worked at a grey iron foundry in the US and we used Celsius there too (green sand using a DISAMATIC). I think it's fine once you go past a few hundred degrees in either system it starts to get kind of abstract and you should just stick with one system.
We used magnesium engravings to make rubber printing plates. I took some old ones rolled up a piece 1" wide and a few inches long. Placed it in an old brass ashtray and lit it, once it was going good I hit it with the garden hose. It exploded impressively, throwing burning white chunks about. It burned right through the brass ashtray too. I am told old VW engine blocks could catch fire and the fire department would just let them burn because of that. I just watched a video and magnesium dust can be used to make a type of flash powder for fireworks.
PSA: Please, do not stare at burning magnesium without eye protection like a welding mask; you can burn your retinas very easily doing what this guy was doing at 4:50
Magnesium is very useful in pyrotechnics. A friend of mine gave me a piece of SU24 aircraft wheel rim. Which is made out of magnesium alloy . I used to file it down to get the fine powder and make flash powder or firecrackers out of it. I also did cut it out and melted it with Aluminium in 1:1 ratio to make very brittle Magnalium alloy,which is very easy to crush into finer powder and useful in pyrotechnics. But stuff is very dangerous to melt alone, it sparks and burns by itself,so that you have to melt aluminum first then add Magnesium into molten aluminium with constant stirring. To get the alloy, you have to pour molten alloy into bucket of water ro immediately cool down, otherwise all of the Magnesium will burn out leaving only Aluminium behind
@scarecrowforge Calcium is a grey-silver element. Bismuth is also a silvery grey, but when oxidized it displays a wide range of colors. However, those colors are from the oxide layers of varying thickness. The metal itself doesn’t have those colors. The oxide layers of titanium, iron, and others display that same property (thin film interference). Brass, and bronze are of course alloys that get their colors from the copper that makes up the majority of the mixture. So, there aren’t many elemental metals that aren’t silver, or grey. Just copper, gold, and cesium. Osmium does have a slight blue hue though.
You can actually put out most metal fires pretty easily with powdered table salt (sodium chloride) or baking soda, so if you ever work with other flammable metals, I’d recommend having a few pounds on hand.
@@hammerth1421 Sand also works great, but the reason they use salt commercially is that when the salt melts when it contacts the molten metal, it makes a crust around it and prevents oxygen from getting to it and re-igniting. Though, sand more than likely would work just fine for a smaller fire. There’s actually specific fire extinguishers for metal fires that are just pressurized tanks of super fine salt and/or soda that firefighters and certain labs use. They’re also like $6 grand if I remember right, which is kind of crazy if you think about it.
The extra fun part of magnesium fires in your workshop is that it burns hot enough to start an aluminium + iron oxide thermite reaction which is self oxidizing and burns at 2862c. Good thing there isn't a bunch of aluminium and iron dust around.
also, Copper - Has a reddish-orange color. Brass - An alloy of copper and zinc, with a yellowish-golden color. Bronze - An alloy primarily of copper and tin, with a brownish or reddish-brown color. Caesium - Appears as a pale gold color. Bismuth - Can have a rainbow-like iridescent oxide layer that gives it various colors, but pure bismuth itself has a silvery white color with a hint of pink. Rhodium - Often appears silvery but has a reflective, mirror-like finish which can sometimes give off a bluish hue. Osmium - While generally grey, it has a bluish tint.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but the likely reason behind the magnesium appearing harder to file is that because it is less dense, it’ll actually clog up the teeth on the file at a faster rate. So similar to how putting aluminium on a grindstone would clog up the abrasive surface 😊 (before anyone says anything, no I would not use a grindstone with aluminium)
I used to repair alloy wheels, we were always told to beware Magnesium wheel because they were made for a small period of time and if heated up to straighten or repair you would burn the shop down.
At sea level, 0 C water freezes and 100 C water boils. 20 to 25 C is nice temp, 30C sucks. It's pretty easy. Freedomheit is all over the place, 33 F, 212 F, 68 to 77 F and 86 F respectively. You should put the kiln next to the power hammer so you don't run around with hot metal in the shop.
If memory serves, Fahrenheit was designed using the thermal properties of brine (don't recall the concentration). Thus it correlates decently to human temps in whole numbers (since humans are mostly saltwater). However, beyond that bit, it doesn't scale terribly well, which if you're doing science, you very much want. Celsius was designed around pure water, so the 'human ranges' are smaller, but its very scalable, making it more useful for most other applications. Fun fact: due to technical limitations, 100F used to be the standard internal human body temp. Once thermometers got better, we realized that its closer to 98.6F; however it seems to possibly be dropping slightly in the modern age.
The easiest answer to the correlation between density and hardness is that gold and lead exist. The longer answer is that there is some relation between density, stiffness (Young's modulus), and even melting point to some extent. If you multiply the density in g/cm^3 by 26.7 you roughly get Young's modulus in GPa... for magnesium, aluminum, titanium, manganese, and iron. Most other metals will be way lower. Beryllium and chromium are actually way above.
Hi dude I think might have mixed table saw blade and hand saw blade. Table saw blade have carbide teeth but regular hand saw are only hardened steel and just the tooth is hardened nothing else. Havé a Nice day
@@Matt-ns2ty i wasnt mixing it up, as far as i know hand saws used to be just regular steel and you used to sharpen them several times to extend their life cycle now they are made from a harder material which i thought was carbide which you cant really sharpen, it doesnt have as long of a life cycle as the old style but last longer now that we dont really do our own sharpening anymore and would have to ship them to a sharpener If i got that wrong thats on me
@@bjornthorgudmundsson2781 the thing is they are both hardened steel but old saw were hardened completely and heated again to be sharpenable. New saws are impulse hardened which means if I'm not mistaken that they use a high voltage on the teeth to heat it up and harden but the rest of the saw is not hardened at all. So the teeth are just as hard as a file but the back should be much softer.
wow, lil Alec steele is growing up! I only tune in from time to time. Im one of those 'I preferred the old vides' guys. I remember you at Baker Street Forge, and now wow, looking much much older.
Apparently, when it was first discovered, it was named Aluminum, as Americans like to pronounce it. But everywhere else, Aluminium was adopted because it was more in keeping with all the other elements ending in “ium”
@@sullenpuffinAs an American, I love the correctness of keeping with -ium. Literally it makes more phonetic sense when compared to metals such as: Titanium, Rubidium, Thallium, Lithium, Cadmium, Radium, and my favorite, Osmium, to name a FEW. Ending in -um just doesn't fit for me 😂
Fahrenheit is like a percentage of hot to a human 0F? "I'm freezing me bollocks off!" 100F? "I'm sweating me bollocks off!" 0C? "The water is freezing..." 100C? "The water is boiling..." they both have uses, but one is useful for knowing the survivability of people, the other for the stability of liquid water
Celsius works well for measuring temperature in a way that's easy to work with, like for cooking or scientific instruments. Fahrenheit works well for measuring temperature of an environment that people live in.
