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Casting SALT like Metal - What Happens?
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- Published on Apr 18, 2026
- Can salt actually be melted and cast like metal? In this experiment, I melt pink Himalayan salt and table salt in a furnace and kiln, then try casting it into molds using the same process I normally use for metal. The results were not what I expected, especially when comparing kiln casting vs sand casting.
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Science & Technology
With a dagger made of salt, you can slash someone /and/ rub salt into their wound, in one stroke.
It would break on any impact. Salt is too brittle.
@KingBongHogger woosh
@KingBongHogger thats even better
And if you're a cannibal it's seasons the meat!
You can't do that. That would be a salt with a deadly weapon.
this is literally peak youtube. calm voice narrates over non clickbait video
More like lickbait
Top notch
Its not "click bait" when the thumbnail shows and says exactly what the video is...
That's all I want in this world!
@CommieExiles that's why they said "non clickbait"
The broken dagger can be called 'The Shards of NaCl'
😂
I came here specifically to see if anyone had said this yet. Nicely done haha
YES
@philipfry352 Don't you mean NaCly done?🤣🤣🤣
it's used to fight the Lord of Snails
Hi, molten salt chemist here! (yes, its a very specific niche) The bubbling you saw around 4:25 is likely moisture and oxygen boiling off the top. Chloride salts in particular are incredibly hygroscopic -- they absorb moisture from the air like crazy! This is why we never really work with molten salts in the open air. Also, great idea to wear your respirator! Molten salts reacting with moisture in the air can produce some gnarly off-gases.
And at 8:36 you found out about how wetting salts can be on ceramics. This is probably because you performed these casts in air. If you were able to control the chemistry and atmosphere in your casting process, you can actually get good separation between the ceramic and the salt. However, this also means you'll need to use a binderless ceramic as well. So your options are limited to materials like mullite, alumina, quartz, boron nitride, and similarly annoy to machine ceramics. I wish it was as easy to "unwet" the salts when they stick to the walls. But this is a big engineering challenge when designing molten salt systems!
Great work!
well now I have to go find out what molten salt chemists and molten salt systems actually do
@sionthomas3235 heat transfer!
I thought you were being sarcastic at first 🤣😆
@sionthomas3235 Thermal solar farms use molten salt as a way to capture heat and continue to produce power after the sun goes down.
@LadyLightning77 heh no, I am captain AuDHD and the rabbitholes are everywhere
6:13 "Honey, please pass me the salt."
*slams a megalodon tooth on the table*
Isn't that oiled sand for the mold? Would you trust it
@jacquestube yes :)
😂😂😂
would be funnier with the dagger
@jacquestube I’d never trust something that came from diddys beach
In a million years I would never have guessed that casting salt would look like iron. Amazing.
Probably due to the sodium, which is in fact, a metal.
@UltimatePerfectionit's highly unlikely that there's anything metallic in there. It's probably the burnt oils from the sand
@BlackZodMaster its not. they are correct. sodium is a metal and is the reason it looks like this. it likely lost a lot of Cl via gas escaping. i'd honestly be a bit terrified of his casting. sodium is a highly reactive metal, but considering he melted them down from NaCl, its likely no where near pure enough to be a risk
@UltimatePerfection Sodium looks nothing like that. It's a bright metal that quickly forms a white oxide layer when exposed to air. It's also easy enough to check, if he adds some water to one of the fragments and it reacts violently, it's probably sodium.
Otherwise it could be a metal that diffused out of the sand. I know nothing about casting sand, but for regular sand that could be silicon. The dark metallic color does match that.
@BlackZodMastersodium is literally a metal.
Potter here. It doesn’t surprise me at all the salt stuck to the ceramic mold. Salt is used as a glaze forming material in a special firing called salt/soda firing, where the vaporized salt literally melts the surface of the ceramic and forms a layer of glass all on its own
Helped a friend do that with raku firings. Must admit, the idea of using a beer keg for an outdoor furnace was cool.
Saint Potter
Been reading some muggle chemistry eh?
Potter here. Never heard of salts being used in a glaze, the heat melting the glaze and mixing it with the ceramic creating a glass phase is enough. Idk what kind of glazes you guys use but I never heard of any of them containing salts.
