We're going to be taking a look at how you can build your own very simplified version of a potentially complicated machine

Steam engine is one of the earliest ways that people were able to harness heat and turn it into motion

We're not going to be building anything that could move something the size of a train

But we are going to try building something that uses heat to create motion the supplies

we need are really simple a tea light candle a couple of pieces of cork sheet and a very thin metal tube

Ideally we would be using a thin copper tube

since copper conducts heat better than aluminium

But copper tubing this small proved very difficult to find I picked this aluminum tube up at a hobby store for about 2 bucks

the interior diameter of this aluminum tube is probably only about

1/16 of an inch maybe one and a half millimeters tea lights are available at a lot of places

I got mine at a craft store in a pack of 50 for 3 bucks

My cork sheets are also from a craft store, and I think they're usually designed for going on the bottom of coasters

But we're gonna use them for something different the basic ideas

We'll have our tub full of water

Our cork sheets will float on that with our candle on top of it

Then a small piece of our aluminum tubing will come up through one side of the cork

wrap and a coil above the flame and then go down through the cork on the other side with our coil full of water when

We light our candle the heat should turn the water into steam which will expand and push out the bottom to start out we want

To put a nice circular bend in the middle of part of our tube. It's important

We don't kink the metal tube because we do need the water and steam to be able to travel all the way through it so

Let's try wrapping it around this bottle of paint to see if we can get a nice smooth curve in it that doesn't kink

Alright that worked out pretty well you can see that

We've got the aluminum tube going up making one complete circuit

And then heading back down through the other side we have too much metal tube on the sides here

So we want to trim that off

And we want to measure to make sure we have the right length so that it's situated just

Above our candle flame for maximum heat to get a good measurement of where we should cut our tube

Let's light our candle and then

Position our tube right over it so we can see how long we want it to be on the sides

We now have a fairly stable flame on our candle so we can measure the height that we want with our coil

You may also notice that the loop

I put in the aluminum is large enough that the sides of our aluminum tube

Fit on the sides of the candle we don't want to use something that gives us such a tight coil that they would run into

The candle with our candle on our cork sheets. We can see exactly how far down

We need the sides of our aluminum tubes to come

We do want our tubes to extend a little bit below the level of the cork

They'll push down below the cork into the water and then we'll angle them slightly to give our engine some drive

I'll use this pipe cutting tool to cut off the excess of our aluminum without crimping the ends

Now this aluminum tubing is so thin that it barely fits in our pipe cutter so even after using the pipe cutter

I have to give it a little bit of help

A quick test of blowing into one side lets us know that we still have a good flow all the way through our tube

Now our cork sheets are a little bit larger than we need them to be and we don't want any excess weight or drag so

Let's cut a slightly smaller circle out of our larger circles

The diameter of this electrical tape is slightly wider than the stance of our aluminum pipe, so that should be a good size

I should also say if you have thicker

Sheets of cork you probably don't need to stack two of them together the way

I'm going to this just provides a little bit of extra stability as it floats on the water

Now we need to poke holes in both sheets of cork so that the sides of our aluminum tube can run down through the cork

Into the water that will be below. Let's just use a spare piece of our aluminum tubing to stab through the cork I

Used this spare piece of tubing because

Poking through the cork can plug up the hole with some of the course material

And we want to be sure we have good flow on the tube that we'll be carrying our water and steam

We can now see the basic design that we're gonna be going for

With the bottom points of our tube angled slightly we should get motion that drives our entire engine in a circle

Water inside the coil should heat up from the candle turn into steam, and then be forced at the bottom of the tubes

Let's slightly bend the bottoms of the tubes so that as the steam is forced out

It's at an angle that will then push our engine into spinning

Of course we need to be very careful as we bend these to make sure we don't kink the metal

Let's just blow through the tube again to make sure we still have good airflow

Yep still good, they're still good flow through the tube just what we want now

Let's fit the two ends of our tube down through the cork

It'll take some angling and twisting a little bit to get it in there now that we've bent the ends

But it should fit just fine and cork is pretty flexible

You can see the tube comes up through one side coils around goes back down to the other and with the two ends bent at

Opposing angles hopefully when the steam is ejected it should cause the whole thing spin

We can see our set up, but before we put the candle on and light it. There's one more step

We need to take we want some water to start inside of our metal coil

so let's briefly take it off of our cork and

Use it as a straw to suck a little bit of water up through the tube and then reinstall it

All right there we go, we've got water coming through tastes like metal

Carefully line our candle up right underneath our coil

And we light that off. It should give enough heat that our whole engine begins to spin I

Spilled a little bit of candle wax on the sides, but that shouldn't affect the movement very much

Now this setup is a little bit finicky sometimes

it does a really good job of pulling more water in and continuing to spin and

Sometimes it seems to sort of stall

I think you have to get it in just the right spot

So it's really doing a good job of heating the water up

But I have had times where I got this to keep spinning almost perpetually for up to 20 minutes. I

Want to see if I can do something to illustrate how much the water is circulating through this coil

I'm gonna try adding a little bit of blue dye to some water and then filling the coil with that water

Hopefully when that heats up. We'll be able to see the blue squirt out of the bottom Jets now

I am a little bit worried that as I try and set this back in the water some of it will just drain right out

Of the tube and start coloring the water in our tub

Prematurely you can see a little bit of blue water is starting to escape on one side, but not too much of it

So hopefully this will still give us a good illustrative example

There you have it how to take a little bit of aluminum to a tea light candle and a little bit of cork mat and

Turn it into a working steam engine this whole project only cost about five bucks for all of the supplies

And it's pretty cool to watch it work

Thanks for joining us for this project today and remember to come gear yourself up with products and merch at the king of random calm

See you there

All right reset

How gosh alright that comes out really hot

And powerfully you try to cover farther up my arm, and it just keeps shooting even more far of my arm