@nikkiofthevalley I don't think it is, it's more convenient for us because we grew up with it and then people are trying to intellectualize why it should be more convenient even though the other one works so much better, and we're kind of inclined to believe it because the part about metric measurements being inconvenient for us hits close to home. I don't think 0 to 100 degrees are useful for relating to the human body, 100° being almost body temperature is literally all it has going for it, ok good job gold star now what is the f*** is a degree Fahrenheit? Actually I'm going to look that up it probably is something, but I know a degrees Celsius relates to how much energy it takes to get a square centimeter of water to boil at atmospheric pressure based on BTUs which are based on candles Sounds pretty human-centric to me. Looked it up and it's based on An 50/50 ice Salt mixture what the heII does that have to do with humans or anything? Let's just get rid of Fahrenheit and we can make a new thing called degrees Nikkio where 100 degrees Nikkio is the actual temperature of the human body (because Fahrenheit got that wrong) and then we just use degrees Celsius as the units.
Can you do a video on all the safety equipment you use? What do you look for? What materials do you use? What kind of respirators do you use? How do you make sure you still have hair?
2:10 I'm not 100% sure but i don't think density and hardness are very strongly correlated. Gold and Tungsten have very similar density, but very different hardnesses. I suspect it's got more to do with melting point, since iirc germanium can be chewed like bubble gum due to its low melting point and i supposed mercury is a liquid so would be "soft"
The Density doesnt really correlate with properties like hardness. Thats because density is mostly affected by the mass of the atomcores, while hardness is mainly affected by the bonds.
indeed, look at at metals like gold and lead which are famously dense... and famously soft
Best example would be charcoal and diamond, both are carbon but one is very much harder to work with than the other
@@ClawsOfAFreak i mean yes, but we were talking about metals specifically because the topic was forging
...and crystal structure.
@@ZoonCrypticon And imperfections within that structure, as the cracks from working the magnesium to hard illustrated
You shouldn't be looking directly at the burning magnesium. It produces intense UV light in addition to visible light, so you can damage your retinas looking at it.
good thing I lowered my screen brightness 😎
*corneas
Bump for visibility. Never look directly at burning magnesium fires without UV protection.
@@bartolomeothesatyr Welding metals too. my buddy welded on an exhaust for his car using the look-squint method and was only wearing a t-shirt. he survived the spalling, but he had the worst sunburn on his face and arms I'd ever seen.
@@dumpsterdave3710 If you are saying that to correct them they were right that it would damage the retina not the cornea. It could potentially cause scarring of the retina. That's essentially what the photocoagulation laser does to my eyes when I get treatment for diabetic retinopathy.
In the 1980's working at British Nuclear Fuels the fuel rods were made from magnesium. On bonfire night they would fill an aluminium dustbin with the swarf and light it. I remember vividly seeing the shadow outline of the crowd on houses 100m away. Way brighter than daylight in a full field and so white.
@Beuatifulsmall we also had to great bonfires when I was a kid, a large piece of Magnesium sheet ended up on it, it lit up the whole nounhood when there was a gust of wind. 🙂they also reprocessed the nuclear fuel rod casings, I think we had one a cloths prop for many years! ( see comment above).
Congratulations, the.. "white" light is UV light so intense it completely overwhelms any optical sensors. Camera as well as eyes, to see the true colour of a magnesium flame you'd need one of these temperature cameras that create an image not by light emission sensors but an radiation intensity sensory array and translating it into human-conceivable colours by shifting it into a spectrum the human body can sense (like shifting up or down audio tone pitch to make it comprehensible to the human ear by bringing it inside of the human hearing range and does NOT mean, that it's that colour or pitch in real life.. Colours are an illusion anyway. It's all more or less colourless, but due to different light refraction properties of certain materials and surfaces. When you're adding colouring to something, you're not changing the thing, but the way its surface manages to refract light. Without our eyes, everything is grey, "Eigengrau". The "static interference" in our optical nerves humans and therefore silence used to call "black" but actually is a mix of all the different RGB sensors in our retina glitching out uncontrollably but still homogeneously.. except for when you're high and your mind's pattern recognition feature is basically super- and turbocharged with weed, on Nitro with Shrooms and on TopFuel with LSD, having you imagining vague, random outlines and shadows of things in the static.. no matter if the eyes are open or closed.
It's a software-problem more than it is a hardware one, so except for filtering the light input in general, like in sunnies or selectively by frequency, like torch hoods, is only semi possible. It's ike the analogue TV static, just in 240k.. 😅
Sorry, I'm more of a car/microbiology nerd than anything else. 🤪
@@HG_Budde👌
@@HG_Budde Never in my life have I seen a more longwinded and rambling comment from anyone other than myself.
@@HG_Budde "UV activates the optical sensors"
any source on that I can read?
0:20 "what metal isnt grey?"... Copper, brass, bronze, gold, to name but 4
Bismuth
ok brass and bronze only because of the copper in it.
Well, Brass and bronze are alloys.
@@bl4cksp1d3r yeah, but they're still metals
@@amyshaw893 They're not pure metals, they're metal alloys.
Metals plastically deform by forming and moving imperfections called dislocations around the crystal lattices of the metal. The crystal structure of magnesium is hexagonal close packed (HCP). HCP metals tend to fracture like you saw because there is a direction in the crystal lattice in which it is very difficult for the dislocations to move, so the material will shatter instead of moving as you hammer it.
I don't know why but metallurgy is just cool.
In geology/gemology I'd call this Conchoidal fracture. Seashell like/scalloped. i noticed the dude's really shiny piece looked a lot like an arrowhead. Obsidian/flint/chert/agate are non/micro-crystalline silicon oxide Quartz that also has hexagonal structure. makes me wonder if you cooled Magnesium very slowly could you get a large single crystal like a quartz or sapphire tip.
@@Roadiedave which makes me wonder what happens if you quench it. Since it's so densely packed it probably won't do a lot, but if there's a reaction I expect it to be violent.
It is possible with titanium/nickel to get single cristal turbine blades, i guess it could also work on magnesium @@Roadiedave
@@bramweinreder2346Magnesium cant be quenched (aluminium cant either)
A friend was at the Isle of Man TT in the early 80s. He described how one of the bikes had crashed (nothing new there at a TT) and then ignited and BURNED. Emergency services were dousing it continually in streams of water for more than 20 minutes with no observable effect as a very expensive bike with a very high magnesium content frame burned down to a small puddle of liquid metal & finally went out.
A guy and his wife from England live next to us in their duplex in North vancouver. He was a falconer when he was in England but couldn't do it here in Canada because of the sheer number of regulations made it virtually impossible. And that included a scrapbook with various feathers from his Birds over the years very illegal. But he also was a salesperson technical support for a brake manufacturer in England and he describes some of the accidents at Isle of Man. One of the worst ones is this chicane where somebody's wall has been run into so many times by out of control bikers that he didn't bother to rebuild it
Honda made a Formula 1 car with a magnesium body called the RA302. Their usual driver, John Surtees, refused (wisely) to drive the car on safety grounds. They put a substitute driver, Jo Schlesser, in the car for the 1968 French Grand Prix at Rouen Les Essart. There was a crash at the six brothers turn and the car ignited and Schlesser was killed.
Quite an unfortunate, and worst of all, unnecessary incident.
When forging magnesium, you have a one heat one strike opportunity. If you mess up the heat, it burns. If you mess up the strike, it burns. You need to put it directly into a press with a mold. Heat it, and then press it into the shape of the mold. Do not miss.
It's driving me crazy the masses keep saying magnesium is flammable, so is potassium but you don't see people avoiding bananas. The purity of the metal matters and no one with a brain is going to work a non alloyed magnesium metal period.
@@Neoprenesirenexcept tge place that makes the bar stock for their client who makes those spools of magnesium ribbon😂😂😂
"Can you forge Magnesium?"