@ProtectFreedomOfSpeech you just heard about it you clown
Professional hand-molder and aluminum caster for over 25 years here.
On the open cast you can see how much salt is shrinking when cooling down.
This percentage of shrinkage is the problem with the other castings and is responsible for the cracks.
Still, it's a fascinating video-I've never tried melting salt before. Keep up the good work.
You could extinguish countless numbers of ghosts with salt weapons.
Great movie plot
Well, you end a ghost by burning its corpse with salt. Worth a try, though.
Holy shit imagine if the Winchesters had a blacksmith friend
@yahikokurotama4351 There is no paranormal stink behind the Winchester mansion, that's all horseshit that was made up by the people who inherited the property in order to sells tickets to stupid ghost tourists. The Winchester manor is the way it is because Sarah Winchester was a female architect who inherited a stupid amount of money from her and her husband's rifle business, but could do nothing to satisfy her creativity besides add useless rooms and hallways to her own home because it was the 19th century and people were only just then starting to get past the notion that all women weren't just otherwise useless homemaking baby machines, and her passion and talent wasn't taken seriously, despite her vast wealth. Fuck you if you disagree.
Were*. Fuck, you know what i mean.
“A communal salt lick for my family” 😂
I didn’t expect that either 🫠
caught me as well
"Kevin licked my side!" 😂
Every good home has one.
licking the Salt Skull is bound to curse you for eternity.
I did a bit of research. The reason your castings came out a slick gunmetal grey is likely due to the dissolution of carbon and trace copper from the crucible creating a carbon and copper chloride suspension in the salt, as well as surface carbon from the pyrolyzation of the oil in your casting sand. In short, the casting is contaminated with potentially toxic compounds and can no longer be called "table salt."
Until you are able confirm otherwise
*_DO NOT EAT. NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION._*
That's quite interesting. My best guess was that some of the Chlorine had been stripped away from the Sodium by the heat, which had then quickly oxidised around the outside. That would have also explained what the gas bubbles were when melting the salt. But that makes a lot more sense, especially considering its only really viable to separate sodium from chlorine via electrolysis.
I find it unlikely that a large part of the color comes from the mold, because the fractured faces of the dagger look the same color as the outside. But either way, probably better to be safe than sorry.
Who cares... eat it
@Kenionatus look up carbon drift in steel.
So you're saying the family salt-lick is probably not a great idea.
I just wish you had tried to polish a few of them up with a polishing wheel? The metallic finish was kind of cool, but would be interesting to see if that colour runs all the way through.
The colour doesn't run all the way through. Look at the back and interior of the open pour skulls that were broken.
7:13 I thought “why not clean it with water?” then I remembered we're working with salt!
Same here 😂
I wonder if it’d be okay to clean it with salt water that’s fully saturated? Maybe then the salt wouldn’t dissolve into it?
@ChemoorVodkamaybe alcohol is best
😂😂
Mineral oil and methanol works pretty well for FTIR NaCl plates - technically methanol will have some water... but it takes a super long time to be a problem.
"I finally have a sword made of salt!"
Slugs:
Sword stats:
-75% damage against "Human" type enemies
+200% damage + POISON against "Slug" type enemies
INSTAKILL for "Ghost/Spirit" type enemies
oh i thought about shotgun bullets
@eugendd12x2Ah yes, salt shotgun shells against giant snail monsters.
@kriegsmesser4567 -75% damage but causes "Agony" for 5 minutes. Does not stack.
😂😂😂
The casual communal salt lick for the family...
got a laugh outta that
I'm picturing it... 😂
pass the salt lick please... lap lap lap
in the shape of a skull lol
Haha!!!
The salt you added probably had some trace moisutre in it that it naturally gathered from humidity in the air.
Chemical Engineer here. The bubbling you observed during melting is probably due to water and some gas trapped within the salt crystals. The mettalic aspect of the cast surface is unexpected, but probably due to the interaction of the Hot melted salt with the mold minerals.
This was the comment I was looking for. FYI, I love your work. In a different life I would’ve have pursued the wondrous path of chemistry.
