NileRed - 2023-12-22
💻Thanks to Opera for sponsoring this video! Get a browser that’s literally better at everything, download Opera today: https://opr.as/12-Opera-Browser-NileRed A few years ago I stumbled onto something called purple gold and I really wanted to buy a pure purple gold ring. However, I was devastated when I found out that it didn't exist...so I decided to try and make one myself. Turning old jewelry into pure gold bars: https://youtu.be/37Kn-kIsVu8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NileRed Store - https://nilered.tv/store ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ■ NileRed is now available on Nebula! https://go.nebula.tv/nilered (when signing up with this link, a portion of your membership directly supports the channel) Join the community: Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/nilered Discord - https://discord.com/invite/3BT6UHf NileRed Newsletter - https://nile.red/home#newsletter You can also find me here: Facebook - https://m.facebook.com/NileRed2 Instagram - https://m.instagram.com/nile.red Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/NileRed2 Nile talks about lab safety: https://youtu.be/ftACSEJ6DZA Music in credits (Walker by SORRYSINES): https://soundcloud.com/sorrysines/walker
"Im not usually into jewellery"
Nile casually making himself grillz a few months ago
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts 💨
He's right tho. He's unusually into jewelry.
@@kphaxx Exactly
He’s right tho
In the grillz video, he mentioned that grillz was really the only jewellery he liked.
I love how the chemistry in this video isn’t complicated, it’s just Nile learning that casting metal is complex.
I'm totally down for this arc for Nile. Sometimes he doesn't need insane chemical recipes to make something exciting.
Turns out that materials science is pretty different from chemistry and just as complicated. There's a lot more to making a high performance alloy than just the right mix of elemental metals.
@@iankrasnow5383 but material science is partly chemistry. Especially when this is about alloys.
This video features a lot of manufacturing and material science, two things I did in mechanical engineering. I did very little chemistry in it
@@SURok695 Mainly engineering though
Nile: "there was still one problem though, and that was how ugly it was"
the bar: 😢
i would be proud of it
bro was really roastin tf outta the hole-y bar the entire vid 🤣💀
What a waste of money looks like something you get in a kinder egg
@@tarzant4445Womp womp
As someone who uses sandpaper a lot, I can almost guarantee that the gold that you lost simply just got stuck in the sandpaper. Soft metal is very good at clogging sandpaper grit and with as much sanding as you claimed to have done, I'm genuinely surprised you didn't lose more than you did lol
Yea metals u gotta grind and he didn’t grind it cuz sanding it didn’t work but grinding it would definitely work
WooooW!! I didn't think about that 🤔 sheer simplicity...brilliant!!
I'm pretty sure he'd have had to have recovered the gold from that. It's pretty simple if you just burn the paper. Getting the sand out would be harder though.
@@GameDesignerJDG and you also have to remember that a lot of that “sand” is actually aluminum oxide. I’m no chemist, but I would think that introducing other chemicals into the mix would make recovery a bit more challenging lol
Thats so obvious, he must have thought about that and just dumped the sandpaper into some acid to dissolve everything but the gold
Nile: "I have no idea where all the gold went!"
Also Nile: sanding, grinding, hammering
💀
It's hilarious watching how Nile's knowledge base is kinda a mile deep, and an inch wide :D
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts
He said in the video that he collected all the dust and dissolved it with the rest.
Smashing some chunks through the lab 😂
I showed this video to my godfather who owns a large jewelry company and he told me he had tried to make this about 5 years ago and this was some of the finest work he had ever seen
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts.
you have autism@@p-__
That's interesting to hear! Do you think he would try again in the future?
@@p-__congrats? 🤨
Will he make it
Imagine being a medieval king and some alchemist walks up to you, pulls out a bunch of bubbling, color changing liquids and transmutes your gold into purple gold jewelry. It would blow your mind.
These people were given significant roles in the king's court, meanwhile people that could do math were executed for witchcraft lol.
Based, fuck math@@Sursion
"WITCHCRAFT!! GUARDS!! GUARDS!!" That's probably what the king would say
@@Sursion What are you talking about? No they weren't. Nobody got executed for math, try to avoid just making random things up and stating them as historical facts.
@@TylerChamb Lmfao who let this guy onto youtube?
