How To Turn Styrofoam, Into Solid Aluminum

As his name suggests, you never know what “The King of Random” is going to come up with next. This guy has tons of wacky experiments that put all kinds of real-life materials to the test in ways that you might never expect. This time, he’s using styrofoam and molten hot aluminum to convert a foam shape, whatever shape you please, into a metal one. No, he isn’t plating the foam with aluminum or anything like that but instead, he’s going to replace it with the metal to create a new solid piece of metal in whatever shape the foam was in. Make sense? Good, now let’s get down to business here!

For this experiment, we see the use of the simple products of styrofoam and sand that are combined with the molten aluminum to create a sort of cast that’s unlike any other.

By simply burying the styrofoam shape in the sand and pouring hot aluminum into the styrofoam, the foam instantaneously vaporizes and is replaced with aluminum to create the solid piece. It’s pretty wild to think about how quickly the metal can replace the styrofoam as do not allow the sand to collapse in the process. With a set of steps like this, there are so many different possibilities of things that you could create from nothing more than a couple pieces of styrofoam.

Check out the video down below that shows you how the processes done, step-by-step, taking raw materials and making them in the something amazing. It’s not too often that you get to have your very own foundry in your backyard but with the right steps, something like this could bring your metalworking dreams to life. If you had access to all these materials and knew how to safely do something like this, what would you create with the styrofoam that you would make into metal?