 Fire in Brimstone A dramatic phrase from the bible denoting the judgment from god. It brings up images of lightning with sulfurous aftersmell and the volcanic eruptions spewing toxic sulfurous compounds from the earth. The land of brimstone and fire brings up otherworldly images. But in this video I travel to one of the few places this element can be easily found aptly named Death Valley and explore the origin and explosive potential of sulfur. My last ingredient before the age of gunpowder begins. One year ago I explored one of the most challenging ingredients to source for gunpowder, saltpeter. This involved a rather gross process of soaking and straining the droppings from a chicken coop and then boiling it down over several days. A second ingredient that is slightly less challenging but still not an abundant compound is sulfur or brimstone as it was called in old English. Sulfur is often found near hot springs and volcanically active locations where hydrogen sulfide gas is vented and elemental sulfur accumulates. For my source of it I found myself near the largest sulfur deposit west of the Mississippi River just outside Death Valley at a formerly volcanic area last active at least 2100 years ago. Hi so I'm back at the same location I was at about six years ago. I happened to be in the vicinity doing a collaboration with Ghost Town Living and figured I had some extra time I wanted to stop and get more sulfur so I was going to stood out as one of the more surreal locations I've been able to visit because it's it's very distinct just because it stinks. It has a very obvious smell of the sulfur as soon as you get out of the car and has a very unnatural yellow hue to it from all the sulfur in the vicinity. So last time I was here I was pretty rushed so I have a little bit more time now I want to explore a little bit deeper see if I actually find the mine and everything so I think their supposedly is still a mine it's about 60 feet deep so not super deep but definitely more than just what's on the surface here. While there I had a chance to test out a new drone I just got for the first time in a nice open location I got a little cocky and wanted to test just how far of a range it had while not realizing the slowly elevating hills directly behind it. So after crashing the brand new drone at least two to three miles away in a random direction it was time for a nice frantic salvage hike. I went for a nice little hike to retrieve the drone that I crashed because I should not test distance flying backwards for the very first time in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception but I found it and I got it back from a secondary location here and it seems pretty similar to the other one I might be worth checking out just because it's a little less likely to be stopped by and picked through so it might be some more pure ore that I can find. It's very very interesting just random yellow rocks scattered on the ground here leading to the war site over here and then mine. It's not really what I found it if I crashed my drone but the actual mine is a good ways down the road. Got a sign here telling all the many dangers of going into old mines surprisingly not blocked off pretty shallow 60 feet which is a ways definitely don't recommend this pretty dangerous. Let's take a little peek see see what exactly is down there hopefully not die in the process. I don't see any ore there. There's some sort of structure there though. I don't see any ore here though. There's some structures here. Oh those are droppings of something. Something lives in here. It doesn't go anywhere. No I think it did. It's just collapsed now. Look at this platform and stairs. Look at me going up. There's no sign of ore in here though. It's interesting. There's no actual ore in there I guess. I don't even know any sign of it considering how much of it there is everywhere else so I'm not sure this might be a mine for something else actually could be pommassite. It does look a lot like the pommassmine we went to which is not too far from here but no sulfur. So I think back this way little ways was a whole other spot less disturbed so that maybe some more pure rock that I can collect so I think I'll check that out next. It's kind of like rubble through the stuff. More porous is maybe better I'm not sure. Everything is just kind of a layer on it. I think there's like any pure just chunks of sulfur so I'll just kind of soak through the cracks as it came out of the volcanic activity. I believe that's my understanding of how it's formed here. You rock a sulfur. I can't tell if it's more pure or not. It looks the same. Sulfur successfully collected and no expensive equipment lost in the desert. I was on my way to the next stop of the trip. Cerro Gordo Ranch to get some help from Brent Underwood of Ghost Town Living but that's for a different video. If you're a fan of me, Brent or YouTube makers in general you should check out OpenSauce this July. It's going to be a live event combining some of the best makers and creators on YouTube and Brent and I are going to be there with our own fireside chat. So check it out and hopefully I'll see you there. But first, thank you to Better Health for sponsoring this video. If you feel like you're needing to speak to someone or you just need a mental health check-in, Better Health is an amazing online resource that allows you to do just that. It's an online therapeutic resource such as your needs that match you with your own licensed professional therapist all from the comfort of your home. People often forget that mental health is just as important as physical health. I know I do. To get started, head to betterhealth.com slash htme. Answer a few questions about your state of mind and before you know it you'll be matched with a licensed therapist who will work with you. It takes about as much effort as watching a YouTube video to start your connection to Better Health. Better Health is about facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change therapists as needed. Head to betterhealth.com slash htme to answer a few questions and get paired up with a therapist. Oh yeah and you'll also get 10% off your first month when you click that link below. Back from California now, I mailed these guys back. I think at this point I still not sure I found like the main vein of the sulfur ore at Crater Mine but I was able to go through and select some of the more promising specimens that look the most concentrated ore and collect them and bring them back here. So even at best the