I love how dedicated Nile is to making these videos like $5700 to $7200 on just one ingredient is crazy
Probably double because if you look at around 5:00 you can see the gold bars have different serial numbers
Nile trying to not flexing how much money he spent on every videos (10k on average)
You’re not going crazy about the gold loss - in my workshop, we call it ‘Fairy Tax’ - a tax paid to the fairies for good luck on the piece. Works every time 😅
Oh, interesting....kinda like the Angel's Share in distillery work. A little of your liquor volume is lost during the fermentation process due to evaporation~
That’s perfect 😂
i thought the angel's share was the part lost during aging? @@firegodessreiko
Pretty sure he didn’t add the stuff he sanded away , seems about right for the amount lost
@@Element0145 He properly did. But properly not the dust stick to the sand paper. You can only recover them by burning(or use the acid) the sand paper to ashes.
Fun fact: in the semi-conductor industry, this alloy is known as “purple plague” because it’s extremely detrimental to parts. Basically, if gold and aluminum contacts touch at high temp, some purple alloy naturally forms. This alloy is both brittle and a poor conductor, leading to electrical or mechanical failure. It was a big issue for a while, and Al and Au are some of the most common contact materials in chips. So yeah, fun facts for ya.
Edit: Wow, this blew up, haha. Glad to start some cool conversations and learning!
Very interesting thanks for sharing
one man's plague alloy is another man's shiny finger trinket
Grats, I give you 100 likes, on this, Christmas Eve.
My gold is better than NileRed’s gold
Glad someone else called it out. It's super obscure unless you're in the right industry, and then you hate it lol
As a retired manufacturer of alluvial gold extraction plants in Australia, I was dumbfounded at your experiment, and ecstatic at your result.
Congratulations, you did extremely well.
What makes this ring particularly cooler than most is how genuine it is. The design and process was obviously based on techniques already used but to source it all yourself and go through the process as you did (imo) is what makes that ring so precious. fallowing your own ideals of what you feel made your product worth casting was a sight. the random mistakes that inspired the design and helped the process. truly one of a kind. thanks for sharing this yo!
One month on, Singaporean here and I just happened to stopped by Lee Hwa for some jewllery shopping. Asked the staff about purple gold and would you know it, the staff informed that this video was shared all over the company internally. Staff shared that Lee Hwa actually experienced a spike in international sales right after this video dropped, so they have Nile to thank for!
Betting on new jewelry companies to start rising up and making more polished purple gold than what's currently available. The competition begins...
You are correct. Lee Hwa's website have gone from an average of 20k viewers a month to a bit above 290k.
Thanks to Nile they most likely gonna have their best year.
THATS WILD
WHERE'S HIS CHEQUE???
This is so amazing ❤❤❤
Yeah, another future sale here
Whats crazy is you've advanced a field. no one makes cast purple gold jewelry because of the complications. You are now one of the best in the world at that specific task and made it look like a college students term project.
To be fair bro has a 6 figure laboratory
@@Devblivion 🤣 You're not wrong
Purple gold is ugly but...
He's a chemist doing material science lol
@@Devblivion That certainly helps in figuring out the correct process. But the actual gear you really need doesn't seem that expensive.
I mean, you need the beaker and the acids to pulverize your gold (and that seems to be optional, you can use other methodes) - you need some way to melt the gold, the argon-setup and a way to get your molds.
I think some mid 4 figures of gear and material (excluding the gold) to start you off.
Hi NileRed,
Nice video.
I have three, probably important, comments for you :o)
I hope you will like it (at leat it may interest scientific peoples, enginers and chemistry educated peoples, or readers).
1°) About your gold amount disappearing; you are right gold when heated vaporizes and some is lost not only litteraly but effectively into fumes... so you are "totaly sane" and absolutely not crasy; your results show this effect quite obviously (and yes dramaticaly).
Not many knows this but gold is a "noble" metal; and as such molecularly despite its weight and density; it ressembles by many aspects to mercury metal or noble gases; when heated; it sublimates partly thus long before melting point is reached some is lost in the air.
2°) Annealing at 600°C is one thing; but often in industial processed it is made several times in sequential mode; so heating, cooling, reheating, recooling, etc.; I'm quite sure that your pink-lilac colour will improve upon cycling more (not a single time (like what you did), but several times) and also by checking the form of the cyle (speed of heating, time of plateau, speed of cooling).
