 When it comes 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 helped 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 in the alloy was or how to isolate it, it was discovered how to produce brass using various forms of zinc ore. The journey from making my own brass from scratch began a few years ago when we traveled down to Galena Illinois. The main objective of this trip was to collect the namesake of the city, Galena, a type of lead ore, 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 Galena lead ore right there. When it's exposed, that's how shiny and bright it is. Lead 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 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 start expanding could have several miles of passageways. You've added a lot. Loads of zinc that you really want are one to 300 feet down. Lead 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 mines closed by 1979. I said that we could still mine zinc if we wanted to in the region, but it's economically prohibitive. This is the zinc sphalerate you'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 and improving my health. AG1 is the 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 a lot of the other ones, there's not going to be a bunch of 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 sphalerite, which unlike other ores, actually requires the initial roasting step, which helps remove some of the sulfur and break down the zinc ore before we can begin the cementation process. So here we have our ingredients to do the smelt. We have the zinc ore here, and I supplemented it with a bit of store-bought zinc carbonate and the impurities from sand and such to kind of replicate it, just 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 ratio. So I'll mix them up, put them in the crucible and we just gotta 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 the 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 the 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 cesters. Brass production proved to be an important part of the Roman Empire's economy as it was a valuable commodity for trade that 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. 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 a matter of hitting the proximate temperature and holding it for long enough. Hard to imagine how they would have discovered this way back then, and 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 both fascinating that this is something that can be done without making zinc itself, and it's also something that they figured out how to do. The actual process of making zinc didn't come until a lot later. It's actually going to be kind of a follow-up to this. It's trying to actually extract zinc by itself. So there'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 Rome and their economic abilities. I went ahead and cast some custom coins for how to make everything. I have a little profile of my face, say how do I 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've now been able to cast a few different things in brass, and before this I've only really done copper and bronze and both would be 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. 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 as we start getting into more complicated machinery it's going to be absolutely crucial. It wants to get a little bit better and get the hang of cold working brass. It really opens the door for making sheet metals out of brass, which 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'll use 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. 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 this series consider supporting us on Patreon. 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