I would imagine it would be similar to the science of soda glazed ceramics, where salt is thrown on the ceramics while still in the kiln, leaving an almost iridescent glaze
He used pink salt which contains trace heavy metals, like lead and iron. I would suspect that contributes to the metallic sheen.
I think there was a chemical reaction with the chloride ions that captured some metal from the sand releasing metal sodium
I wonder if the surface is sodium metal, rather than sodium chloride, hence the metallic appearance
9:25 it looks like some serious archaeological find
HE MADE THE ONE PIECE
@digiaprotogencalledl4378😂 yeah
Scientists 1000 years later, "Apparently in 2026...they made tools out of salt!"
That was my first thought,,,, makes you wonder
Indiana jones and the salt crystal
High school chemistry teacher: "Sodium is a metal."
Me, thinking, "Ah, so you can make swords out of it."
a sodium sword would be suuper soft lol
Right, and chlorine is a gas, so... Maybe this is actually more like sodium carbide or sodium carbonate, similar to creating a carbide steel and burning off the chlorine in the process
They sell it as chunks immersed in oil since it’s super reactive with the air. Straight up looks like feta cubes in oil. Cuts like it too.
@schenectadyny-official would blow up when you stabbed someone.
@FuKItM4nso you're saying it's better to make sodium arrowheads that explode when they penetrate your enemy?
Stabbing someone with a knife made out of salt is diabolical on so many levels.
“Why so salty?” Joker, probably
@Obversus-o7rubbing salt in the wound?
Great video! Missed opportunity to cast a salt shaker though
Salt salt shaker, I like it heh
What a Peter Brown idea!
missed an ever better chance to cast a salt rifle
@talcbbawould a cast salt bullet survive being fired or would just salt mist and fire leave the barrel?
@fortyyardcrayon Bug-A-Salt on steroids
Lol, a family salt-lick
He could literally make much more efficient salt forks with this
Yes lick blocks are a thing. They are used to contain caws herd in mountain. A fence would be too expensive. Just attach salt block to a post, and the herd will stay around. They are sold as big circular rings big enough to slide around posts or be attached with a wire. Mountain water is very poor in minerals so most animals seek for complementary salt.
Yeah, lol. Using salt seems a bit unhinged and dangerous. Glad my family sticks to butter for this purpose.
@DarthSchum a family butter-lick, eh? Now thats unique!
Ishgardians would go wild for this
Something I have never seen done in RUclips.
When I was a kid I mixed molten aluminum and glass together and made statues with lines of purple and green glass in the result, glass cracks in places cooling but is held in place by the aluminum, makes amazing light features if made hollow
Be the trailblazer of this on youtube
@K1efsatzHasherachagreed
That's a great idea
Subbed to your channel so when you post it i see it. No pressure!
aluminum is used in glass to strengthen it sometimes so it's definitely something that interacts with silica. interesting
Broken dagger almost reminded me of the shards of narsil
you mean the shards of NaCl (totally stole this idea from quazimortal)
No "sponsored by", no unnecessarily long 'what will this be, lets find out, I am so nervous, oooo okay lets find out, wait actually', just straight and simple "I'm excited to see, so lets see" and immediate result. Top tier video my guy
Yeah, if this video didn't have a unnecessary comment like yours... I think it would've been perfect...
@SentenceToDESU mans was just tryna spread positivity let them be
@SentenceToDESU yeah, how dare people compliment a video and tell the creator something they enjoy
@SentenceToDESU Yeah, if this comment didn't have an unnecessary reply like yours... I think it would've been perfect...
@mrrp_mrowp spreading positivity is fine but these bot ass glazing comments need to go bruh
6:36 Some people have a sweet tooth. He's got a salty tooth
Chowder had a sour tooth
Well done! 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼
I wonder what would happen if you were to replace the salt with sugar?
@tomq6491 Idk but it would be pretty sweet
Essentially the same thing. Do you not remember in the early 2000s people were shoving spoonfuls of salt into their mouths to tame their sweet tooth, and cardiologists were freaking out? Got so big it was on the view or something similar.
