How To Make Synthetic Ruby With An Electric Arc At Home
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- čas přidán 14. 02. 2019
- How To Make Synthetic Ruby With An Electric Arc At Home
I´ve finally managed to make synthetic ruby with my stickwelder. All compounds can be bought at a pottery supply store. For the electrodes, I would recommend looking for "Graphite Stirring Rods". Don´t use rods from batteries, as these are contaminated with electrolytes.
Electric arcs produce dangerous UV radiation. Do this experiment at your own risk.
Dude! I just came across your video on arc created ruby! I've been doing the same thing since I'm bored of not having completed my Verneuil furnace. Awesome I'm not the only one doing this!
Rubies along with sapphires (which are both forms of corundum) are definitely one of my favorite gemstones! Hard to believe that they're made up of the same compound (aluminium oxide) that can be found coating all aluminium objects from soda cans to kitchen aluminium foil!
It's definitely cool stuff. Ever since I got into chemistry and especially corundum, I see the world in a whole new way and it's incredible. As long as I'm exploring the physical properties of the world around me I'm happy. I'm REALLY into collecting minerals right now and trying to figure out how to extract elements and/or compounds. It's fun stuff. I know some locations not too far away to get bauxite so I may try to get some and extract the Al2O3 and convert it to elemental aluminum. I'm trying to get manganese, iron, nickel, chromium, copper, silver, gold, mercury, etc from ore I personally find. I like chasing the challenge I guess.
+@@mwilson14 Good luck with that because aluminum as you already know is not going to be an easy metal to extract so that will indeed be a challenge for you.
@@brfisher1123 Thanks. I'm certain I can create microscopic deposits of elemental aluminum from using high voltage DC arcs. I've not tested this out yet with aluminum, but I have accidentally with chromium which surprised the hell out of me. I was trying to do something else, but found the steel cathode was coated in silvery chromium crust with chromium dendrites.
I may try the cryolite route (Hall-Héroult process), but I'd like to try a few things that I've not seen done yet.--just out of curiosity. I'll probably fail which is cool with me. Failing is part of learning.
+@@mwilson14 BTW what was the price of that natural ruby specimen?
@@brfisher1123 It wasn't too much. I think it was $36 total shipped. It may have been cheaper even, but either way it was a reasonable price.
Great video. At what amperage did you set your welding machine.
Thank you.
Have you considered building your own arc furnace? It's not a difficult as people think, and it would let you process materials exponentially faster.
Just been able to recreate the synthesis. Used two low voltage transformers in series. (~32 V AC)
I got quite bad contamination, i think its because of the two graphite rods i am using.
Love the Project!
Great video. Why are more people not subscribed to you. Great channel! Keep up the good work.
yeah it is officially ruby, but it is poly crystaline and is the exact same stuff of which your DREMEL work tools (the pink ones) are made of... corundum...
so its unfortunately not worth much.
In order to let it have gem-value... it needs to be a monocrystaline... and that is way harder and takes months to crystalize.
And the UV used must be at least be 365 nm and not higher.
I need to try this myself. good video. :)
Great video! You explained the process quite well! Which camera are you using that works with the black light?🤔 My footage when using uv is just terrible.
I´m using both my phone and a GoPro. I´ve never had any troubles with the footage, but it seems harder for the phone camera to focus when using uv. Also the rubys glow much brighter in reality. I wasn't able to record the real colour.
@@SomeAustrianGuy Perhaps use a uv blocking filter disc, they're insanely cheap, stack a few as they're also kind of weak.
USE UMA LANTERNA UV É BARATINHO E FUNCIONA .
It is better if shown clearly. How is the quality. Giving an enthusiastic moral tks.
Tried the same, and also got some "stones" but they are rather dark-red. is it possible, that the carbon of the electrode mixes into the stone ? does the polarity of the welding matter ? my stones do not glow/shine at all with my black light bulb. is something going wrong ?
How can i get little bit of cromium from stainless steel for this project :)
I have seen your comments on other CZcams channel on video about isolating cromium from steel ?
