Welcome to the important metals in history. A lot of emphasis gets placed on ones like bronze, iron, and steel. But they often forgotten cousin of bronze, still had a very important role in history. And it was one of the key metals that was mastered by and hoped to grow the Roman Empire. So in this video, I'm going to explore the ancient method of producing this alloy. And along the way, I think we might learn to appreciate and love this metal. Let's make some brass. I've covered and worked with a lot of copper and bronze in earlier episodes. But brass has been easy to overlook. The copper alloy of bronze was first made as early as 3500 BCE and kicked off the so-called Bronze Age era. While brass was made as early as 500 BCE, well into the Iron Age. Comparing the two, bronze has a lot more advantages when it comes to tools and metals, being the stronger alloy. But these are also areas where iron and steel would eventually supplant it. For other applications though, brass has some key advantages. It's easier to cast, or malleable, and can have a more attractive decorative gold tint. The differences between these two alloys are the secondary metals they're alloyed with, with bronze being a combination of copper and tin. Brass, however, was an alloy with a metal, that remained mostly unknown until much later in history, zinc. Despite not knowing what the other element and alloy was, or how to isolate it, it was discovered how to produce brass using various forms of zinc ore. The journey for making my own brass from scratch began a few years ago when we traveled down to Galina, Illinois. The main objective of this trip was to collect the namesake of the city, Galina, a type of ledor, but also mine in this area were deposits of zinc. This is where our mine is. It is underground about 50 feet. It's 90 steps down. There's the Galina ledor right there. When it's exposed, that's how shiny and bright it is. Led in this area was prominently mined starting in the early 1800s, but most major deposits were depleted by around the 1850s. Zinc ore was found while digging, but had no economic value at that time, it was mostly just discarded. But starting the 1850s, profitable ways to smell the zinc were discovered, and most of the mining switched over to zinc ore. This is where we're going to talk about zinc mining. A lead mine, this one is about three-fourths mile, right? A good zinc mine, as they are expanding, could have several miles of passageways. Maybe add it all up, loads of zinc that you really want, are one to three hundred feet down. Led ore, 50-60 feet. Zinc mining continued to grow and eventually boomed during World War I, when there was a huge demand for zinc to make brass for ammunition. But during World War I, they were taking out millions of dollars of zinc in this region. After the end of World War II, though, profitability of zinc began to drop, and the last mine's closed by 1979. Said that we could still mine zinc if we wanted to in the region, but it's economically prohibitive. This is these zincs fallerate they're going to be looking for. Today's video is all about getting zinc into our copper metal using an ancient process, but zinc also plays an important nutritional value to the human body. Today's sponsor can help make sure you get enough inside yourself. AG1 is a comprehensive daily nutrition that makes taking care of your body simple, with 75 high-quality whole food sourced ingredients including vitamins, minerals, superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. AG1 is carefully curated to nourish all of your body systems. Like most people, setting healthy routines for myself is a crucial first step for self-improvement in improving my health. AG1 is a perfect first step in your health routine, helping you start each day on the right path. 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With brass, because zinc isn't really feasible at this time period to be smelted, you're actually going to be smelting it with the copper. And in that process, in contrast to all the other ones, there's not going to be much more liquid really, because the zinc ore is going to vaporize into gaseous zinc, which is then going to be absorbed into copper. And the copper will actually be below its melting point. So theoretically throughout that point, we're only dealing with solids and gases. But once they mix together, we do that just at the melting point of brass. Theoretically, the result should be a puddle of brass and probably a fair amount of slag from the impurities in the ore. And then from there, we can just melt down the brass itself independently and cast whatever we want. We really collect a few different types of ore on our trip, but the majority were sphelerite, which unlike other ores, actually requires an initial roasting step, which helps remove some of the sulfur and break down the zinc ore before we can begin the cementation process. All right, so here we have our ingredients to do with the smelts. We have all the zinc ore here, and I supplemented it with a bit of store-bought zinc carbonate and just impurities from sand and such. Do you kind of replicate it? Because we're a little bit short. Didn't quite have enough ore. And here we have copper. These are split up in a one to two ratio. So I'll mix them