4:23 my guess would be that salt attracts moisture easily
you made that up
@ArickA4he said my guess lol
Trapped H₂O
Himalayan rock salt has a fair amount of water trapped already
@ArickA4it’s a guess
it never occurred to me that salt can be melted
9:15 "...communal salt lick for my family." Something I thought I would never thought I would hear. What is wrong with the Robinson family?
They're vegetarians
blood pressure
family hunting season
They are were-deer
What is wrong with you that you don't have a communal salt lick?
5:45 just don't try to wash the sand off.
So tempting!
It should be fine cuz only a really small layer will be removed
In the optical industry we submerged glass lenses in molten salt for several hours to harden them.
You guys do amazing stuff. I work with fiber lasers and I saw that Veritasium ASML video.
Every engineering challenge took like a decade and a team of nobel laureates and eleventy billion dollars... except the insane lenses which needed to be atomically smooth.
From what the video showed, for that you just call Carl Zeiss and your 99.999999999999% perfect lens arrives next week.
When people ask me technical questions about laser lenses I just tell them you keep hand sanding til you get to 50 quadrillion grit which is just rubbing baby bottoms across the lens
Im not even sure that's wrong, though 😂
Also steel tempering works with this too
Salt crystals trap air as they form, so your bubbles are just from that air getting released as the crystal structures are broken down
Salt is also highly hygroscopic so it could be caused by water.
@greensun5998 also it could be humid air during crystallization, so kinda sorta both?
Moisture is very common in most salt, though it's in small quantities unless you're talking epsom salt.
@greensun5998 All salts have crystal water. That's why it is often described as NaCl+3H2O for example :)
I'd expect rock salt to contain all kinds of impurities. It's probably mostly air and water with traces of who knows what.
Never expected it to look so metallic but they turn out great
Graphite from burned up oil binder of the sand.
Either the sand, or the crucible.
@mike3963 It is the color of graphite. Sodium will only appear mentally shiny when in a glass vile.
@mike3963 cool
This isn't sodium
It's sodium chloride
@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410beat me too it 😂
youtube was pushing this as hard as they did with the "can you cast molten obsidian" video back then so i guess i have to watch it then
Never expected salt to look metallic when casted, this is fantastic. Thank you!
I wasn't even aware of the fact, that salt even CAN be molten...
Here’s one. Did you know that you can evaporate (actually, sublimate) diamonds?
In most cases if it's a solid, it can become a liquid, if it can become a liquid, it can become a gas
@deanfowlkes On Neptune, it rains diamonds....
@deanfowlkeshow?
Almost anything can be melted under the right conditions. Some things that can't can still be vaporized or plasmatized (ionized)
the salt fork guy needs to see this
My thoughts are exactly opposite. It might break him after seeing how easy it is and all sacrafices he made in the name of carving some forks.
@surikatga
This isn't the edible kind of salt anymore thanks to all the graphite contamination, so fork guy can rest easy knowing his work was not in vain.
@bnwlkr
@arifhossain9751 Graphite is kinda edible. It's all the other contaminants that might pose a problem.
@arifhossain9751 there are other methods still, you dont need a graphite crucible to melt salt
I know sodium is literally a metal but the degree to which they came out looking metallic is awe-inspiring.
He’s also seemingly using a pink salt which isn’t pure sodium or sodium chloride, so they usually contain small amounts of other minerals and metals like iron magnesium and such as well. Any other elements such as chlorides and weaker lower melting point elements like potassium nitrogen will mostly turn to gas and burn off hence the most likely reason there were the bubbles
Sodium is a metal, but salt isn't.
Molecules are not merely the sum of their parts.
The impurities in the salt would also make it more corrosive to graphite, so there's a decent chance that metallic sheen is from the crucible partially dissolving into the salt.
Yeah they really do look metallic. Kind of like a mix between lead and graphite. This was really interesting.
The sheen is from graphite, unlike metals, salt sticks to graphite very well
The fact that you can melt salt is so mind bending
I have melted salt as well, and what struck me about it is that it went through a phase transition that looked just like ice melting to water. When liquid, and extremely hot, there was no visible indication that this liquid was hot at all. It also ran almost as fluid as water. I found it very unnerving actually, and fascinating at the same time. I just used an electric pot designed for melting lead, it got hot enough to melt the salt. When it cooled, it froze into a solid puck the shape of the pot. Unlike water, it did not expand when freezing, so it popped out just fine when cool.