You need to dissolve the steel in nitric/hydrochloric acid and then drop out everything with NaOH. You will get a brown sludge, add H2O2 to the basic solution to dissolve the chromium as Cr2O4 2-. Iron and nickel won´t dissolve. Filter the solution and keep the orange liquid. Add ethanol and boil the liquid for a few minutes, this will reduce the chromate to Cr3+. You should get a green sludge in your beaker. Filter the product and heat it until red hot. The resulting powder is Cr2O3 which I used for the rubys. Although it is possible to get Chromium from stainless steel, i wouldn´t recommend it. It takes a long time for the steel to dissolve and the process involves chromates, which are very toxic and also cause cancer. Cr2O3 is rather common and also not expensive, it is much safer to order the Cr2O3 online.
Why cant you use a TIG torch , instead of a rod and stinger , it would be cleaner ?
What setting did you have the welder on? And what is the mixture rate that works for you like 5g of one powder and 15g of the other powder or what is the best measurement that works for you
I have my welder set to 100A, but more power is better. I use between 0,5% and 3% Cr2O3, with 0,5% the rubys will be pink, with 3% you get a deep red.
VOCE NÃO USOU ÓXIDO DE CROMO JUNTO COM O ALUMINIO???
What could these rubies be used for?
Did you use a good quality ruby as seed? Because a successful growth process uses good quality starter seed to new materials comes and replicate the molecules.
Sind die Rubine im inneren klar, oder weißlich?
Did you experience any carbon contamination in your finished rubies?
if you want to break oxides to something like chromium directly, this method cranked up should work nice
Very nice! :)
It might be interesting to use a concave plate or even a heated concave plate
how u make the arc?
Can this level of stone transparency will work for ruby laser ??
No, you need incredibly pure ruby for a laser. You can get these ruby rods from eBay for less than $40 and you won´t get near their purity if you make them yourself.
very cool
I wish you luck on sapphire too. It's damn difficult, though the advantage is that it does require higher temperatures which the arc achieves.
Thank you, i´ve already had minor succes, i managed to make small green and blue sapphire. I´ve watched all of your videos on the topic and I think you used Fe2+ and Ti4+ for your blue sapphire? That mixture didn´t work to well for me, instead i used CoCO3 which gives a light blue colour. For the green sapphire I used ~1% NiCO3. A small problem is, that the sapphire has a lot of bubbles in it. I´m quite sure that this is because i used carbonates which decompose to CO2, roasting the CoCO3 and NiCO3 schould fix the problem.
@@SomeAustrianGuy I've made the blue stuff once using CoO and it does make a very even and vibrant blue. It's truly a beautiful hard substance but the mineral & gemology world doesn't consider a blue sapphire as being made with cobalt. The blue sapphire is only considered a blue sapphire if the blue is created through valance charge exchange, which is of course Fe(III) & Ti(III). The problem here is the source for Ti ions is typically Ti(IV) in titanium dioxide. Fe(II) doesn't like to exist long on its own so in short time it oxidizes to Fe(III), violently if fresh and thrown into the air (I like pyrophoric iron).
I think my step of creating the FeO just created an extra unnecessary step. Sapphire can have it's color adjusted from dark grey to yellowish orange depending if the boule is heated in an oxidizing or a reducing flame. Once I found that information, I quickly realized the sapphire will favor the blue color by heating the feed material containing Fe2O3 in a reducing flame. If it comes out dark gray, then treat it with an oxidizing flame for a certain length of time and it will change color. From my experience using my formula it will eventually turn dark orange or yellow-orange if left in the oxidizing flame for too long.
I don't honestly know the exact time intervals to get the perfect shade of blue, but if you heat treat it in these different flame types, and look at it's progress in time intervals, of say five minutes, you'll find out how long to heat it. You can perform this heat treatment between 1400 and 1800 degrees Celsius if I remember correctly. That temperature range will need fact checked. Let it completely cool and treat it for 5 minutes and cool down to see the color. If it still needs changed, then move onto 7, 10 minutes, then 15 or whatever interval you choose. I think sapphire is sometiems heat treated for up to 45 minutes, but this is something that definitely needs fact checked and it's not easy to find the answers. I have the links to some heavy duty research papers on sapphire chemical composition and how the heating conditions effect color change. I'll find the link on my computer at home and post it here in the next reply.
photos.app.goo.gl/ZhLsxp9B5NDRjsIV2 This shows the results of my flame fusion produced sapphire and ruby along with the cobalt mix. I've got a sample of natural and lab created stuff too for comparison as well.