3°) The bubbling of Ar gas into the melt (or N2 gas - that is cheaper) a bit like what is done in chemistry with fluids to degas them is a good option; just like the ultrasonic (or vibrations like some cements, plaster, plastic for molding)...
but
Did you consider reducing the overal pressure; it also degas things more and faster; some use a depressurization chamber for cements, plaster or plastic molding; of course taking into account the volatility of some ingredients or solvents; here despite aluminium and gold are metals and melting point should remain almost the same; the oxidizibility of aluminium should be reduced in lower pressure; but volatility and loss of gold will be worse under reduced pressure than your 5% loss :o(.
Kind regards
PHZ
(PHILOU Zrealone from the Science Madness forum)
This needs to be in the top comments. Thanks for explaining!
@@ouch9402
Thank you.
Glad it catched your eyes and interest you.
I'm so glad I read all of that, it's so cool! Thank you for taking your time to share your knowledge with us!🌻🌻
You're a very nice dude! Thank you for the information!
The solid substance made of more gold than aluminum is truly lavender. If light reflects the thing, it is fuchsia. The jewel looks so beautiful! Even more beautiful without holes!
I feel like this man single-handedly expanded the purple gold community from almost nothing to something in the eyes of the people
frrr
A hundred percent
Smart marketing 👀😅
He just filled the entire Wikipedia page single handedly,
The patent US6929776B1 looks to have expired in 2020. Maybe there will be more purple gold jewelry coming around using this method.
Dude just completely reverse engineered, fully documented, and probably even improved a deeply proprietary jewelry process based on a one line recipe in a patent, what an absolute beast. I'm thinking most of your gold loss was in the sanding and grinding, especially if you didn't chemically extract the gold from the used sandpaper.
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts.
and now its public and non-proprietary, not requiring a patent!
I'm guessing that he did extract it chemically...
@@p-__ Scientifically impossible. Go away
@@kitsunekaze93 The entire point of patients is that you share the information with the public (no reverse engineering needed) and then the exclusive right to use it, defending with lawyers instead of secrecy.
The fact you just keep going and never gave up, for such a simple yet satisfying outcome, I absolutely love it
That beaker drop was such a cool joke. My jaw dropped temporarily.
My immediate first thought of seeing a beaker full of dissolved gold is "What happens if he drops and breaks it", and without missing a beat Nile trolls the viewer with exactly that lmfao. Mindreading content creator.
I had a heart attack for him in that moment 😭
me, 2 years ago when he made that short video.
My heart dropped when that happened, then had to laugh at myself once I realized
hurt*
and he still has that metal block on the floor
Can we just appreciate the fact that this guy took an arcane process only known to a few specialists and made an entire YT step-by-step that everyone can now see.
Congratulations, man!
Lee Hwa's not going to be happy 😂
"Purple gold is super difficult to work with" meanwhile he's making a whole ring of this stuff.
@@SkyEcho751lee hwa probably trying to scare away the competition
@@yanuk818They’re gonna be very exited. Millions of people now know that purple gold jewelry exists.
Lee Hwa Jewellery may be putting a hit out on him.
I can't even imagine how happy excited and proud you must have felt during this process but at the same time devastated, hopeless, sad, confused, etc. Congratulationssssssssssssssss
Jewelry companies hate this man, he's showing us the secrets and the methods so we don't gotta pay for overpriced rocks
i am a jeweler and goldsmith apprentice and seeing you drop the beaker "full of gold" game me heart palpitations and i almost started crying in Italian
yeah i seen that and was like "oh my god WHAT?"
MAMAMIA THE GOLD
@@pohkuangda6662I literally cackled when I read this
😂😂😂
Before he dropped the beaker I was thinking "Wow it would really suck if you dropped that..."
Casual 8k CAD beaker
Man really just spent $8000 on gold, bought a CNC machine, and spent days purifying and re-smelting metal just to make a ring he doesn't think he will wear all that often. Legendary.
It's about learning something, not having the thing you learned to make. I have a shop full of them too! Lol
But look, it's purple!
that's how sciene works
Anything for the content 😂
tbf the $8000 he spend will be still worth $8000 if he ever wants to sell it again
I’m watching this as a foundry man (you are a reason I chose to do this) and I 100% think I could have helped you on this project and saved you from a lot of pain 😅
Blue gold would be so cool if it were ever made
Gold-indium and its worse than making purple gold so good luck! but its also very very brittle too.