I read somewhere that water is a one of the very few (or only) chemicals that expand when frozen. And if it wasn't for that fact, life as we know it would not exist.
This is why molten salt nuclear is super awesome
@SanchoPanza-wg5xf decades ago, Isaac Asimov wrote a fascinating article on why and how water expands when it freezes. And also about why this was so incredibly important for so many things, especially in life.
@ready_here Isn't that it? When water cools it loses density and sinks, but when it freezes it expands and rises to the surface. And that's why our oceans circulate and don't trap life-giving nutrients on the bottom.
If it is transparent, then it doesn't emit lots of electromagnetic waves, so it is not brilliant as liquid metal
7:50 The Shards of Na-Cl (Narsil)
Still sharp...
@notmefosure Imagine getting cut by that, it would hurt so much
@SomeGuyJammin et tu, bruteaaaaauuuuurghhhhhh madre di dio!
@SomeGuyJammin That honestly sounds like a weapon you would find in a D&D campaign.
@SomeGuyJammin
Bro... salting a wound?
No! Salt wound.
There is a RUclips channel about a guy trying to make forks with salt, I think he would find this video useful.
This should be the template for this type of video.
Very well done! The castings look really cool
1:20 He is pink for an amazing reason.
he is salt for an amazing reason
He is salty for an amazing reason
DAN HENTSCHEL
Ball knowledge
He worked at T mobile for 10 years, he will probably keep working there.
@ 3:58 I would move that tripping hazard rock.
Agreed.
but then how do you smell what the rock is cooking?
@jungy537it's quite easy when the Rock is cooking you.. with molten salt.
where is the fun in that
YOU DO NOT TOUCH THE SACRED ROCK
3:14 FINALLY a youtuber who is actually decent about safety. Too many people see safety when making videos as an afterthought.
There shouldn't be toxic fumes when melting NaCl, so probably not that necessary.
@Daniel-fi4ls Doesn't change that it's better to be safe than sorry. Besides it's not like it's pure chemical - the reason it's pink is because of unpredictable inmpurities.
@Daniel-fi4lsdepends on what other residue from previous projects was left over in the crucible. It's also not really healthy to breath in salt as it can seriously mess up the body's ability to regulate water distribution ss water is attracted to salt, creating an environment rife to get bacterial growth.
Safety shouldn't take a back seat
That's not a RUclipsr thing, that's just a person thing. The ones not on camera are no more likely
@Daniel-fi4lsI was thinking the chlorine might produce phosgene gas. That's pretty insidious stuff
The solid salt bubbling when submerged is a vapor pocket
I’m a a material scientist and engineer and back in university they told us about ceramic processes and they told us that casting was not an option due to their high melting point except for some “low melting point” ceramics like salt, is interesting to watch salt casting, maybe the salt objects you cast in the sand casting where with that “metallic” color due to impurities that diffused, very nice video!
Do you think the impurities are relegated only to the outside, sort of like a shell? Or do you think they are more diffused? I'm not a scientist, just a bit nerdy, and very curious!
@cindabearr the carbon from the crucible almost certainly diffused throughout the workpeice. You can see on the broken knife peices how the color pervades the interior.
The other contaminants from the sand most likely be only a few mm deep at most
@cindabearr The diffusion should have been superficially and on the material interior too, that’s because the diffusion depends on the solubility and mobility of the impurity. Some impurities should have diffused less, as in some workpieces the color was superficial, and in the broken workpiece the color was in the interior too, so other impurities should have diffused to the material interior, so both. It’s basically that, depends on the solubility and mobility of the impurities.
melting point of salt can be reduced considerably by mixing with potassium chloride, can be as low as 657c
you can also use a mix of sodium and potassium nitrates
@justinpyle3415the knife "broke" while cooling due to shrinkage. It was expected. Check the colour of the skulls he dropped.
The broken skulls at 5:25 reminded me of the opening scene from Terminator 2.