If you don't actually like having eyeballs or fingers anymore.
Na, he just had the temps WAY to low.
I, too, would have my temp set way too low if the alternative was risking a bar of metal that spontaneously combusted into a fire three times hotter than a campfire that is near impossible to extinguish.
My car has forged magnesium wheels, it’s certainly doable, just not in a garage shop as it has to be done in proper atmosphere and the product has to be passivated with special coatings to prevent ignition in an accident.
@@zombiesue1054 Yeah if theres one thing i know about magnesium, it's that it sparkles, can spontaneously combust, and can basically become thermite.
They cold press forge magnesium rather than hot.
These are presses the size of buildings capable of gigapascals! 😮
This video is so cool to see since I work with these alloys on a daily basis, casting, extruding, etc. I work at a company that specialises in magnesium production here in the UK for all kinds of industries. We make the alloys mentioned in this video such as WE54 and Elektron as well as dozens of other alloys. We've made stuff for Porsche, Ferrari, Honda, and even the apache helicopter uses our alloys.
And Alec you're right this material is incredibly difficult to work with and is incredibly dangerous but I really enjoy working with it.
We need to use cover gas at all times to keep magnesium from oxidizing when heated, otherwise magnesium oxide gets in and you end up with crap material that lacks the properties required. Basically if you don't want something to oxidise, just take away the oxygen!
If forging magnesium - heat it using inductive heating in an inert atmosphere and also forge it in an inert atmosphere.
Burning magnesium is normally extinguished with special salts or dry sand, a D class fire extinguisher designated for magnesium would be preferred.
Water can cause oxyhydrogen gas to be created and make things worse.
It takes a pretty big magnesium fire to break down water.
The couple of ounces that most people are likely to burn _probably_ won't do it.
Technically, you can use gasoline or any hydrocarbon based fuels as they don't contain oxygen in their molecule, so it would turn from a metal fire to an oil fire which is easier to handle.
@@Sue_Me_Too the key word is _probably_
I know I wouldn't risk it
@@Percutien I like the way you think!
@@drthmik if you're only burning a couple ounces of magnesium, it will consume itself pretty quickly. After that you just have a regular fire to deal with.
An interesting fact about magnesium. After WW1 most of Germanys iron industries were seized as reparations. But they were allowed to keep the magnesium plants. Thus they had to specialize in manufacturing with magnesium, the Best way they figured out was with huge presses, because hammer forging often Leads to these kind of cracks
Machine thinking has an amazing video on these huge presses
That’s super interesting!!!
@@AlecSteele indeed it is
@@AlecSteele Go and visit it for us!
@@AlecSteele
After the war America initiated the US Heavy Press Program for cold forging magnesium for the aerospace industry.
You need to go see one, they are insane, the largest in the world in Tyson, the 100,000 ton press in Italy, owned by Giva.
Check out the video by MrGreenGuy.
Petrol/Gasoline on a magnesium fire will extinguish it without the risk of explosion.
If I didn’t have the correct fire extinguisher to hand, I think I’d rather try to starve it of air with sand.
Since you forged the poo maker metal, you need to forge the poo stopper metal. BISMUTH!
The "Elektron WE54" Alloy is about 91% magnesium. Pure magnesium would be way softer than this alloy here. Magnesium is soft enough to cut it with a knife kinda like wax-like maybe a bit tougher. More reactive as well. Apparently, the Yttriumin in the alloy gives corrosion resistance, meaning less oxidation/rust and harder to burn it. If it were to be pure %99.9 magnesium I doubt you can put it out with just water even if it's small in amount it would explode.
If you like to know here are the contents I found for it.
Element Content (%)
Yttrium, Y 4.75-5.5
Neodymium, Nd 1.5-2
Heavy Rare Earths 1-2
Zirconium, Zr 0.4
Magnesium, Mg Remainder
To add to this. NEVER USE WATER ON A MAGNESIUM FIRE!!! The fire will split the water (H2O) into Hydrogen and Oxygen, resulting in an explosion.
I was wondering how much it would cost for a titanium domestic dagger
@@JoshWebs Its even better than that - look up 'Why Sodium explodes.. a new explanation!' Its crazy
Yeah I remember playing with some pure magnesium tape I liberated from my high school chemistry lab, and it was quite soft and easy to tear by hand or cut with a knife. And would light on fire quite easily with a butane lighter.
I wondered about that- I've worked with pure sodium and lithium in the chemistry lab, and my impression was pure magnesium was similar: soft enough to cut and shape with a spatula, and reactive enough that it + water = fire
Had a 125cc two stroke motorcycle called a Cagiva Mito that utilised magnesium extensively in it's construction. It's power to weight ratio was such that it could exceed 100mph, crazy for a bike that size, it was pure joy, I highly recommend taking one for a spin if you ever get the chance.
100 on a 125, that’s mad
@@mitchdabeast_2103it was a two stroke, there's been several 125cc two strokes that made 100
The real issue with 125s hitting 100 is that they're legalled limited to ~15 bhp now for CBT/European laws
They can (probably) make 125s that push 25-30 bhp on four stroke now, but the law (and the lack of a 125cc racing class, with moto3 moving to 250cc ) means that it's not worth the effort to develop
Cagiva Mito was a beautiful bike!
Power-to-weight has more influence on acceleration than on top speed. The only effect of weight on constant speed is through power loss at the tires.
@@gibbogle Thanks' for the correction, but even in that regard the bike did 0 to 60mph in 5 to 6 seconds with an engine the size of a can of baked beans.
It filed worse because it filled the chip reliefs more. The saw has significantly larger spaces after the cutting edges that don't get loaded up as easily.
I was coming to say the same thing. The file teeth were getting gummed up by the magnesium.
My favorite thing about magnesium, is that it does both heat and cold. Chips burn very hot, but a bloc transfer heat very very quick, and that makes feel cool to the touch. Love it.
I think part of my CPU cooler is a block of magnesium.
@@Sue_Me_Too CPU coolers usually are nickel-plated copper.
@@hammerth1421
Or aluminum.
@@Sue_Me_Too i think it would be a bad idea to use this metal for this use
@@neralodinson6980 why? Sounds like it'd make a great heatsink
Materials Scientist here: Magnesium and its alloys were quite big before and during WW2 specifically in Germany. That was because Bauxit, the mineral from which Aluminium is synthesized, couldn’t be mined and bought by the German Government. Magnesium was seen as the alternative and in fact, Germany became the leading country in Magnesium research, production and processing having its center in Bitterfeld - Magnesium was known as the „German Metal“.
After the war, a lot of knowledge was destroyed and lost (some estimate a 60-year-set-back) and researchers are still catching up in a few areas of research. A lot of what was left went to the UK in the form of Magnesium Elektron (today known as Luxfer MEL). The material WE54 (W = Yttrium (5 wt%) and E = Rare Earth (4 wt%) like Neodymium, Gadolinium etc.) is one of the alloys developed in Bitterfeld for high temperature usage.
Magnesium and most of its alloys have a hexagonal closed packed (hcp) crystal structure with a c/a ratio close to ideal. This means that there is only a limited number of glide systems for dislocations (less than 5 independent ones at ambient), resulting in a very limited formability and forgability as you demonstrated here! I was somewhat surprised that at higher T, the forgability is also quite low, as at high T more glide systems become active in theory. However, Magnesium has a low heat capacity meaning it looses temperature quite quickly.
