How To Cast Metal (LEGAL LOOPHOLE)

I want a pair of brass knuckles, but buying them is suspicious. So instead, I'm going to post a YouTube video on how to make a pair, and we got the suit coat on because it's getting a little chilly down here in Texas. There's two ways to cast metal shapes, and the first one is imprinting it into green sand. So I got my friend Pancakes to print me some. But these brass knuckles are made of plastic, and they're not that durable. So I'm going to need to get a metal pair, and I'll be showing you how to do this, but another way is just using styrofoam or 3D printed objects. And then when we pour our molten hot metal on top of them, it melts into the form of that shape. So we're going to try that first. I had a poll a couple of months ago, guessing what my age was, and everyone got it wrong. I'm actually turning 20 in just a couple of days. You're probably wondering how are you even going to be able to melt metal. Now, if you're a Cool Man Things OG, you would've watched my metal foundry video that I posted a couple of months ago. But I'll give you a quick recap. So you actually only need three things. The first one is some insulation, a metal bucket, and then a propane torch. Now before I show you how to make this, if you don't want to do this, you can just skip this by using lead or Peter, because those metals have a low enough melting point just to melt on your stovetop. Now our foundry is fueled by propane, but just putting a propane torch on a piece of metal won't be able to melt it. So we're going to need to make something that'll raise the temperature high enough to be able to melt metal. This is going to be our foundry. For our insulator, I'm going to be using kaowool. This stuff looks and feels a little flimsy, but when it comes to insulating, there's nothing that can beat it. This stuff is such a good insulator, I can literally be holding it with a flame on one side and not even feel the heat on the other. A huge warning to when you're cutting it or handling it at all, you need to wear gloves. This isn't a this might cause cancer in the state of California, this is a this will cause cancer. So here's essentially the idea. We're going to take this metal bucket and line it with kaowool, drill a couple of holes so our propane torches can fit inside of it, and then we're going to be lining the top with our kaowool as well. Before we do any of this, we're going to need to acquire our torch, which is the hardest part. I spent hours searching for one, and luckily, I've linked it in the description for you so where you can afford one for extremely cheap. If you'd like to build your torch yourself, you can totally do that. The only problem with that is building it is much more expensive than buying one. Now that our torch is assembled, we need a way to connect it to a propane tank. For this, just buy a propane grill hose. When you buy it, you'll need to slightly modify it. It'll come with an attachment on the end that you're going to need to cut off. When you buy the propane torch, it'll come with this crimp that you're going to need to slide onto the hose. Now comes the tricky part, which is sliding this pipe onto our brass fitting. This can take a lot of muscle to do. Now that you've put it on, take your crimp and tighten it with a screwdriver. Now that I have everything attached, it's time to screw it on and pressure test it to make sure that there's no leaks. Pressure test it. We're just going to be using soapy water in a spray bottle. Now you're going to turn on your propane and spray any connection point. If you see any bubbles forming in any of the spots where it could leak, then you do have a leak and you need to redo your seals. It looks like we're good to go though. So now it's time for us to cut our pieces of kaowool to match the inside of our foundries. As you can see, I have actually cut out this slightly larger than the area of the pan. This was done intentionally because the thinking is I'm going to be able to put it inside. Now when it's upside down, this thing isn't just going to fall out. As you can see, it holds itself up when I flip it upside down. This is what we need to do because no adhesive could withstand the temperatures of the furnace. We're going to unscrew the nozzle and screw it back on on the other side. That way there's less of a gap and it seals itself off more naturally. Building one of these has lots of advantages because I'm able to melt aluminum and even stuff up to copper, but we have a problem because I don't actually own this package right now and I don't have a 3D printer either, so I have no way of getting a 3D printed object. So I unfortunately had to send the package back. So Landon wanted me a 3D printer and some cool stuff to turn to metal. For those of you who don't know me, my name's Theo and I'm a fellow small YouTuber who also likes to make cool things. And if you can't tell by the fact that I have not one, but two 3D printers, I am a nerd. And for those of you who have been living under a rock and don't know how a 3D printer works or even what it is, basically you load some plastic into it and then it runs down this tube into what's called the extruder, which basically works like a hot glue gun and gets really hot and turns that plastic into molten plastic. And then as you can see, it moves around and turns that molten plastic into literally anything you want. Honestly, this is probably one of the coolest things I've ever bought. I mean, I bought two of them. I've made all sorts of sick things with this 3D printer, including this fully 3D printed cat powered airsoft gun and even this action figure myself. I have a YouTube channel where I show all sorts of epic things, not just 3D printed, but a lot of 3D printed stuff like this and this and this and this and this and this and this. As you can see, I found some cool stuff, including some brass knuckles, some throwing stars and some cool knives. And as you can see, it's now done. Now the knife printed kind of weird, but I think I should be able to clean up with some sandpaper. So now I got to try to cool down the bed and then the stuff should just come right off. As you can see, the knife doesn't really look like a knife. It's got all this weird stuff on it, and those are actually called supports. And basically what they're for is when you're printing