Only on Cody's Lab: Just a cosy bonfire in my back yard... It seems my shovel is on fire...

Imagine walking along the street and you just see a guy giggling around a pool of molten, violently exothermic "lava", occasionally stirring it with a flaming shovel.

Seeing you crush those cans was the most satisfying thing I've seen all week

I work for a company that makes CNC laser equipment for cutting and marking metals, and I always advise customers that if they don’t clean their slag wagons etc out between material changes, one of the hazards is essentially thermite build up between steel and aluminum laser dust/slag. Just last week a coworker was on site for a metal fire that wrecked a machine pretty good

Me at the halfway mark: "Yeah, that was a pretty cool video. Nice one, Cody." Cody: *(pulls out 50lb bucket of thermite)* Me: 😳

Reason for the lip lifting off the sand: The thin aluminum rim cooled faster than the thicker Iron center material. As such the rim material contracted first and then solidified. After that, the thick center material solidified and contracted pulling the rim material up off the ground. This is a problem that you need to consider when 3D-printing large metal parts, so much so that the print novel needs to have a live physics simulation running to compensate for thermal contraction. At the end of the day, it comes down to thermal contraction and geometry.

The most controlled thermite reaction I've ever seen (and I've watched a lot of videos about thermite). I love that instead of just throwing melted slag everywhere, it was able to react more slowly and incorporate all of the aluminum cans and magnetite sand into the final products. When you pulled out that big lump of iron from the bottom was a huge "whoaaaaaaaaaaa" moment.

19:02 The Exact Moment Cody's Lab Became Heisenberg

2:12 Crazy to think this stuff used to be more expensive than gold, but now one can cast multi-pound ingots of it from casually discarded drink containers

Basically, you have a big chunk of pig iron. This is the end product of the iron smelteries along the Susquehanna River. Coal, iron sands and the wood for charcoal was brought down by train and barge from around Centralia and Halifax, smelted and poured into buildings with floors covered in a thick layer of sand (that would turn green from the iron contamination, similar to that used in the stems of Alsatian wine glasses). The slabs would be broken up and sold to blacksmiths, iron-wrights and steel mills, often finding it's way up to Pittsburgh. Pig iron is rather useless on as is, it takes another melt or a lot of really hot, folding and forge welding to become something strong enough to be used as anything other than a paper weight. The reason you take this intermediate step is because transporting it in this form removes a lot of weight and volume. The Susquehana Valley was the logical place to set up these foundries because it was the shortest distance, near a lot of water from the sources of all the materials needed and you can let gravity do most of the transportation for you.

That pour at 2:00 is so satisfying. The sound gave the feeling of "Aah a nice warm cup of aluminium by the fire"

This vid seems like a fun one! Thanks for all of the content over the years, I have been watching your vids for soooooo long. Keep it up :)

18:30 it is amazing that at this point you could just keep throwing more cans to keep a really warm fire.

Since no one is talking about the intro, I appreciate your effort on it.

gosh darn I absolutely love this channel. Been a long time fan and seeing you keep going and having fun just doing random stuff is a nice break from a lot of the content on here.

This is somehow the purest “Cody’s Lab” distillation and a wonderful throwback to some of the long-lost greats that boring old “YouToob” and the “Federal Government” had opinions on - that single-cylinder diesel clacking away, Dad’s ball mill, Cody measuring things, paper plates, “probably won’ts” and all. Loved this, man. Blew my mind to see that reaction consume the whole cans and boiling away like some open portal to the Earth’s core. Bravo.

Working in a fabrication shop, I love how easily accessible the materials are for thermite. Literally just laying on the floor.

Cody originally got demonetised because he made gunpowder out of his own urine. Now that he has been monetised again, he's teaching us how to make thermite 😂 Never change, Cody. You're the best.

Love your enthusiasm for these projects! I'm starting an education to become a biology teacher and I have a book on chemistry laying around that I really need to read beforehand to refresh my memory of the subject because the last time I had it was in 2015.. Your channel has taught me so much over the years though and I really appreciate you and your channel! Can't wait to try out chemistry experiments with my kids and teach them about beekeeping and the lot. Hope you're having a lovely day!!

I've been watching you for the better part of a decade and I love that you are still doing stuff like this.