Due to its low ability to deform uniformly and without breaking, parts from Magnesium are mostly produced by casting like high pressure die casting.
Do Bismuth next. It is a REALLY pretty metal and forms cool shapes when heated and worked with, and will throw Jamie's idea of all metal being grey out the window!
The colors of bismuth are from the oxide layer, but only when it has a specific thickness (called thin film interference). The metal itself is grey. Copper and gold are the only elemental metals with strong colors. Though cesium is a silvery-golden color, and osmium has a slight blue hue. Most metals are silver to grey. Everything else is either an alloy, has colored oxides, or the color is from oxide thin film interference.
Yeah, all metals are weird like that, gold is apparently red?
@@ashe1.070Osmium is really expensive if I remember correctly, though, so you can't reasonably get enough of it to forge.
Can't really do bismuth easily because of its low melting point, I think. Also, it's extremely brittle. I can tell you right away one hammer blow will be a shower of pieces.
@@MostlyPennyCat Gold is gold color. If anyone said it's red without an oxide layer or something, that's just not true. Like the old myth kids in school pass around that your blood is blue until it touches air
Welding Mg usually requires AC. The mechanism is the same as for Al -- oxide layer needs to be crushed by the reverse polarity pulses.
Not just that, but Tig welding was originally developed for welding magnesium. Specifically, it was for a prototype fighter for the US, the XP-56. Some of the really old dudes in welding still call it heliarc.
The shop called 'The Guild of Automotive Restorers'(a bit pretentious, but, frankly, it's fitting for the work they do lol) built a 'replica-restoration'(for lack of a better term) of a 'lost' magnesium bodied 1930s Bugatti. Absolutely incredible work, apparently it took them quite a while to get down the process for welding thin magnesium sheet metal. I believe Jay Leno covered the car on his YT channel, look for 'Bugatti Aérolithe'. It's a fascinating story of a concept car that was shown once or twice in the '30s then lost(thus far), and The Guild started with an original Bugatti rolling chassis and recreated the magnesium body from scratch based on pictures. Their work is second to none.
This is the kind of Alec Steele content we love to see. Love seeing the different properties of these metals
you can put out a magnesium fire with gasoline. the gasoline burns at a lower temperature and eats up all the oxygen, putting out the magnesium. Then you just have to out out the gasoline fire.
Thankfully, those are probably pretty easy in comparison.
Water on a magnesium fire can cause an explosion, but it's just counterintuitive to put a fire out with something flamable.
I know so little about this that I can't even gauge whether this is a joke, a neat factoid, or an actual technique that would actually get used.
Metal fires, Class 4 fires, have to be put out by eliminating all oxygen and cooling them down. This is a legitimate way to put out a magnesium fire.
Or salt. Salt reacts with the magnesium and blocks out the oxygen
There was a titanium plant near me. Some time ago, they had a fire catch in a barrel of titanium milling chips, and the two guys nearby panicked and forgot their safety training. Instead of following procedure, they dumped a bucket of water on the fire to douse it. The resulting explosion lifted the roof off the building and shattered windows half a mile away. There were empty casket funerals, as there weren't even dental remnants remaining of the two millworkers.
My guess is that it reacts with water to form rutile (titanium oxide) and hydrogen gas. Then the hydrogen exploded. Or am I wrong?
@@tomaspecl1082 IDK about the rutile, but those metal fires can absolutely strip H2O into its component gasses.
@@tomaspecl1082 magnesium and basically any -ium metal dies exactly that
A single barrel of water on a single barrel of tungsten? That's a pretty intense result for such a small quantity.
@@amogusenjoyernot really. We’re so used to things operating as they are intended to that we forget the incredible power that we have harnessed. A gallon of gasoline can move you around 20 miles, but atomized it can level a small building.
Pure magnesium isn't used for a laxative. It is magnesium citrate, which is a salt of magnesium.
It's still because of the magnesium though, that's like saying salt isn't sodium.
@guyincognito. The intake of pure magnesium, like pure sodium, is dangerous. So, being specific about it not being pure is important.
@@dl200010 earing pure sodium will be way worse than pure magnesium tho lol. but yeah, some forms are scarier than others.
@@uuh4yj43 Very much so!
@@guyincognito.
Would you say that the Earth's crust is oxygen then? Since it contains oxygen?
A common camping tool is a magnesium rod, which is essentially a chunk of magnesium connected to a striking surface. You shave off pieces with a camp knife and then use the flint to strike a spark that you use to light the magnesium to start a fire. Very flammable, but also soft enough to shave with a standard camp knife.
I carry just such a fire starter on/as my key ring. You can actually scrape it with a sharp rock.
Ford Kuga cars in South Africa were recalled when the they started catching fire and the magnesium chassis would burn and essentially be unable to put out.
Another common form of magnesium fire starter is basically a ziplock bag full of chips/shavings. You can light those with a match and they'll get your fire going.
It just slightly different alloy than magnesium. Called ferrocerium.
@Rosewayforge Ferrocerium is used in lighters to strike the flame, it can be used as a firestarter but the thing they're talking about here is a piece of magnesium that you scape bits off of to use in place of kindling, to start fires even if it's wet.
Titanium and Magnesium need lots of pressure to forge - the USAF sponsored 50,000 ton presses to work these metals and their alloys for plane parts. The Germans used presses up to 30,000 tons during WW2 for Magnesium plane parts.
Uhh. 50,000 tons? 100 million pounds? Maybe 50,000 psi
ive see a lot of footage from when they were making the wooden planes. saw a lot of "factories" from ww2. I've got to go back and look at the plane factories. My grandmother built tank parts for the Bendix corp in Iowa. some wild stories from her time, i was a welder too for a short time. My grand mother and great grandma were 5,1 and would do all the out of position welds. How they both lived to 90 is crazy to me as they used no respirators and the saftey was on par with 3rd world countries standards today. she took more than one person off an electrified environment. they had wooden hooks and 2x4s everywhere they had power running.
@@lysolmax50 kt is right ;)
There are presses with 540MN of force
@@lysolmax yup, 50,000t. Google "Heavy Press Program"
@@lysolmax i just read an article about this. Russia built two 75,000 TON presses for titanium parts
For you to remember the conversions 100 Celsius is about 212 farenheight. Despite being and living in america I actually like celcius. The conversion from Celsius to farenheight is
F = C x 1.8 + 32. And to convert from farenheight to celcius its
C = (F - 32) / 1.8
The Convair B-36 Peacemaker, a holder of many records had an airframe consisting of a lot of magnesium. This massive plane (230 ft wingspan, the longest of any military aircraft ever) had no fewer than 10 engines, 6 piston and 4 jets. The piston engines were of a pusher design, meaning they were at the back of the wing. This lead to several issues, as the carburator did not have proper heating, leading to carburator icing, which caused the engine to overheat and catch fire. While the B-36 had a solid saftey record for the time, crashes are inevitable, and the magnesium airframe burned very easily. It also was a nuclear bomber, and these problems did lead to a few broken arrow incidents.
(Sry for the yapping, its just i like planes and magnesium is involved in the b-36 and the video) Sry
Cool info, thanks
The deterrent system at the time was such too that a portion of the fleet were meant to be in air at all times so they did rack up flight time fast.
Its a cool project, with the later modification of additional jet engines and all.