something, the printer can't just print on air. It has to have some piece of plastic to print on top of. I got it cleaned up decently well. Now I just got to reprint the other knife because for some reason it didn't print with the blade. I reprinted the other knife and also printed some different throwing stars because I accidentally printed the other ones a little bit small and I also found a cooler design. So now that I have it all printed, I need to get it to Landon. But I have one problem. Mailing stuff from Ohio to Texas is incredibly expensive. And I'm broke. Yo, Landon, here you go. Now that we have our shapes, we can start metal casting. Now you don't actually need 3D printed or styrofoam object. I can metal cast this metal knife if I wanted to just by imprinting it into green sand. Now you can spend $40 to buy green sand, but all that green sand is is just normal sand, but wet. Subscribe. All right, so the metal is cooking in the furnace right now. So I'm going to show you how to make a mold with sand. Now the method that we're using destroys the shape, so it's actually extremely easy to make a mold. I'm going to grab a metal bucket or a wooden frame and put like three inches of sand at the bottom. Like I said earlier, we actually need damp sand, so just get it slightly wet. Now I'm going to tap all the sand down to make sure it's well and packed. Now we'll lay our object on top of it and compress it again. I have a feeling something like this won't work super well because it's extremely thin. Now we're going to poke two holes, one for the metal to go in and one for pressure to escape. Now I'm hoping this 3D print has a low melting point. If it doesn't, we'll have to imprint it and I'll show you that method later. Let's try it out. Yo! I think it worked. Also, someone tell me in the comments if I just got cancer from breathing all this smoke in. Ah, dang it. I don't think we did it. There's still plastic everywhere, but yeah, that's unfortunate. Next time I'm going to add much more metal. Wait a minute. It actually looks like we might have done it. There's just a thin layer of plastic everywhere. I got really lucky, I guess. This time it should work because it's a lot thicker. We'll also be trying it vertical. That way gravity takes it down. Look at that. It's just entirely red in there. That's crazy. This is my last 3D printed pair of brass knuckles, so now I'm going to have to imprint mold it, which is a little bit harder, but I'll show you how to do it. We're going to take a five gallon bucket and cut it three inches from the bottom all the way around. But for a more budget-friendly option, you can just use two cardboard boxes with the tops opened up. What we're going to do is fill them entirely up with sand and then pack it down tightly. Now we're going to take our shape and press it in. Now we're going to stab two holes all the way down to the bottom of our box in our second one. Now let's flip this over on top and try it out. This was a terrible flip, but it's all we got for now. So let's go ahead and give it a shot. The next step would obviously be cutting off these little metal things, but I'm going to go ahead and throw it back in the furnace and we're going to try it with the last bit of 3D print that we have. While that stuff's melting, now would be a great time to tell you I actually got my first 3D printer, so I'm going to be doing really cool projects from now on. ATF, watch out. So we messed up the brass knuckles, but I bought a 3D printer and it is arriving soon, so I'm going to try it in a future video if you guys want. Regardless, I have some other 3D prints that we're going to go ahead and try. So I got a ninja star and this cool looking knife with this little circle on it. This time we're not taking any chances, so I'm going to show you how to build an actual molding box. We're going to cut our two by four into four six inch sections. Now we're going to cut our plywood to match our two by fours. I'm going to fix it to the plywood with some nails. I mean, it's far from perfect, but it's only job is to hold sand, so it's going to be fine. We're going to cast a ninja star because I feel like this is going to be pretty easy to do. So we're going to pack it up just like we did last time, but this time I have the added advantage of using this two by four to level it. All right, this is attempt like five. I have this bag over here just in case it leaks out. Here we go. I'm going to let this cool down just a little bit longer because it's extremely brittle when it's hot. I used an aluminum zinc alloy, so it's kind of brittle. All right, let's take it out. Frick! Y'all, I suck at this. Like genuinely, what am I doing wrong? I'm an idiot. I didn't even have the hole drilled to the 3D print. Let's see what it looks like. Frick. I'm not even sure if I'm doing anything wrong because I'm following all the steps correctly, at least I think I am. It might just be because these prints are super thin and are pretty obscure shapes to print, but I bet someone out there is skilled enough to do it. I only have one more 3D print. This will be my last attempt, so… Wait, this is actually the best we've had so far. It's starting to peel off. Let's see what it looks like. Ow. I just burnt myself really bad. Oh, I think I just snapped the knife. So we actually finally did it, but as I was peeling off the rest of the plastic, I snapped the end of the handle off. That sucks. I have a 3D printer. I have it in a couple of days. Let me know if you guys want to see a part two, but I actually succeed this time. Okay, so I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Essentially, I didn't have enough pressure buildup. I'm supposed to have a taller funnel, that way gravity pulls it all down. I had a very small funnel at the top. My dream is to be able to do all cool man things, not just chemistry stuff. I'm going to start to dabble in mechanics and electronics. Also let me know if you guys want to make this kind of like a series where I do like this metalworking stuff. Honestly, I'll probably just make it a series if this video performs well. If you have any advice or tips, just leave it in the comments. I'm always reading the comments, so yeah. Also we're extremely close to 50,000 subscribers, so thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I will continue to be making awesome videos.