Here is a link for my arc created ruby.
photos.app.goo.gl/ZfDoefVq77ibxryj8 I think it's so cool we were both working on this at around the same time. The fact that someone else was thinking of trying this same technique is satisfying.
Here is one last album you might find of interest. It displays the explanation I gave regarding color change with sapphire. This stuff was created by the heat of thermite and you can see where it is colorless, to yellow, orange and blue. It's interesting to me anyhow.
photos.app.goo.gl/cudnAC5fFx3RE37t7
iam recomend you to use tungsten crucible so that when the ruby melt they collected in crucible also tungsten start to melt at 3400c if im not wrong they sold it at 60$
How much you sell them for
Please make a video on synthetic sapphire...
Awesome video. I have been trying to get TKOR to make a Ruby in his arc furnace but you are the first guy iv seen do it. Instead of using a stick welder using a stick and plate what if you use 2 sticks to generate one big arc and focus that arc into the powder to generate a larger ruby. Cheers mate. Awesome vid
That is actually a Video i've filmed already. I just didn't have time to post it yet. It works well, but the powder sticks to the outside and makes it rough. You can make larger rubys, but only the inside looks good.
@@SomeAustrianGuy make an extremely large ruby and then tumble it to clean it up, or possibly facet the ruby into a gem. Cool I look forward to that video being posted. New subscriber.
@@kodyfrost I plan on doing that in a Ball mill. I've already talked to a gem expert about my rubys. He told me you can polish them, but the rubys need to be very large. It seems like you grind away more than 50% of the stone.
@@SomeAustrianGuy there is apparently a better technique!If you start with a bead of aluminium metal and chromium metal you will end up with surprising results:in my case I have a great example of what is coming out!It's very fluorescent and the crystal boundaries are so much awesome!And it is actually better than doing this from oxides!
Anyway what I was definitely surprised with once I made that was a 1 centimetre thick sapphire doped with rhodium(3)and(4) oxide!I just once precipitated about 0.38 grams of rhodium as somewhat more of it's oxides and in addition to that I eventually got a bunch of aluminium oxide precipitating out as well,yet as I am really lazy guy I decided to toss everything in the crucible(to be precise in this case I was using a bunch of broken tungsten electrodes which is the best thing to melt any oxides onto!) as is and thought that rhodium will decompose well below the melting point of aluminium oxide,and will be eventually accumulated somewhere inside the piece of aluminium oxide!But what happened was actually just anything but:I ended up with very deeply darkly coloured bead of Rh(3+)&Rh(4+) doped alumina!And this is while decomposition point of the last rhodium oxide is less than 1200°C and the melting point of aluminium oxide is fucking 2072°C-just wtf guys?..
I’ve done this with soap stone and it made a glasslike black mass before
I'm going to be that guy. These are technically ruby glass. While they are chemically the same ad ruby, their structure is different. Synthetic rubies that are identical to natural, take months to slowly cool under high pressure to form the right crystal structure. Still, these are very cool and have their own uses.
kick ass bro!
Nice Video Thanks!
Can you polish it to become clear?
Nope!
The outside can be polish to get a glossy finish, but the inside will stay opaque or translucent at best.
To get a clear ruby, you need to let the high temperature longer to allow the internal crystal to grow larger.
Microscopic crystals = opaque
Single large crystal = cristal clear
Thank you for the explanation.
VOCE NÃO USOU OXIDO DE CROMO?
What about Carbon contamination?
Try adding a Tiny bit of water some how well making them, i think it should make more clearer Rubies i started adding a Tiny bit of water to my Plasma Fused Synthetic Crystals and they have been coming out more clear.