The beaker drop had me in shambles until I realized it was just a bamboozle
Oh no....
same lmfaoo
My heart sank when I saw that then I swore at Nile
I about had a heart attack lmao
I literally yelled out loud in anger, frustration, and sadness. But then I realized that it had to be a prank, and I am very glad that it was.
7:50 As soon as the gold was completely dissolved, I thought to myself, man, the worst thing that could happen is if he spilled this beaker of $5,700 orange soda. I basically yelled out loud when I saw it slip.
dude, this exactly hahahaha i flipped out
I pictured dropping or spilling it as well! It definitely put me on edge haha.
He did the same thing with bromine lol
I was expecting the prank. Still gave me a heart attack
That was such an easy joke, considering he already did it once)
My uni major was chemistry (53 years ago) and we worked with different solutions. At one point, I had to salt out gold from a liquids as part of my final exam. They were extremely alert when we worked with precious metals.
I always watch your videos on Facebook and love them. I never knew you had a YouTube channel. I am a huge fan of precious metals, and saw TraxNYC's purple gold Jesus pendant and him shouting you out in the comments. I'm glad to now be a member of the channel. When my finances are better, I will become a patron. Much love from Chile.
yes i just saw trax’s jesus piece and had to come back to look at nigels quality 😂
@@danielfinley-pesti6661 and Nigels ring is far superior. 💯
2:06 “But for some reason, I really felt that I can do it”
50 minutes remaining
Nile, you’ve done it again
I felt this in my adhd
The part with the Aqua Regia is exactly how George de Hevesy hid 2 Nobel Prize medals during WWII. To the soldiers who looked around his lab for valuable things, it just looked like a beaker of orange chemicals. After the war, he precipitated the gold back out and the Nobel Committee recast the medals from that gold.
Dude, that is amazing! Thanks for sharing!
didn't know this story. so cool
I knew that story from wayyyyy back in chemistry lab when we were playing with strong mineral acids.
Science wins again! Love it.
This is an amazing story. I think this would have been cool to hear in the video.
Imagine a random guy melted gold and put purple coloring in there and there it is. Perfect purple gold.
I stumbled upon this on You Tube. Young man you are a very bight spark ! Your laboratory is well stocked & supplied.
Well done, very informative & highly educational presentation.
You presented information concisely & accurately , the chemistry is faultless & suburb . Thank you for sharing in the Cosmos.
Keep up your continued scientific interests. The World needs more of your mould type .❤🎉
I'm a jewellery maker, and I just watched this whole video utterly fascinated. The chemistry, the complexity of casting metal, and the artistry, all combined into an absolute thriller. When I studied jewellery making, I never got to cast gold for budget reasons, and I only know in theory how gold can be dissolved in aqua regia, and I'm just mindblown right now.
553 Likes And No Replies Let Me Fix That
@LOLOLOL69220 i already know you're a bot
Having studied jewelry making I kept wondering if he knew what a centrifugal caster is. That might have eliminated the last of the bubbles and cast the purple gold into the final form all in one.
@@CalophonMechanoChemistry?
this must be so satisfying for someone in the know lmao
I think you've advanced the field of purple gold metallurgy by several years
Or at least the information available on the public domain.
*Pold
@@raghudurina2354 which will advance the field since this will allow more people to try different things
@@the_reapingcatwhat pold?
@@Freddy_Fazbear_and_Witherred
purple + gold = pold
I imagine the gold that was lost was impossibly stuck in the sandpaper. 🤷♂
Really cool video. You should season your crucibles with borax and also sprinkle in borax powder when melting it helps stop oxidization.
he says explicitly in the video that he can't use borax because it would react with the aluminium
This has to be one of the most well deserved patents. Not only figuring out how to make purple gold but refining the process so it can be strong and once it’s set into a shape then annealed into the crystal structure that gives it the purple colour. It must be near impossible to rediscover this without a deep, deep understanding of metallurgy.
Plus: Stuff disclosed actually works as described. Not all heroes wear capes, some sell jewelry.
He probably payed a lot of money for the patent
Metallurgy is freaking magic. I have an insane amount of respect for the researchers, engineers, and artisans that have put in the time and effort to understanding it. Every time I look at a phase diagram, I am reminded that there are some real geniuses out there.
Imagine making this stuff 1000 or so years ago. You'd be some kind of wizard/witch!