4:28 it’s because it’s oxygen in the salt crystals and gets released because crystals form different than metals
I never thought of salt as a material that could be melted. Thanks for the video
"The Salt Sword: Snail's Greatest Nightmare"
Pfft, every person's worst nightmare... ever sprinkle salt on an open wound of yours?
Great for killing the dragon-snails in medieval paintings 😂
@MrEli768 like having a burn status, that is indeed painful
Salt Sword + 15 vs snails
Saltcalibur: the greatsword capable of extinguish unholy and slug monster in one slash. Deal agony damage 100% toward enemy
0:10 I feel like it's worth specifying that sodium chloride is A salt, yes sodium chloride is salt, but salt is not always sodium chloride (not to mention most table salt you buy is fortified with potassium chloride also)
Okay Jimmy calm down, take their order and press the buttons
And iodine if yr smart. Tho that might not mean much.
@ValeriePallaorono iodized salt destroys the nutrients in the salt for a negligible amount of iodine. Supplement it separately, just buy a tincture of Lugol's iodine.
The potassium chloride there is 2% by volume and its only purpose is prevent clumping.
@Deathstrothe fuck are talking you talking about. Iodine is an atom. It doesn't destroy nutrients.
That broken dagger absolutely looks like someone needs to write a D&D adventure about it!!
fr!
Legend of the Saltcaster
Defeat of the slug king.
It looks so good im having a hard time believing it's salt! Very impressive!
Making a dagger out of salt, gives the saying to put salt into a wound a whole new meaning😂
4:25 I suspect the salt has absorbed some moisture which boiled off
All salt you use is a hydrate, which means it has chemically bound water even if solid. When the cold pieces are placed in the furnace, the hydrate decomposes releasing water vapour. That's probably the reason for the bubbling.
And the reason they look almost metalic is probably because of a layer of carbon from decomposed oil. You may wanna store these in a very dry place because who knows what may hapoen to their surface as they reabsorb water
👍
Just an addendum, since it is pink salt with lots of impurities, it's not necessarily all hydrate that's bubbling, it could also be various gas expulsions.
Salt is NaCl correct? is there any chance of releasing chlorine gas doing this?
@ryanjohnson3615 I wouldn't expect so in any significant amount. Yes, there will be plenty of Chlorine ions around but at those temperatures, they'll find just about anything to react with.
NaCl doesn’t have a hydrate chemical form. Dissolved water, maybe.
amazing the difference of the fine salt used in the ceramic molds
cast an IKEA lamp out of salt so it's a literal salt lamp, rather than just a chunk of lit up salt.
7:51 Bro made the shattered pieces of Mehrune's Razor.
Fr
0:49 Those would make some badass pauldrons/ shoulder guards!
Damn for real
Welp, i know what my next homebrew Paladin of the Deep is gonna wear.
1.75x size? Or would it be 2x size for armor?
That was pretty neat. Thanks for sharing it with us. 👍
8:42 depending on how high of a temperature you fire the ceramic to it might have become completely vitrified and not able to easily absorb water so it would need like maybe a couple days of soaking
If there are trace metallic solids within your salt or your crucible, it's actually entirely possible that your end product could have a layer of metal at the top or bottom of your casting. It's possible to have a redox reaction that pulls the metals out of the salt and deposits it at the bottom if it's more dense than the molten salt and vice versa for if it's less dense.
The metallic sheen could actually be a very thin layer of metal!
I'm curious to see how thick it is, if it's a coating, and if it could be polished off to reveal a more typical salt colour underneath...
@dacheetah I'm trying to wrap my mind around why everybody seems to be surprised that molten sodium would look like a metal once cast, Sodium IS a metal! Other similar examples, well-known as both metal, and salt: Magnesium (Epsom salts), Manganese, Lithium, Uranium, Molybdenum.
But then it occurred to me, I'm Autistic!
Ok so, depending on how a particular mineral interacts with the other elements that might've been present at the deposit, usually dictates whether it collects as crystalline salts, or as formations deposited in stone.
Many of the metallic elements on the periodic table, can be found as deposits of either salt, stone, or both. A large amount of people are completely unaware that mines can be incredibly dangerous, because of how likely that "safe" elements being mined are often, if not always, found with trace amounts of other elements deposited right along with them, many of which are toxic/deadly!