the general ore in this area was only 40% sulfur which means we got a bit of refining to do to get the impurities out of here otherwise we're not going to really make too effective of gum powder. So purifying this should be pretty simple. Sulfur has a fairly low melting point at 235 degrees Fahrenheit however it also has a very low ignition point which is actually why it's so important in gum powder is it helps lower the ignition point for making the reaction happen. So we need to be careful to keep it below that temperature and away from any open flames otherwise it's gonna start on fire and it's perhaps a bit fortuitous that the area I collected this from was the site of a sulfur explosion so kind of a little bit of a warning of the dangers of this. So sulfur itself despite being ingredient for gum powder is not actually explosive except when it's pulverized and in the air as a dust. It's kind of the same reaction you get in flour mills where if there's a lot of flammable items suspended in air where there's lots of oxygen there's the potential of it all igniting into a big explosion. So we gotta be careful about powder and igniting that and we also have to be careful that if it does start on fire it will release sulfur dioxide which is toxic in high concentrations. So we gotta make sure we have good ventilation as we process this in case we produce any fumes so we don't make ourselves sick. The first step for this will be grinding everything up into a fine powder then melting it down into liquid sulfur then we can hopefully strain out all the impurities strain them or decant it let that cool down and we can recrystallize it and hopefully get some relatively pure sulfur. So we have our molted sulfur here nice and gooey just a good sign kind of interesting just melts a rock in relatively not super hot temperatures it's got liquid we have a fine cloth here we can see if we can strain it before it gets too cold very soupy just constrain it out and assuming I'll have to give it a bit of a squeeze this stuff is kind of thick but we are getting strained there's actually very yellow surprising color change there you can see the color yellow is much richer and you can even see it has crystallized which is a very good sign that means we can purify it even further by just melting and recrystallizing I think very promising for a few rounds of filtration I've gotten the result here and overall I'd say it's definitely yellower but it's a lot more muted than I had hoped but when this is ground up and melted it kind of just turned into a gray sludge and this is after filtration and it's I think it looks a lot better I think this is very promising but I don't think it's as pure as I ideally hope I think my process of filtration is probably not working the greatest I think a fair amount of the gypsum and such is still making it through I think I probably ground it too fine in the process so I think there's still a little bit room for improvement there I'm not sure how pure we can actually get without using some modern technology and tools all right so we have a raw piece of ore here and it has to purity let's see if it lights on fire all right we have a very slight flame on the part that started to melt all right you can tell the rock does burn you just have to melt it first a little bit with a little bit of filtration see kind of similar not the most promising result definitely better way I think we can clearly see there's a fair amount of impurity still in there so this makes it burn better so I'm curious if this will work for making black powder with this we have one part of our gunpowder and the other part is what I made before which is the salt peter made from drying out chicken poop so I've been letting that sit and dry out and recrystallize a few times now and gotten a pretty good results I have a cross section here of a chunk of it and you can tell that on the top all the crystals formed and on the brown it's just kind of a probably not delicious brownie but we have a nice crispy top with crystals I think are very promising so I'm gonna try and scrape off some of the top layers and do a little bit of a test batch and see if we can make some gunpowder even with this impure results then the last ingredient is the actual fuel and that's charcoal and crush that up and all together we should have gunpowder relatively pure black powder here let's pour it out for a test so it's worth remembering that black powder by itself is mostly just gonna kind of fizzle and burn up very quickly it's not until you really like put it in a confined space it's gonna be explosive and able to like propel a bullet or blow stuff up give it a light not a good sign should ignite easily okay I got a little bit of fizzle some pop nope there was a little bit that is kind of disappointing a little bit of a blue frame so we know the sulfur has ignited I still gotta say it's a little bit disappointing I thought I'd get a little bit more but there's evidence that it is working I think that's every time you see kind of a fizzle and pop that's like an actual decently concentrated portion of black powder so unfortunately there's a lot of impurities that prevent it here's the whole thing from going off like it should and I think this is probably like if you're out in the woods trying to make your own gunpowder this is probably realistically how it's gonna turn out and probably not be super useful you can see that it is trying to be black powder with all the sparks and fizzles that is a good sign so I think we have all the elements in there they're just too many impurities mixed in and I think probably the biggest factor is the oxidizer so I think our salt peter has just too much impurity still big next step for both making gunpowder and well as a lot of other innovations is getting better at purification which is something I'm not the greatest at so my goal is to basically make a whole collection of chemicals get them tested to see what kind of purity I've been able to get and then focus on purifying them even further and behind me you'll see I built kind of an apothecary for my collection of chemicals and I think I can start right now with adding my sulfur but now we are definitely one step closer to the gunpowder still a lot of tweaking to figure out how to actually make this a working formula but we're getting there thank you again to all of our supporters on patreon without you this wouldn't be possible thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are 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