Interesting, thank you for enlightening me. I suspect you are autistic like myself?
never be afraid to yap about your interests on the internet!!!! thoroughly enjoyed this knowledge
How does carb icing cause fires? Is it due to running too lean?
You can put out a magnesium fire. You need a special kind of dry chemical fire extinguisher designed for metal fires (class D), a lot of dry sand, or you need to replace the air with argon or an another inert gas (magnesium will burn in nitrogen too). Halon doesn't work BTW.
Magnesium does not oxidize itself. But it will separate the oxygen from water and continue to burn, while producing flammable hydrogen gas. It's also an exothermic reaction (produces heat) that reacts faster as the temperature increases, causing a positive feedback loop and runaway reaction.
With sand it reacts too giving Si. And this reaction is also exothermic.
If you haven't seen it look up mrgreenguy he just did a very chaotic video explaining magnesium fires and how to put them out in a very unique way
Hijacking this; Explosions&Fire has videos about class D fires, watch them if you're interested/curious
@@Ma_X64 I have personally put out large magnesium fires with sand. It has to be dry though.
wouldn't putting a magnesium fire in silicon-oxides result in it taring off the oxygen and burning itself?
Had an 02 BMW M3, the engine(S54) is made of a magnesium alloy, had to break out a the tap and die set, and... pain. But had a good bit of metal shreds after cleaning up,and my dad wanted to show me a neat trick with getting rid of certain metal shavings, and turned a oxygen gas torch on the pile, after seeing it go up, made me very happy we cleaned up after rethreading some stuff on that engine block.
As a physicist and a chemist: No, the density of a material has nothing to do with any other characteristic (hardness, colour, how it will behave in a forge, etc). And even if you have just one material, you may have different "versions" of it, which may have widely different characteristics. Take Carbon for example: If you burn stuff like wood or coal, you get soot on your furnace. This soot is basically just carbon, really soft, black, basically no structural integrity. However, if you take this soot and put it into an environment with really high temperatures and incredible pressures, you get diamonds: The hardest material we know of and transparent.
If we go back to metals: Remember tungsten? Really hard, heavy, incredibly high melting point. Now let's move a few steps to a theoretically similar metal: Quicksilver. Also really heavy, a liquid at room temperature and thus quite soft. (I have now information of how frozen quicksilver behaves).
I could explain to you why it is like this, but not in form a youtube comment.
And as a fellow blacksmith: Always think about the oxygen, when you work with hot metals: Of course you can tig weld, because you work with protection gas, which prohibits any oxide layer or fire. If you would have a method to both heat and work your metal in an protection gas atmosphere, you could use higher temperatures, which would make the metal softer and less likely to form cracks. But that is a lot of effort for next to no benefit.
@2:10 his theory falls apart when you look at how soft gold is and how soft lead is
Damm beat me to the punch
And how hard titanium is xD
Also steel and hardened steel
And how hard diamond is
and how strong carbon fiber is
Think of gold and copper. Both much denser than steel, yet super soft.
Then for the truly extreme example of a dense but soft metal, there is mercury which is so soft that it is a liquid
@@Corvinus_swe I'm not sure that's really comparable... Mercury is liquid because it has a very low melting point. That being said, I'm unsure of the hardness of mercury in its solid state.
@@Corvinus_swe .. But liquid steel is also very 'soft'
TIL Coppper is denser than Iron.
lead
Magnesium rims are rolled at WAY more than 400°C. If the oven is 400°C, the billet inside isn't necessarily.
Magnesium forgings are usually die forgings with large hydraulic presses. Not so much impact forging. I haven't seen drophammer forging of Mg yet. It may also be a thing, but I don't know it.
5:00 RIP your retinas
5:58 that transition into the sponsor segment is so, , , smooth 🤣🤣
😂
I’d go as far as to that it was quite “tight”
A decent rule of thumb to determine if a metal is malleable is to look at the crystal structure. Hexagonal close packed (HCP) is typically brittle, face-centered cublic (FCC) is typically very malleable, and body-center cubic (BCC) is usually in between the other two structures. Magnesium is HCP hence the cracking and chipping when forging. Aluminum is FCC. Steel is BCC at room temoerature, but at forging temperatures, it transitions into FCC, giving it better malleability.
I did an apprenticeship at an aerospace firm. Whenever working on magnesium, you had to have the fire cart next to the machine. That was basically a huge fry powder fire extinguisher with a long lance nozzle.
@16:20 Cooper and gold are not gray.
leave my mate cooper out of this.
Ah yes... cooper. My favorite element. Jokes aside, absolutely, neither gold nor copper is silver or gray in any measure.
It seems like the cracking happened cause of the heat not being consistent through the whole piece. Since the core of the metal was starting out colder than the surrounding material you ended up getting internal stress in the metal. Induction heating would have given you a more even heat through the whole piece and a better chance to produce the shapes you wanted without cracking.
As a scientist: No, density is not directly related to hardness. An example would be lead, very dense but not hard at all. The hardness of a material is mainly related to the type of bonds that hold the material together (covalent bonds or ionic bonds, for example) and, in the case of metals, the material composition and the associated structure of the crystal lattice.
My father used to tell me the story of where he worked in the 1950s, they had a huge machine shop doing lots of military contracts at the height of the Cold War. As a "Safety Lesson" they took a month's worth of magnesium shavings from all the lathes (he mentioned it was about a train car full) piled at one end of the parking lot and lit it up, burning 6 feet (almost 2 meters) through the asphalt, dirt, and stone. I'm sure they were very careful after that...
Magnesium work hardens like aluminum but is very brittle. The forging of magnesium is not usually forged as it is not an easy to work with metal. It is usually either cast or machined to shape.
The first rudimentary camera flash was just a small plank with a bit of magnesium powder on it that that the photographer would burn while taking the picture because it burnt so quickly and brightly
Firefighter here, when I was young we responded to a shop fire of a guy that liked to restore old VW bugs. He said he had about 8 old magnesium engine blocks in there. We stood back and just kept the fire from spreading. Wasn't any hope of us wasting time trying to put the shop out and saving anything with the supplies a backwood volunteer fire dept had (water).
The dumb old coot found a dumber lawyer to try to sue us because we didn't try to spray water on it and save anything. Our lawyer had them both laughed out of the court room. Last I heard his insurance refused to cover anything because he never disclosed all the "dangrous" mag engine blocks he had stored together in a small space.
Play stupid games - win stupid prizes, I guess.
I watch a guy, who is RC/jets/automotive enthusiast, and he is building his own formula-something car (a really small class, though IDK which one, I guess he will use it just like a track car) from scratch. Every time he is working with magnesium (turning wheels, for example), he clears the working area, has cement floor + brick walls, and does so like it is the last thing he is doing at his shop. Also some salt, but he doesn't believe it is reasonable to use because you need to get close to put salt on it, and specialized salt fire extinguisher is quiet expensive.
He got something like two or three magnesium fires, but because of preciouses and awareness it just kept burning in a lathe tray without damaging anything each time. And a long ventilation needed, because of the smoke.
So how would you properly store magnesium engine blocks? In a crate full of sand? And maybe not 8?
@@Llyd_ApDicta first of all, sand is a bad idea - magnesium is so insane, it mogs silicon of oxygen and burns this way)
Second - bulk Mg alloys are fine, chips are dangerous. Pure magnesium is pretty wild and could be dangerous even in bulk (though usually it is still ok if you are careful), but alloys are much more tame.