Sulfur is one of the most commonly mined elements, and Hydrogen Sulfide gas (H2S) one of the deadliest naturally-occurring compounds, is almost ubiquitous to Sulfur mining (as well as many other borehole mines), at one point I thought people didn't respect highly-reactive elements, or corrosives, or the power of high or low pH (alkaline or acidic) compounds, until their clothing, or flesh, or mucus membranes, begin reacting with them, but I guess we're just not teaching students nearly as much about the natural world, as more & more incredibly disparate scientific disciplines get crammed into even fewer school hours...
The interior is salt colour. You can see that with the broken skulls.
Reminds me of that dude that's made a business of salt forks. Loads of trial and error and he got it right.
a dagger named "salt the wound" sounds like a destiny 2 weapon
8:55 - I would think that the moisture to penetrate the pores will take much more time, I would try to let it sink for a day or maybe even a week and then try to pop it out.
Wouldn't it penetrate very unevenly? It has to dissolve ALL the salt at the boundary before you can separate, so in some places it's bound to dissolve big pits into the salt if you wait that long.
6:25 I DIDN'T KNOW THAT!!! Never expected to learn something about Megalodon teeth in a salt casting video. Thank you!!!
SAAAAME!
I actually expected it to be the opposite. It's crazy to me that the big curve would be in the back
4:39 Perhaps the salt has absorbed moisture from the atmosphere, and you're seeing that boil off?
This would be my assumption as well
Probably locked up in the crystal structure from when it was laid down al well
Chemistry grad here, it would be water and likely to be two types of water. Water that is drawn in from the air by the salt due to the hygroscopic nature of the salt. The second being water that is molecularly bound to the salt molecules themselves. Sodium Chloride itself doesn't typically have molecularly bonded water (hydrate as it is called in Chemistry) but the other trace minerals would likely have a readily hydrated salt form.
My best educated and first guess would be water boiling off. It could also be that some parts of the salt block is vaporising due to the heat. The furnace was set to the melting point of Sodium Chloride but there could be some component within that off gas, vaporise, or degrad into a gas at that temperature and melt at a lower temperature.
Without doing tests though, I can only speculate.
It doesn't require much water or vaporised products to make bubbling like that. When a liquid or solid phase changes into a gas the volume it takes up explodes massively. This is why liquid nitrogen is so dangerous. You can be careful not to freeze yourself but end up asphyxiating as it quickly displaces oxygen. 14g of Liquid Nitrogen when evaporated into gas will displace roughly 22.4L or 4.9 Gallons of air.
For water it would need 18g for the "same" volume displacement, however it will displace more due to the added kinetic energy in the molecules. The 22.4L is based off room temperature, add 1000 degrees onto it and imagine how much less will be needed to get the same volume displacement.
For any who care look up the Ideal Gas Law, the formula should look like:
PV = nRT
I am happy to go over the Ideal Gas Law but I think this message is long enough.
That is actually so cool that it cast that well.
The dagger reminds me of Aragorn's sword before it was reforged
Or Mehrunes razor in Skyrim.
Stabbed with a salt dagger is a pain I didn't think about.
@jamesharrell4360 yeah automatic salt on the wound (and in the wound)
It has been remade….in salt!
@Huttser17Exactly my thought, too small to be aragorn's sword. 😂
Something about the nonchalant deadpan delivery of "communal salt lick for my family" sent me into an explosive laughing fit. Beautiful.
I don't know how I stumbled onto this video, but at a primalistic level of dude, this is a "hell yeah"
First person to ever write this sentence
@ShiroganeABA obligatory "Hell Yea!"
I feel honored you asked me why salt is bubbling and the answer is because salt is trying to gasp for air while you slowly submerge it do its boiling death
Cast a bust of Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the molten salt reactor
7:20 Mythbusting the Evil Scarecrow Antartarctica Sodium Blade of Slugbane
Antartarctica
TF2 ass name
You have slain me with said dagger! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 The winnah!!!!!
Great background music! 4:47
On camera, the raw surfaces of the cast salt look like Quartz.