Classic CodysLab; questionably safe science experiments in the back yard!

Pretty excellent result! I like the idea of only using a small amount of highly processed material. I wonder if you could get away with only a couple lbs of thermite to get a big flowerpot of crushed cans going. Also you should make another iron ingot like that and cut it down the middle. Give it a polish and boom: art.

really appreciate the explanation of the different resultant materials, thanks Cody!

Hi Cody! Great show. Thank you for making and sharing what you know. Semper Fidelis.

i can't believe i've lived 40 whole years of my life without ever seeing someone crush an aluminum can with a tamper.

"If you wish to make thermite from scratch, you must first bake a pizza."

This video was a BANGER!!! Definitely got me nostalgic to the good old days of UKposts and CodysLab. Thank you!

I am so excited this worked. I started collecting soda cans 6 years ago to test this and see it could be done and had to move before i had gotten the iron oxide made. Love the videos!

I'm a blacksmith and I've been watching you since you started this channel. In smithing we use slow cooling out of the wind and weather to create a smaller grain structure. This is called normalizing. If you make a work-piece too hot you create large grain structures and brittle steel. So that's when you normalize it. You heat it to the critical point ( so hot that its non-magnetic). Then you heat it a bit more. Then you normalize it. You do this several more times until you're heating it to magnetic. The more you do this the smaller the grain structure size will be. I theorize that it was the overnight temperature and snowfall that cooled the iron quickly. Cast iron will always have a larger grain structure than steel, but I think that the fast cooling and possibly other minerals created conditions for the much larger grains/crystals. I would give somebody else's left eye to do a smelt to make wrought iron with you. I might just give my own left eye to run a smelt, but sadly I already lost my left eye when I was 21, so someone else's it is. Any takers in the comments? Thanx for the video. They're never boring.

the railways use thermite reactions to weld rail, it is done in a funnel or conical vessel which conducts the iron to the rail joint. Presumbably the iron is pure enough to join rails, over the last hundred years the mixture probably contains fluxes and other substances as well.

I just love that you don't use super high end lab equipment for a lot of things you do (maybe all, idk). These random things are so cool. I bet you've learned so much from doing all this random stuff.

This was amazing to see , good job 👏

It's really cool seeing the iron prills in the slag. Reminds me of the forge experiments that Primitive Technology is currently experimenting with, especially iron bacteria sources.

18:40 I was 100% expecting you to toss a few additional prepared cans in, like adding logs to a fire

this is soooo cool! awesome video and energy! :D keep it up!

Been watching you for about a decade now. Something about ur videos are so entertaining with a mix of American country ingunity and science. Ur a mad lad in the best way possible.

"Ooh, that's hot." -man digging lava with a shovel

I rarely watch a video start to finish, Great work Cody!

Cody, it’s good to see you so happy man. Thanks for the fun video.

i love how unique cody's style has gotten over the years. nothing else like it

He made a pool of molten metal in his backyard with sand and cans Take a moment to apreciate how cool is that

glad one of your videos blew up, you deserve it bro. love from all the long time subs

I wonder if its posible to polish the iron with those amazing colors and what the result would look like. Interesting experiment and your enthusiasm is outstanding.

when it was glowing in the hole, it looked like a meteorite had landed. I would have thought the aluminium would have been silvery coloured like the iron. Thanks for sharing Cody.

HA! Thats clever as heck! I never considered that you could just start a large reaction that's big enough to just consume the raw cans! and considering all you needed to do to get the materials was save cans and use a magnet in the dirt, that makes a super cheap way of getting a LARGE thermite reaction! Nice job, Cody!

good ol’ cody never disappoints good on ya mate love from aus

That smile on your face 😆 Great idea for a video!! I really enjoyed watching you do that...

It’s amazing how those huge chunks illustrate just how light aluminium is compared to other metals. No way could you hold a chunk of steel that size in one hand with such ease

If you insulate the hole with dry wood ash it will insulate far better than just the sand. Also throwing wood ash on top once the reaction is going will allow the heat to increase and allow more of the iron to precipitate from the slag. The cold air exposure is causing the mixture to cool and become sticky which is why some of the iron remains in the slag. Dry wood ash is an insane insulator, I have put cast iron pieces into a wood fire and let the fire burn out, come back a day later and pulled the iron from the bed and it is still red hot. It has taken up to a week for it to cool down to handle when it is left in the ash pile.