up, put them in the crucible, and we just got to bake it. With our crucible ready, we can now start the cementation process. Earlier this fall, I started building a kiln for making crucible steel, which I decided to wait until spring to actually attempt. The design of a kiln includes a tunnel which allows airflow into the kiln from the bottom, and should be able to use this kiln for this cementation process also. But the first step will be to defrost the kiln. Loading up and firing, I let it run for the better part of a day. While brass was discovered and known before the Roman Empire came to prominence, they were the first major party to truly begin the mass production of it. They quickly were able to produce brass in such significant quantities that they even began using it to strike quite common coins, such as the Susters. Prass production proved to be an important part of the Roman Empire's economy as it was a valuable commodity for trade, and was used in many aspects of daily life. The gold-like appearance of the alloy gave the commodity an extra advantage in trade, and was found to be especially useful in trading with neighboring regions, and was most likely a very key diplomatic tool when dealing with neighboring Celtic and Germanic tribes who greatly value this metal. This mastery in producing brass proved to be a very important tool for the growth of the Roman Empire, and its value in trade helped to cement the economic and political power of the empire. After running the kiln for a better part of a day, have the results. It is not necessary for the brass actually melt. This could be still solid copper, but does look like it melted into two nuggets, which is a good sign. It's hard to tell at first their color, almost a little bit coppery on the surface, so I cleaned them up a few spots with just a wire brush to reveal a very distinct brass yellow color. We have some more copper here for comparison, you can see the very clear color difference. So we have succeeded. We have made brass. It's indexing in about down these two nuggets and cast it into a solid ingot, and then from there we can start making some stuff out of brass. So in the end the process of making brass is actually surprisingly simple, but also complex. With the knowledge we have today, being able to recreate it was actually surprisingly straightforward, and just the matter of hitting the prox of a temperature and holding it for long enough. Hard to imagine how they would have discovered this way back then. It had to take a lot of trial and error to figure out just this random rock get absorbed into copper to make something that looks almost like gold. It's most fascinating that this is something that can be done without like making zinc itself, and it's also something that they figured out how to do. The extra process of making zinc didn't come until a lot later. It's actually going to be kind of follow up to this. It's tried to actually extract the zinc by itself. So it's going to be a video coming up relatively soon as we explore the historical methods of actually making zinc itself. But now we have brass, and brass is going to be really useful as it was really useful in history to kind of commemorate how important it was to roam and their economic abilities. I would have had it in, I cast some custom coins for how to make everything. I have a little profile of my face, say how to make everything, and then on the back I have the language we made way back in the beginning of the series that basically just says htme, and I'm going to send them out to our highest supporters on Patreon. So at this point I'm not going to be able to cast a few different things in brass, and before this I've only really done copper and bronze, and both are probably pretty difficult. Brass, though, seems just so much easier. Just that lower melting point just makes it just that much easier to get it high enough. The few things that I've cast so far have turned out really well. And I look forward to using this metal for a lot of our upcoming projects, and for improving some of the last ones. The DaVinci lathe that I made in our last video has a little bit of an issue that the the metal shaft when it's spinning is just inside a wooden hole. And as it spins it ends up making that hole larger and larger, which then throws everything out of alignment. It makes it really difficult to use. So being able to use a metal like brass to cast some really simple bearings is going to be a bit of a game changer I think for some of these machines. And then as we start getting into more complicated machinery, it's going to be absolutely crucial. I want to get a little bit better and get the hang of cold working brass. It really opens your order for making sheet metals out of brass. If you can then be easily turned into a lot of different tools or possibly even some instruments. But in the end, it's a new metal to work with. I'm really excited for the possibilities it opens up. And hopefully we've just a little bit more appreciation for this specific metal. Thank you again to all of our supporters on Patreon. If you like our content, please consider supporting us. All of our top donors will be receiving their own custom coin of our own currency. Thank you again to all of our patrons. Thanks for watching.