My favorite ones are the skulls. The sparkly backs remind me of geodes.
7:51 There are no broken castings. Just art pieces that have yet to be repaired with a cool binding material.
kintsugi!
@BobStein Thank you. I saw someone (Duke) repair his broken colored pencil carving of a floating coffee mug, using gold, and it was amazing. Now I know what that style is called, thanks to you :)
@Bobal27 I had to look the word up ten times before remembering it. Hope to try it someday.
@BobStein😂
A guy named Ben Walker sells forks made from salt. Semi related I was just reminded by this video
Salt isn't very strong, as a material, is it? I can't imagine it makes a good fork. Steel, for example, is about 1000x stronger than salt, and that's for a good salt crystal, too.
@kindlin yes but have you considered the whimsy of a salt fork?
Not like a fork needs to be super hard, plastic forks work fine, wooden forks work fine, if done right i don't see why salt couldn't
Might degrade over time as some of it dissolves in your food, but honestly isn't that kinda part of the point with a salt utensil lol
@kindlinbut steel doesn't salt your food while picking it
Very impressed with your salt castings
7:04 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Salt Skull
After watching, I wondered if everyone has a communal salt lick just lying around with how casual that comment was.
He remembered his password! Yay!
Glad to see you back. :)
09:10 That is one brutal salt lick. 🤘🏽
Archeologists gonna be confused with this
I would have loved to see whether the sand-casted salt polishes to something more crystal-like 🤔
Unfortunately, the contamination that makes the shiny outer coating goes through the entire casting as shown by the fractured ends of the dagger. The salt cast in petrobond sand is no longer usable as salt for human consumption.
@EdwinWiles Not with that attitude.
@EdwinWilesthat isn't true. We can see they are salt coloured on the broken skulls. The dagger didn't "break", it shrunk apart while cooling.
6:30 Also the last thing that you would see. Ever.
There is a device that was sold for making clear optical windows out of various salts. Basically, it was a metal pipe of the desired diameter with a tiny hole drilled in the middle for a vacuum port and both ends of the pipe were internally threaded. The idea was that you put in your desired salt mixture in it, subject it to a vacuum so air bubbles don't form, then heat it up and melt the salt while tightening the end bolts. If the faces of the bolts were perfectly flat, you got an optical window. If the bolt surfaces were machined into curves, you produced a lens.
That reminds me of the salt discs which are used in infrared organic sample analysis. They are usually made of sodium chloride or potassium bromide and are kept in a desicator until used.
The liquid sample is dotted onto one disc then the other sandwiches it between them. The sodium chloride is transparent to infrared so doesn't affect the results.
@peterwilson7532I don't know how these guys come up with this stuff - it's so cool. I wondered if this technique could be used to make specialized camera lenses. I suspect the material's tendency to dissolve even in humid air along with it being relatively soft kind of rules it out for general use.
@jimzielinski946Fortunately I think they have figured out how to dope glass with elements to change it's refractive index significantly. Making lenses which would dissolve in a rainstorm unnecessary. 😄
What would you do with optical salt?
Ok, I'm going to try this now. Thanks for sharing
"communal salt lick for my family" 🤣
„Communal salt lick“: deserves a like and a comment.
loved the fact you took time to explain the teeth anecdote about the side we expose VS the front side, i didnt know it ! :)
Very impressive!
skull geodes xD
I think dont turn the furnace off, but instead down, work it like a kiln to have the environment juuust below the melting point
you might be lucky to grow a single whole crystal
It’s beautiful seeing this bright golden sodium flames from the sodium in the salt. Not seen anyone even notice the colour of the flames.
in love with the phrase "communal salt lick for my family." your deer, i mean dear, spouse and kids
love it
i was still busy laughing at it that i was reading your comment and i got confused what the spelling for deer was,
i could see the joke
but then i was struggling to think what the correct spelling was because i was laughing while still thinking
Punny
Absolutely wonderful. I had no idea that I needed to know this! And the fact that a molten salt chemist have seen this video and explained so much in this comment section is almost unreal 11/10!
1:47 laughed when i realized it was table salt. Something about that is so funny.