This was a spark of joy for me, thanks for brightening up my day :)

this whole video was awesome love the pit experiment! love the "welp, let's dig it up!"

bro just goes outside and gets the iron himself

Cody is the literal definition of "Science Is Cool".

I love how you are just having fun with yourself and appreciating little funny things like eating a marshmallow from a kinda cooled off molten aluminum hole lol

Aaah ive missed your channel. So great to watch 12am before sleep. Calm , relaxing, cool, interesting and im learning something too

Cody uploaded.... Stop everything I'm doing... Await explosion.... Perfect evening.

When I was younger I made my own furnace out of a bucket lined with cement, and a hair dryer blowing air into charcoal briquettes with a steel fire extinguisher as the crucible. I was melting aluminum cans down, and about halfway through, the steel crucible started to melt. I was left with interesting mixture of steel, aluminum, and charcoal. It was fascinating, porous charcoal mixed with little round balls of magnetic steel, and smaller round balls of aluminum. To this day I cant fully understand why it turned out the way it did, but seeing videos like this are always interesting. Thanks Cody.

love your smile man it radiates joy

I think it lifted on the edges because it lost its heat mostly out the top, so the surface was cooling and thus contracting before the lower parts, causing it to warp upwards.

That mystery igniter looks a lot like powdered copper and sulfur to me. Classic demonstration in chemistry classes.

Anyone else enjoy that crystal lattice defect sliding across in the intro?

utterly fascinating. Thank you

Very Satisfying Video 😂 Came across this by accident but loved every minute of it haha.. Liked and subbed 👍😁👍

"Fire tower 1 to Fire tower 2" .... "Ummm, it looks like there is weird colored smoke and flames coming from Cody's again!"...."yah it's ok he's just making a video!"

Glad you left out the secret igniting sauce details - hopefully that keeps the video up!

Thank you Cody, pretty amazing. I learned something awesome

Now that was an entertaining video! Thanks very much I definitely learned a few things👍😉🇨🇦

I like how neatly the iron and slag separated in the last batch.

The turnings and chips work fine as is for large thermite fires. Ball milling works great for making pyro grade powders though. One fun thing to do is to make a battery with the aluminum, use the turnings for the negative side and some baking soda plus lye for the electrolyte, then a mix of graphite and rust for the positive side. Makes about 1.7V per serving.😂

Such a great video! Thank you!😊

The calmest thermite reactions I've ever seen. Impressive reaction!!

Please never stop uploading cody. I really enjoy your videos. When i started watching you i was 10, now i get 21 and still enjoy your videos and you as a person. I am studying electrical engineering right now and you contributed to my development in interest in science. Just that you know that from an unimportent viewer from germany.

Oh those colors in the iron are amazing. They are aligned like a temperature scale due to the temperature gradient. Never would I have thought about to make Thermite like this.

So great to see you back online. The last video was great, but I've been missing the chemistry vids.

Don´t know why this came onto my feed, but fascinating stuff! I ended up watching the whole video, subscribed and liked !

God i love Cody's Lab. One of the best YT channels out there and goes to show you dont need any fancy set ups or ideas. Just a man with a camera and science (plus a fantastic personality)

I used to melt aluminium in a furnace which had a bottom made from plaster of paris and used charcoal and blown in air as fuel. At one point my crucible burned through and the hot alumium came in contact with the plaster of paris (CaSO4). I figured it would collect at the bottom and added more aluminium cans on top and left the air blower running. Suddenly the plaster reacted with the aluminium in a reaction similar to this. It was very bright and quite fun to watch although also a bit scary. The whole alumium was used up and also a big portion of the plaster was missing afterwards.

Cody is my most favorite person on UKposts. This video made me happy in a way other youtubers just can't anymore

You got some balls there Cody! All jokes aside that result was great to see. Cody experiments so I don't have to! Thanks Cody

That’s super cool! I wonder if you can forge the ingot/iron you yielded? It would be so cool to make something from it! 🔥

15:01 Fun fact: Did you know that cameras are actually capable of capturing light in the infrared range? That pink glow around the fire is IR radiation. You can tell that the fire here is really hot because of how much pink there is (IR radiation is also known as heat radiation.)