@@Blackwing2345635 According to Google dry sand is one of the options fire fighters use to extinguish.
Chevy pickups often have magnesium steering columns. Copious amounts of water do extinguish them, and the fireworks are amazing, but don't be too close because they will ruin fire gear.
C->F is 1.8(C) + 32.
F -> C is (F-32)/2 then subtract 1/10 of that from itself. Yes, you can do multiply 9 divide 5, or whatever way you want, but that’s the easiest I’ve found for me to get to Celsius from Fahrenheit.
if you put a magnesium bar in vacuum chamber at a few hundred c it sublimate super fast and basically turns into swiss cheese . god that was a mess to clean
Huh. Really low temp vapor deposition. I had no idea magnesium did that.
@@nikkiofthevalley neither did we at the time we were trying to just melt it and cast it. and were like hey if we do it in vacuum there no air so it can't burn. but never got it to melt it sublimated away to fast. coated the inside of the chamber with like 1kg of the stuff took several days hunched over in that chamber scrubbing the walls with acid and water
2:47 Diamonds, quartz crystals, silica carbide grinding disks are an order of magnitude lighter than any steel, yet scratch and cut the steel. And steel is harder than lead, which is much denser.
Hardness is not a property of mass but atomic bonds that form crystal structure. When you heat treat steel, you are editing these bonds until the hardness is suitable.
We used to machine magnesium castings on a CNC lathe and the only thing to extinguish the swarf, well smother it, was a very finely powdered baking soda. We had to clean the swarf every 30 parts or so, depending on how big they were, as they almost wrote off a £180,000 machine as the heat melted the switch gear and wiring looms, it cost £120,000 to fix it. It was a Boley BDN160.
Gaz UK
Be careful with burning magnesium. Closing your eyes might not be enough to protect yourself from such a bright light.
Was this video live, and if not, you're talking to a past
@@user-gy7dx8qx3n #1 Providing relevant and important info, even years after the fact, is still plenty useful to many who may come across it.
#2 Still doesn't matter if it was in the past for Alec. If he didn't learn about it inbetween the time of filming and publishing, he's providing Alec that relevant info. Even *_IF_* Alec doesn't plan to forge anything out of magnesium, that doesn't mean he won't _fabricate_ with it and end up with more chips that he might goof around with by burning again.
Never knock someone's efforts in sharing knowledge. 😉👍
Lol! Burning magnesium was an experiment in chemistry sets when I was young. I burned magnesium when I was 8 years old, it's harmless and is no brighter than a bright torch.
@@guyincognito. Children's science kits came with uranium once upon a time as well, so your anecdote falls short. Even moreso with a few seconds of research...
_Yes, burning magnesium can hurt your eyes:_
*_Ultraviolet light:_* The white light emitted by burning magnesium contains ultraviolet (UV) light *that can permanently damage your eyes.*_
_If you're working with magnesium, you should:
Wear safety glasses with UV filters, similar to what welders use._
_-Sit at least 2-3 meters away from the flame_
_-Avoid looking directly at the burning magnesium_
_-Observe from the side using your peripheral vision_
I could also mention all the things that were easily obtainable in the late-1800s early-1900s for ailments or weight loss... but I'm certain YT's autoKaren system would remove it, so I won't bother. 😏
@@guyincognito. Children's science kits came with ☢️ ore once upon a time as well, so your anecdote falls short. Even moreso with a few seconds of research...
_Yes, burning magnesium can hurt your eyes:_
*_Ultraviolet light:_* The white light emitted by burning magnesium contains ultraviolet (UV) light *that can permanently damage your eyes.*_
_If you're working with magnesium, you should:
Wear safety glasses with UV filters, similar to what welders use._
_-Sit at least 2-3 meters away from the flame_
_-Avoid looking directly at the burning magnesium_
_-Observe from the side using your peripheral vision_
I could also mention all the things that were easily obtainable in the late-1800s early-1900s for ailments or weight loss... but I'm certain YT's autoKaren system would remove it, so I won't bother. _(just as it did on the first attempt at posting this comment, due to the U-word I used before replacing it with ☢️)_
Table salt for magnesium fires. The specialised fire-extinguishers (Class D if memory serves) for metal-fires (lithium, magnesium, titanium) usually sport either that or some other (really well dried) salt with no oxygen atoms in its molecule. The salt melts, coats the metal fire and strips it of contact with oxygen. Avoid baking soda (usual powder fire-extinguishers have that in them) or water, because the heat strips the oxygen clean off the molecule and you just fed live oxygen to the metal fire. And yes, table salt is hygroscopic so it will have some water from the moisture found in air so if you want, you could bake-dry some plain table salt and keep it in an airtight container for emergencies if you indend to machine spooky metals. Or just spend a couple of thousand pounds on a proper class-D fire extinguisher. And one more thing... AluMag powder (mix of alluminium and magnesium) was used in some unstable homemade thermite or explosive or something, I cannot quite remember, but shavings of those two together might be particularely hazardous. Source: trust me bro. (so do double-check) Please, do more fancy metals sometime! 🦾
Ally is hard to set alight and mean af after that. Not recommended on a Friday afternoon in a railroad workshop
So I've heard...😉
"spooky metals" :D
I was curious about the alloys, so I looked up the composition. Both are >90% magnesium:
ZK60A: 5% zinc 0.5% zirconium
WE54: 5% yttrium 2% neodymium 0.5% zirconium 2% random heavy rare earth metals
Remember being a Ford tech and we had a Ford Mondeo come in, had some electrical gremlin and ended up having a hard short on the block, the block was made from magnesium, once it started we just had to sit back and watch it, even when the fire team showed up, they just isolated it and let it burn too.
Next episode - can you forge dynamite?
Just go straight for the 'can you forge nitroglycerin' since dybamite is nothing more than that with some shock stabilisation.
@@justdadstuff5171 Nitroglycerin is liquid though, so you physically can't forge it, regardless of whether it would explode on impact.
Well, you can form dynamite into shapecharges. But I don't know how they do that.
I’m not a scientist but I think something’s ability to be cut is more based on that material’s covalent bonds rather than the density of the atoms. Lead for instance is much denser than steel but because it has weaker covalent bonds, the atoms can be pulled apart from one another easier.
I work in a magnesium foundry, and in order to melt it, you need an inert cover gas. Gets fun when that doesn't work
You mean it is fun when it doesn't burn the foundry down too?
A class star jumpscare
Density does change as the atoms get closer together, thats why nuetron star matter is the densest matter in the universe prior to black holes. But Density can also be effected by the mass of the atoms themselves. That same Nuetron Star Matter is basically a singular large atom made solely of nuetrons. Magnesium isn't less dense because it has less atoms, its just that the atoms themselves are less dense, each carrying less mass than Fe, or Iron, Atoms.
That explaination of density was right, if you substituted it with the right words - denser metals aren't heavier because they're more packed together, they're denser because the atoms themselves are physically heavier with all the extra protons, neutrons, and electrons they have.
If that was the totality of the reason, density and the periodic table would be an exact match, the higher on the table the denser the material. Which is not the case. Molecular density, the amount of molecules (well, it's a metal, but still) in a certain volume also plays a part.
Or am I mistaken? It's been 15 years since my last chemistry lesson, lol. Metals could be an exception due to the lattice structure.