3:34 is their any way to purify this ruby into transparent ruby crystal perheps by heating then heating by microwave radiation ????🤔🤔
Not really. If you cool them very slowly, they should get pretty clear. Sadly I´m not able to do that with this setup.
so its rapid cooling that makes it opaque?
what are the recommended methods of cooling it slowly?
Hello, I've tried to repeat ur project but instead of some beautiful red rubies I obtained little metal pieces (the melted electrode I guess) and quite dark metal-like colored little stones. The latter ones can scratch glass, but they are horrible and too easily breakable to be pure corundum. UV light also seem not to reveal any ruby in the products of the welding. And I heated quite much the stuff, I remember that some big incandescent drops were almost boiling...
I used 80A, 4mm electrode, And a mixture of 99,25% Al2O3 and 0,75% Cr2O3
What did I do wrong?
Sorry for my bad english
You need to use pure graphite electrodes. Some graphite electrodes have a copper coating on them, you need to remove the coating befor you start.
@SomeAustrianGuy Thankyou! It's me with another account. Is a pencil mine good for? And what about the platform? Should I use a graphite one too?
Very probably I'll not be able to reply you again so thankyou very much in advance and thank you for the answer, you are very helpful and I can see that you are really interested in your activities and do not upload on yt just for getting views. Your channel is amazing keep doing the grat work!
Yes a pencil mine is ok. A graphite plate seems to be the best, but a large copper plate might also work.
It is difficult to see in the video, but are the rubies clear inside or cloudy?
Most of them are cloudy. Only one was somewhat clear. I think the Problem is, that they cool down to quickly. I'm working on a Part 2 of the Video.
@@SomeAustrianGuy why did you say you haven't seen any youtube videos of ruby making? There are dozen you neutral idiot.
Cool,bro!Now I suggest you to go further and maybe make doped sapphire!For example with ruthenium tetraoxide!That is going actually to be hell of a challenge,because it is already gas at room temperature!
Anyway I tried with rhodium trioxide RhO3 and actually failed to get it to dope anything because it simply decomposed and formed microscopic spheres all over the volume of molten Al2O3 and so actually that was expected to happen..
I will definitely try make saphire. Getting the colour right is a lot harder than with ruby. I'm currently out of platinum groupe metals, but I like your idea.
@@SomeAustrianGuy anyway it has to be transparent but in case you want to get it blue coloured-you will either have to introduce for example cobalt or cadmium or just the way through getting an irregular crystal lattice like in case of blue diamonds that still don't have any impurities-only carbon but with a structure a bit off-that should be vastly more complicated process,I am not sure that it will even work!
And I just now had an accidental doping of Al2O3 with rhodium oxide,just from cat converter material I had some leftovers in a beaker together with a bunch of rhodium oxide and so I decided to smelt that down as is,thinking that it will all decompose at temperature below melting point of Al2O3 and so I should have had it working as a flux,so that after smelting everything in zirconia crucible I thought that I would have a blub of fused Al2O3 with a nice rhodium bead at the bottom but instead when I finished first half and flipped the whole thing-I noticed that colour was strange but decided to hurry and melt it from another side..So what I have now is a sphere 1 centimetre in diameter comprised of Al2O3 doped with about 0.3-0.4 grams of rhodium oxide!Obviously very intensely coloured a dark red colour..
Interested can u send me a good amount for testing in our lab
SEU PROCESSO DE ARCO EM CAMPO ABERTO NÃO FUNCIONA,ESTA QUASE LÁ.
can you sell these rubies
What will happen if I use battery rods ?
You can use battery rods. Just make sure to burn the electrolytes out of the rod. If you don't do that, you will make a lot of smoke.
Forbidden jawbreaker
What if you use a tungsten crucible and TIG welding electrode?
The tungsten will react with air to form WO3 which produces an orange colour in the Ruby
@@SomeAustrianGuy Oh wow. Didn't think of that. Thanks.
Actually after thinking about it, inert atmosphere sould work. But too much trouble, I guess.
Try adding some glass 3-4%
Where to buy pure aluminum oxide because no one sales pure
eBay, but mine doesn't seem to pure
What is the worth of these synthetic gemstones?
Next to nothing, ruby is very cheap and you can buy 20cm long synthetic ruby rods for less than $100 on eBay. I just think it's fun to make the Stones yourself and try to get different colours.