4:08 don't wanna inhale that pixie dust

Love it when you do projects like this.

Thanks Cody! I'd bet the gap along the sides is from uneven cooling. It likely cooled more quickly and contracted on top while still pliable on the underside allowing it to pull in and leave the gap behind. I know that's a consideration in molded and casted parts because of the warpage that comes with uneven cooling

Dude so casually made a less angry Elephant's Foot in his yard

They used to make lead shot by pouring molten lead through sieve and letting it fall from height, the bigger the diameter the longer distance was needed so high towers were constructed for that very purpose (Look into 'shot towers' to get more details). Pretty sure you used to have access to vertical mining shaft (recall it from mushroom growing series) maybe it would be worth trying playing with this method to get aluminium shot in reasonable size that can be then thrown into ball mill for finer pulverizing. There were alternative methods developed since so there's space for some tweaking. Seems like potentially much easier and faster method than melting everything into big chunk and then spinning it all on lathe just to get chips

seeing what you do makes me to shapeshift into the core of reaction..... learned a lot 😀

Your content never dissapoints. Favorite youtube channel 7 years strong!!

"Ignition mixture." "Mystery powder." AKA, "Please don't send the bomb squad to my house kthx."

Get you a man that takes out the good shovel to stir the thermite

Cody is the adult that decided to do the things every engineer wanted to do as kids.

that pulverizing tumbler from a wheel rim is brilliant!

this would make such a good scene for a sci-fi book/film. Some people crash on a barren planet where there's no organic resources and its going to get lethally cold when night comes, but they have no source of heat. So they process a little bit of the aluminium from their crashed spaceship into dust and gather up a bunch of magnetite sand then make a small amount of thermite to get a reaction going and then spend the night huddled round a pit of molten iron throwing in chunks of their spaceship and handfuls of the sand to keep the reaction going until dawn

Your magnet didn't attract the glowing lump of iron from the small scale test because it was over 723°C, so the iron would be austenitic (FCC) structure instead of ferritic (BCC). The larger piece lifted up due to thermal contraction as it cooled. The coloration in the large piece was caused by the cooling rates at that spot. It's the same reason motorcycle exhausts get that colored pattern to them. The brittleness in the iron is also due to residual thermal stresses and porosity due to all of that off gassing. You probably also added a lot of carbon to the iron due to the paint and linings of the cans.

I am happy you are still getting views, I went through my subscriptions and found you again (too many subs ugh and home page doesn't show you)

Holy hell that is quite the ball mill, well done!

15:00 "gas coming off the cans probably the paint burning off" It could also be the interior lining of the cans. Soda cans have a plastic liner, or teflon, to prevent the aluminum from rusting too fast.

Leave it to Cody to take a violent exothermic reaction and tame it into peaceful Bonfire mode. This are the content creators that makes UKposts still enjoyable. Great intro by the way

It’s surreal that it sometimes didn’t look like it was burning. It was like the material just decided to melt without really flaming or spattering. I crunched the numbers 3 Fe3O4 + 8Al-> 4 Al2O3 + 9Fe. ~912 AMU total, ~504 of iron. *~72% yield of iron was in the bottom of that pit.* Pretty good IMO considering the impure starting materials, unorthodox mixing technique, heat loss to the environment, and bits of iron that got trapped in the slag. Thanks for an amazing video!

When I was a kid (70 years ago), my dad (1903-1999), a physicist, electrical engineer, and inventor, taught me how to safely make and use some simple explosives. We lived in Lafayette, CA (east of Berkeley and Oakland) in a house on a 3/4-acre lot. In our big back yard I did many experiments. Back then, you could buy powdered aluminum at hardware stores, presumably to make silver-colored paint. But I used it in some greatt experiments. Mixed in the right proportions with easily obtained sulfur, and potassium chlorate (better than potassium nitrate), it could be ignited to make spectacular fireballs. Powdered zinc, and powdered magnesium (which I surreptitiously filed off an unignited incendiary bomb, a souvenir of Dad's from wartime trips to England, worked almost as well. A kid part of me is still nostalgic for those days.