@@Elechte this is very true, especially when talking about gasses and such, thank you for adding that on, altho a correlation mass and density is mostly true in the cases of metals. The reason why it wouldn't line up exactly when comparing it directly to the periodic table is because the masses you see are an approximate average of all of the isotopes of an element. Its also why copper and chlorine might have their masses rounded to the first decimal point while the rest have theirs rounded to the nearest whole number, despite the fact that the most common isotopes of the two elements have whole number masses.
(Edit: finishing a sentence I forgot to complete)
1:50 Not really. For example both lead and gold are really dense, but also soft.
Man you beat me by an hour
I believe it’s all kind of relative to the crystalline structure, but I haven’t studied metallurgy in sometime
1:57
Lead is both dense and soft, so, to borrow a term, ‘bugger off.’ 😂
Metallurgic engineer here. When I was studying Uni, I had this crazy but brilliant teacher wanted us the students to make an alloy of Lead-Magnesium, (Pb-Mg).
Obviously the lead melt down first and because of Mg density it didn’t went into the alloy properly, then it started reacting with the air around so we start having like fireworks on a little oven/ forge at the Public Uni at Mexico. A mess, but my teacher quickly took it out (using safety equipment obviously) at control the situation like a pro 😮.
The best lessons in the world ever 🤣
The fact that Alec isn't wearing a welding mask for the entire video surprises me, I would be really nervous handling magnesium like that ;-)
Its not magnesium, its magnesium alloy. Even if it was elemental magnesium, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.
Also safety mustache engaged
@@websterriit gives off a lot of UV when burning, just like welding arcs.
@@voidseeker4394 I didn't ask and I wasn't talking about anything that would be relevant to.
1:50 What a weird thing to say. Surely it's universally known that lead, for instance, is both dense and soft?
And gold too it’s really really dense and it’s extremely soft
I worked at what was at one time the largest Magnesium extrusion plant in the world. Wasn't that big, but we were one of the only ones, so...
I'm here to tell you, controlled Magnesium fires are a blast. I'd collect saw dust off my band saw for a week before going camping.
While UNCONTROLLED Mag fires are a nightmare. Years before working there, my dad was a crew leader when a welder repairing our fence started a fire in the yard. An errant spark is all it takes. Stacks and stacks of product in bins and stacks of banded Mag round Billet, picture 20-35 foot logs between 7" and maybe 15" diameter, all caught fire.
The fire dept shows up, has no idea what a Magnesium fire entails and starts setting up their water hoses. Words and punches were thrown trying to save those firemen's lives. Water and burning Magnesium do not play nicely.
Burned holes straight through a 30" of concrete slab and spread some very noctouse fumes around Aurora CO.
Magnesium carbonate is what is used as a laxative not the metal also it is use on some sports and claiming on your hands, as it pics moister very well.
Magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) is also used commonly as a laxative
Magnesium Hydroxide is another variant. It starts as an anti-acid, reacts with gastric acid to become magnesium chloride (+water) which is the actual laxative.
Not gonna lie, you look like a young Ned Flanders with that tash 😂
Years ago some roommates and I put a magnesium transmission in a campfire at the river one night. After about an hour it was just glowing white. For fun we chucked rocks at it and made some super cool white sparks fly off it. Eventually the rocks just punched thru it and it fell apart. Only took about another 45 minutes for it to turn into a greyish clump.
Back in high school chemistry class, we were doing an experiment with magnesium ribbon and HCl. I mentioned to my lab partner, Joe, "I wonder if that burns," while looking at the spool of ribbon. Into the bunsen burner the end went, and burn it did. He dropped it in the sink and proceeded to melt a nice channel in the porcelain. I can still see Mr. Geiken standing there with arms crossed saying, "Joe, Joe, Joe..."
Density does not correlate to hardness.
See: lead, gold, mercury.
You’d love where most of my family worked, the Wyman Gordon facility in Worcester, MA. They have a 50,000 ton forging press that was predominantly used to forge magnesium alloy components for aircraft and such.
my grandpa was one of the first people to use magnesium in his race car frame WAY back in the early days of the north american racing circuits. he was a drag racing pioneer!
For what it's worth, I worked at a grey iron foundry in the US and we used Celsius there too (green sand using a DISAMATIC). I think it's fine once you go past a few hundred degrees in either system it starts to get kind of abstract and you should just stick with one system.
0:22 GOLD, COPPER
Bismeth, brass
Titanium, brass, bronze
The clue is in their names
I was about to comment but looks like everyone got it covered 😂
8:36 yes and we lost the war
Guten Morgen Freund
i'm sure it was the magnesium and not picking the impossible fight
We used magnesium engravings to make rubber printing plates. I took some old ones rolled up a piece 1" wide and a few inches long. Placed it in an old brass ashtray and lit it, once it was going good I hit it with the garden hose. It exploded impressively, throwing burning white chunks about. It burned right through the brass ashtray too. I am told old VW engine blocks could catch fire and the fire department would just let them burn because of that. I just watched a video and magnesium dust can be used to make a type of flash powder for fireworks.
So putting water on it causes a bigger and more violent fire because of how hot it burns. It rips the oxygen and hydrogen molecules apart from water.
Wich in the worst case can create an explosive gas mixture. Luckily the heat loss slowed the reaction enough to prevent it?
PSA: Please, do not stare at burning magnesium without eye protection like a welding mask; you can burn your retinas very easily doing what this guy was doing at 4:50
Bump for visibility. Eye protection is important!
Magnesium is very useful in pyrotechnics. A friend of mine gave me a piece of SU24 aircraft wheel rim. Which is made out of magnesium alloy . I used to file it down to get the fine powder and make flash powder or firecrackers out of it. I also did cut it out and melted it with Aluminium in 1:1 ratio to make very brittle Magnalium alloy,which is very easy to crush into finer powder and useful in pyrotechnics. But stuff is very dangerous to melt alone, it sparks and burns by itself,so that you have to melt aluminum first then add Magnesium into molten aluminium with constant stirring. To get the alloy, you have to pour molten alloy into bucket of water ro immediately cool down, otherwise all of the Magnesium will burn out leaving only Aluminium behind
Non grey metals? Copper, gold.
Calcium, bismuth, brass as well
Most metals are silver which is technically not grey. Cesium has a silvery-golden color. Osmium is silver with a slight blue hue.
Zirconium
@scarecrowforge Calcium is a grey-silver element. Bismuth is also a silvery grey, but when oxidized it displays a wide range of colors. However, those colors are from the oxide layers of varying thickness. The metal itself doesn’t have those colors. The oxide layers of titanium, iron, and others display that same property (thin film interference). Brass, and bronze are of course alloys that get their colors from the copper that makes up the majority of the mixture. So, there aren’t many elemental metals that aren’t silver, or grey. Just copper, gold, and cesium. Osmium does have a slight blue hue though.
@@ashe1.070 Where did Alec say anything about elemental metals only as opposed to all metals (including alloys) though?
You can actually put out most metal fires pretty easily with powdered table salt (sodium chloride) or baking soda, so if you ever work with other flammable metals, I’d recommend having a few pounds on hand.
In my university's chemistry labs, we just have buckets of dry sand.
@@hammerth1421 Sand also works great, but the reason they use salt commercially is that when the salt melts when it contacts the molten metal, it makes a crust around it and prevents oxygen from getting to it and re-igniting. Though, sand more than likely would work just fine for a smaller fire. There’s actually specific fire extinguishers for metal fires that are just pressurized tanks of super fine salt and/or soda that firefighters and certain labs use. They’re also like $6 grand if I remember right, which is kind of crazy if you think about it.