Instead of a flat plate try a troth shape
I want to make a gem quality sapphire knife but I haven’t found much on homemade gem quality sapphire
Ritual sacrifice?
Butter knife
@@zekiah2 go get gem quality you need a furnace that can get hot enough to melt and cool slowly, so for the technique in the video its really not possible
@@themartianway "Ritual sacrifice?" Dear themartianway... that was a good one.. You made me laugh so hard!
I know that ruby= Al2O3 + Cr2O3
sapphire = Al2O3 + Fe2O3 + TiO2.......what if we add some gold ?or CuO, Ag2O or even UO3 to Al2O3 and grow a crystal?
Other oxides will produce different colours. Copper and silver tend to make the sapphire brown, Co turns it blue, Vanadium produces orange. I would love to test UO3, but I don´t think the police would like that. Uranium should be able to produce a lot of colours depending on its oxidation state, same with Pu.
@@SomeAustrianGuy wow, thx for your reply...U solve my problem...
@@SomeAustrianGuy i may give it a try on UO3 or UO2 and ThO2....Thankyou anyway......
@@SomeAustrianGuy Can I do it with thermite reaction？ Al + excess U3O8?
It should be possible, but most Al isn´t extremely pure. Al usually contains Fe and Mn which could change the colour. It would be better, if you could melt Al2O3 mixed with your oxide with an eletric arc like I did. A hydrogen or acetylene torch should also get hot enough.
If ever it were possible to have Pink Malo Malo Pearls,,if that were possible. This is what they would look like.
Sapphires are not berylium based :) they are same as rubys but instead of chromium oxide they contain titanium oxide :) berylium is found in emeralds , tinted green with vanadium or chromium oxides :)
Are u using a stick welder
Yes
How many amps were needed?
@@aleke8328 Everything from 100A to 300A is fine. The more amps you have, the more ruby you can keep liquid.
What would you have to do to make them more gem like?
I think you would need to keep them hot for much longer and then cool them down very slowly. Commercial synthetic ruby takes weeks to make.
How do the look cut/polished?
I´ve never polished them. These rubys aren´t clear, so i think they wouldn´t look very good.
@@SomeAustrianGuy Do you know if it is possible to make them clear with this process?
@@glitterkitten9499 You would need to cool the ruby very slowly. This process can take multiple weeks.
@@SomeAustrianGuy I've been doing alot of research and plan on using tungsten crucible with ultra high purity nano oxides in a inert gas furnace.
I planned on trying to cool them down slowly like glass and stuff
But weeks? Ouch. Def gotta experiment on how fast I can make it go.
Using a tungsten crucible will exclude any contamination that occurs from the graphite crucible itself/arc welding rods
The downside is you can't take it out of the furnace till it's done. Tungsten loves to oxidize when hot ;-;
Thanks for the response!
ESTÁ MAIS PARA SAFIRA DO QUE RUBY POR CAUSA DA COR.
so I can sell these as a side hustle!?
No, synthetic ruby is already cheap and this is just lower quality synthetic ruby. It's just a fun project
@@SomeAustrianGuy oh ok cool thanks
my thoughts lol
Please make a update video
I am very busy right now because of my studies. Unfortunately, I will have little time in the near future. Anything specific you want me to try?
Yo is there anyway I can buy a little jar full I play world of warcraft and would like it for Xmas just slide me a 60 $ invoice I'll pay
Well, the clarity is bad
Yes, the clarity could be much better. I think the problem is, that the rubys cool down way to fast. Making them in a kiln and cooling them down slowly might make them clear.
The sound is not clear, you have to speak Loud, slow and Clear, Please !!!
i know an austrian guy.
That is not ruby. That is aluminite ceramic with chromium oxide dopant. It is not crystalline.
Your claim that you made ruby would be the same as if you melted silica, made a blob of glass, and claimed you made quartz
To be fair he claims it to be a synthetic ruby and is true to form. Have a look here: www.gemsociety.org/article/understanding-gem-synthetics-treatments-imitations-part-4-synthetic-gemstone-guide/