@@CrimsonA1 given the technology back then and the challenges involved I'd agree with the town folks ;)
Remember that aluminum immediately passivates into aluminum oxide, so all bulk "aluminum" contains surface layer of aluminum oxide. You need to use chemistry magic to add PURE aluminum to the liquid gold with no surface layer. Perhaps suspended in a liquid. Add the liquid to the crucible with bubbling argon and slowly warm up the crucible evaporating the suspended liquid. Now you have pure aluminum you can add gold to.
You're also sanding / polishing with aluminum oxide. This is why it remained silver.
Do this: mix pure aluminum with no aluminum oxide, pure Gold. Bubble some argon. Pour into a mold, and put DIRECTLY into a furnace and do not let it cool below 600C. Let it sit at 600C for 24 hours, and cool down to room temperature over the following 24 hours. Then polish with stainless steel, stone, or some non aluminum compound.
I am going to do my own work with my goldsmith friend but you have much more resources.
Finally, you say you don't knowing where the gold went... But you were sanding for 10 hours (!) multiple times (!) and you ONLY lost 5 grams?
Burn the sandpaper! Burn it, I say! (I suspect it's in the crevices)
I had exactly the same thought @Wireball
The sandpaper had increased his value with those gold between de crevices 😂
@@Wireballthis was my guess too. Fun fact: gold purifying plants burn disposable bodysuits and air filters for extra gold recovery
It can hide in places you might not expect
@@Wireball Even just completely washing it might have recovered some of those lost 5 g. :p
Even if the paper doesn't require it, using water while sanding metals makes it easier to recover them because they'll be a slurry instead of dust that can get anywhere by just blowing in the general direction...
Brother salute to your resolute dedication! I really take interest in your work and never ever forward any part as it's the details that make it more interesting especially the chemistry! Love
seems like a good time to have found your channel. dope videos man. thanks for droppin em.
NileRed is the chemistry equivalent of a dad building a dresser from scratch because he couldn’t find the perfect one.
As a guy with a weird taste I got into many project this way. Doesn't help that everything is generic mass produced crap nowadays and google is crap at searching for what you input and instead tries to shill you anything they can manage.
I'm not a Dad but I did have to do that with a laundry cabinet once. It needed to fit in this space between the washer and the wall. There was no way I was just going to find a premade cabinet the exact right size. But that didn't stop me from looking for days for one. Then I just made it.
@@1pcfredmy husband does the exact same thing. He hated the way our tv looked on our built in shelves so he completely redesigned it.
This is such a random simile - my father built my dresser when I was a kid (I got to help pick the pulls and paneling used on the sides). I still have it, honestly it's been in five different houses, gone about 35k miles, and is at least 30yrs old, and still looks like new.
@@flightsnotfeelings5867 sometimes you have to go custom.
Nigel being surprised at losing a few grams of gold with the B-reel of him sanding off 10% of the mass of the casting got a chuckle out of me.
And every time the stuff on the spatula.
Bruh, don't you think that he probably just collected all of that?? Come on, what do you think?
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts.
he said he collected it. that is why he was doing it by hand
@@supernenechiThere's a significant amount that can and does get stuck between the grit of the sandpaper. He would probably have to process all the pieces of sandpaper in order to reclaim it.
45:40 yeah this is why jewellers usually use a long thin strip of gold, bend it around a ring sizer, cut it to size and solder together the edges
The dedication to this is amazing
This is legitimately some stuff that may have never been recorded on camera let alone documented in this way. Fantastic work, NileRed. You should be very proud of this one.
May even help future companies that want to try and make this stuff. This video was very impressive.
I never knew elixir was real irl
He's the local chem wizard of YT. This is what youtube was made for. 💙
From now on jeweleries from all over the world trying to make purple gold will look at this video the same way we look at those extremely detailed answers from 2007 forums for ridiculously niche questions
@NileRed - 2023-12-22
Your browser is holding you back. Level up with Opera here: https://opr.as/12-Opera-Browser-NileRed
@sage211 - 2023-12-22
Ok
@p-__ - 2023-12-22
My farts are better than NileRed’s farts 💨
@lorelaimorace-kk1xz - 2023-12-22
SUUUUPE DUDE
@james3126 - 2023-12-22
first jk, i love u nile
@RNGclips_ - 2023-12-22
Hello