The extra fun part of magnesium fires in your workshop is that it burns hot enough to start an aluminium + iron oxide thermite reaction which is self oxidizing and burns at 2862c. Good thing there isn't a bunch of aluminium and iron dust around.
also, Copper - Has a reddish-orange color.
Brass - An alloy of copper and zinc, with a yellowish-golden color.
Bronze - An alloy primarily of copper and tin, with a brownish or reddish-brown color.
Caesium - Appears as a pale gold color.
Bismuth - Can have a rainbow-like iridescent oxide layer that gives it various colors, but pure bismuth itself has a silvery white color with a hint of pink.
Rhodium - Often appears silvery but has a reflective, mirror-like finish which can sometimes give off a bluish hue.
Osmium - While generally grey, it has a bluish tint.
I take magnesium supplements for sleep and I have wicked ass dreams when it’s in my system
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but the likely reason behind the magnesium appearing harder to file is that because it is less dense, it’ll actually clog up the teeth on the file at a faster rate. So similar to how putting aluminium on a grindstone would clog up the abrasive surface 😊 (before anyone says anything, no I would not use a grindstone with aluminium)
gasoline puts out magnesium fires
can you forge depleted uranium 😊
Suppa heavy mace
@@Meowy501 extremely massive warhammer
I used to repair alloy wheels, we were always told to beware Magnesium wheel because they were made for a small period of time and if heated up to straighten or repair you would burn the shop down.
At sea level, 0 C water freezes and 100 C water boils. 20 to 25 C is nice temp, 30C sucks. It's pretty easy. Freedomheit is all over the place, 33 F, 212 F, 68 to 77 F and 86 F respectively. You should put the kiln next to the power hammer so you don't run around with hot metal in the shop.
Huh? Who asked?
@@websterri It's mentioned in the video. Did you watch it?
@@funkaddictions F was, he was talking about F! You should listen better.
If memory serves, Fahrenheit was designed using the thermal properties of brine (don't recall the concentration). Thus it correlates decently to human temps in whole numbers (since humans are mostly saltwater). However, beyond that bit, it doesn't scale terribly well, which if you're doing science, you very much want. Celsius was designed around pure water, so the 'human ranges' are smaller, but its very scalable, making it more useful for most other applications.
Fun fact: due to technical limitations, 100F used to be the standard internal human body temp. Once thermometers got better, we realized that its closer to 98.6F; however it seems to possibly be dropping slightly in the modern age.
above 20C is way too hot for me, personally.
I'm American, after watching this video I will now forever measure in Freedomheit!
The easiest answer to the correlation between density and hardness is that gold and lead exist.
The longer answer is that there is some relation between density, stiffness (Young's modulus), and even melting point to some extent. If you multiply the density in g/cm^3 by 26.7 you roughly get Young's modulus in GPa... for magnesium, aluminum, titanium, manganese, and iron. Most other metals will be way lower. Beryllium and chromium are actually way above.
3:20 wood saws nowadays are made with carbide teeth so the sharpness lasts longer
Hi dude
I think might have mixed table saw blade and hand saw blade. Table saw blade have carbide teeth but regular hand saw are only hardened steel and just the tooth is hardened nothing else.
Havé a Nice day
@@Matt-ns2ty i wasnt mixing it up, as far as i know hand saws used to be just regular steel and you used to sharpen them several times to extend their life cycle
now they are made from a harder material which i thought was carbide which you cant really sharpen, it doesnt have as long of a life cycle as the old style but last longer now that we dont really do our own sharpening anymore and would have to ship them to a sharpener
If i got that wrong thats on me
@@bjornthorgudmundsson2781 the thing is they are both hardened steel but old saw were hardened completely and heated again to be sharpenable.
New saws are impulse hardened which means if I'm not mistaken that they use a high voltage on the teeth to heat it up and harden but the rest of the saw is not hardened at all. So the teeth are just as hard as a file but the back should be much softer.
7:06 sponsor end
Having youtube premium gives me a skip button so I don't have to watch it 🙃
Thanks sir
wow, lil Alec steele is growing up! I only tune in from time to time. Im one of those 'I preferred the old vides' guys. I remember you at Baker Street Forge, and now wow, looking much much older.
Every time you say aluminum it makes my American brain hurt 😂
Not as bad as the middle Pennsylvania guy who worked A&P at my school. he called it Am-mum-inum. I fully blame Pennsyltucky accents for that.
Al loo min nee um 😂
Apparently, when it was first discovered, it was named Aluminum, as Americans like to pronounce it. But everywhere else, Aluminium was adopted because it was more in keeping with all the other elements ending in “ium”
@@sullenpuffinAs an American, I love the correctness of keeping with -ium. Literally it makes more phonetic sense when compared to metals such as: Titanium, Rubidium, Thallium, Lithium, Cadmium, Radium, and my favorite, Osmium, to name a FEW.
Ending in -um just doesn't fit for me 😂
@@Sphendrana 100% agree!
Fahrenheit is like a percentage of hot to a human
0F? "I'm freezing me bollocks off!"
100F? "I'm sweating me bollocks off!"
0C? "The water is freezing..."
100C? "The water is boiling..."
they both have uses, but one is useful for knowing the survivability of people, the other for the stability of liquid water
Celsius works well for measuring temperature in a way that's easy to work with, like for cooking or scientific instruments. Fahrenheit works well for measuring temperature of an environment that people live in.
That never has made sense to me.
Why is 0°? Water freezes before then and we can survive way lower, why.
Insert five tomatoes copy pasta:
@@nikkiofthevalley that's more or less what I was trying to imply without coming out and saying it explicitly
@nikkiofthevalley I don't think it is, it's more convenient for us because we grew up with it and then people are trying to intellectualize why it should be more convenient even though the other one works so much better, and we're kind of inclined to believe it because the part about metric measurements being inconvenient for us hits close to home.
I don't think 0 to 100 degrees are useful for relating to the human body, 100° being almost body temperature is literally all it has going for it, ok good job gold star now what is the f*** is a degree Fahrenheit?
Actually I'm going to look that up it probably is something, but I know a degrees Celsius relates to how much energy it takes to get a square centimeter of water to boil at atmospheric pressure based on BTUs which are based on candles
Sounds pretty human-centric to me.
Looked it up and it's based on An 50/50 ice Salt mixture what the heII does that have to do with humans or anything?
Let's just get rid of Fahrenheit and we can make a new thing called degrees Nikkio where 100 degrees Nikkio is the actual temperature of the human body (because Fahrenheit got that wrong) and then we just use degrees Celsius as the units.
One thing tho, the American calendar system is based
Can you do a video on all the safety equipment you use? What do you look for? What materials do you use? What kind of respirators do you use? How do you make sure you still have hair?
That segue into VPN was crazy
Do you realize you almost lost your shop!??
Welding on Magnesium could have ignited that whole bar, and goodbye shop.
It is very difficult to burn bulk magnesium so that is very unlikely
If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.
Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others.
2:10 I'm not 100% sure but i don't think density and hardness are very strongly correlated. Gold and Tungsten have very similar density, but very different hardnesses. I suspect it's got more to do with melting point, since iirc germanium can be chewed like bubble gum due to its low melting point and i supposed mercury is a liquid so would be "soft"