this is the most expensive xbox controller in the world it's made of one
and a half kilograms so that's a little under four pounds of solid gold and
you might be wondering how we made it
so i just got an email back from expert casting they did some test casts and
they can do it yes it's going to be about one and a half
kilograms of 18 karat gold
wow which is going to be 87
500
well you only live once gold xbox controller here we come this video is
brought to you by the volta 2.0 a universal reliable fast charging
magnetic cable that works across all usb devices including with data transfer
capabilities check it out today at the link in the video description
let's take a moment to appreciate just how challenging this is going to be by
cracking open this pulse red xbox series x controller
starting with the battery cover i guess for disassembly we pry off the outer
shell starting with these hand grips at the back and then remove all the screws
including ah yes this sneaky little boy
under the sticker here my warranty is now void i think hello
ah wow
that is a complicated part if we want the functionality of the finished
controller to be exactly the same though we are going to have to recreate this
one for one and that won't be easy thin components particularly ones with
lots of intricate detail are especially difficult to cast that's why we won't be
attempting this here in our own shop which brings us to expert castings here
in beautiful downtown vancouver but as
grand as the entryway looks things are about to get down and dirty
unlike ourselves expert castings are
just that experts with accolades like being one of
two places in canada that can work on a tiffany piece and making jewelry for
disney 50 shades of grey once upon a time and many more
now they first tried to convince us to cast our piece in bronze then gold
played it this is generally what's done for movie props like this one right here
it's way cheaper and usually gives a better result anyway but
problem is this was one of those videos where we came up with the title first
and then figured out how to fill in the gaps later so we were stuck cutting a
fat order of pure gold to the royal canadian mint
they just brought this over and look at it we have one kilogram of gold right
here so this is a professional engineer's salary in my hands and it's
shocking how heavy it is given like the size i'm surprised how small it is
look at this thing forecasting you first have to create a
negative of the shape that you want for the metal to be poured into adam is
going to be taking care of this step called spruing wax gets heated up by a
low temperature soldering iron and stuck to parts of our controller this will
create pathways for the gold to pour into in the past rings would be
painstakingly hand carved out of wax but
now most parts are just 3d printed some parts they cast all the time like
this anchor so for that they've created a negative that they can inject wax into
using this wax pot all of the pieces on the sprue need to be organized kind of
like an upside down tree this shape makes it easier for the molten metal to
flow into the cavities while also making it easier for air to find its way out
that's critical because it's super important to accurately weigh the
plastic and the wax on the sprue and use
the density of those materials compared to gold to figure out how much metal
will be needed to fill the mold too little metal and there won't be enough
force pushing down into the mold or it might just not fill at all and too much
metal well that's just wasteful and that's very expensive waste now we need
to create the investment which will harden around our sprue simply add a
.395 ratio of water to plaster powder in a large bowl and then combine with a
kitchen mixer for two minutes place the mixture under vacuum for one minute 40
seconds to remove bubbles pour the plaster into the mold and place under
vacuum again for another minute and 40 seconds from here the whole thing is
placed in the kiln at 700 degrees celsius overnight this will give the wax
and plastic time to melt and then burn off leaving only voids behind now we're
basically ready to melt the gold but there's one problem our hunk of gold is
too big if it makes you feel any better this is
much more painful for me to watch than it is for you so if you could go to
lttstore.com right now to ease the pain that'd be great thanks now you guys
might have guessed that during this chopping process tiny flakes of gold
will fall off it's not too bad the flakes coming off
of our piece here total only about 10 to 20 cents but they do add up they
actually sweep the floor here and the benches every day chuck it in this big
bucket and in a year it can catch about a hundred thousand dollars in tiny
pieces of gold our second problem is that the royal canadian mint is awesome
and their four nines gold bars are just too pure
but okay seriously though even pleb american us mint gold would be much too
ductile for actual use in fact
oh yeah it's so soft that it would probably
deform in your hands the first time you got head shot by some 11 year old in
call of duty so then summer here we'll be expertly creating our alloy using 450
grams of gold per 150 grams of alloy
blend we're using number 220 which is 12
zinc 11.5 silver and 76.5 percent copper
blends are chosen mostly for the color that they produce and ours should give
us a nice orangey yellow look finally
it's time to melt some metal baby using an induction oven the gold is heated up
to 100 degrees celsius and our mold is
then removed from the kiln at 600 degrees celsius the thing is if the mold
is too cool then the gold might solidify
before it fills in all the cavities before the gold can be added though all
the air in the mold has to be replaced with an inert hydrogen nitrogen mixture
this helps prevent the gold alloy from reacting with the air while it's molten
so when everything's ready they just lift up the center column that's lined
up with the center sprue of our mold and
all the gold flows in is it going is it going did it go can i see it
molten gold david is it good
yeah oh that doesn't sound very confident we
didn't put in enough gold oh
the concern right now is that there's a bunch of tunnels that the gold is
supposed to flow down and there's one that it didn't go down but there's like
five that it did apparently that's what she was poking at she was poking to see
if the tunnels were full let's see if it worked ladies and gentlemen
here we go
oh bomber
oh wow it's heavy i guess we might not even need to worry
about that though because that's covered like all of this in here you don't see
well because of the uh holding it together
i think it's fine actually you might be right
it's actually the texture oh my god it has the texture of the xbox controller
i mean i i know i shouldn't be surprised but like
but it but it did it kind of looks like ass hey
right like that's my ass tens of thousands of dollars and
it just doesn't look like anything tens of thousands of dollars of ass
of course what you saw was only the back piece of the controller so the front the
shoulder and trigger buttons as well as i don't know whatever you call these
back pieces and the battery cover were all done ahead of time due to size
limitations so with a combination of a soap bath
scrubbing with a toothbrush scraping with a pick and
even some actual removal of the material
this will turn in to this
now this was our first cast and it was pretty good but there are some small
surface finish problems once it's cleaned up we should be able
to go from a more satin like finish to a
super shiny one like you actually see on this corner here of course there are
still some problems that we have to solve like for example what are you
going to do about the parts where the sprue was joined to the original plastic
i don't know but i can't wait to see if the thing actually comes
together so this is it ladies and gentlemen
test fit time oh
that's it okay where's my uh where's my battery cover at alex can you be can you
be my third hand here
oh man once all the sprue crap is on there and
this fits together this is gonna be crazy
guys do not miss the met the next part of this
and don't miss this segway to our sponsor
drop.com dang guys we need that sponsor
dollars like bring on the rage shadow legends no but
seriously drop.com is featuring the control keyboard it's one of their
top-selling keyboards with over 11 000 sold and why not it's got a solid cnc
aluminum frame a built-in switch plate RGB lighting qmk firmware for excellent
customizability hot swappable key switches and your choice of cherry mx
kaiwa or halo switches it features a floating key design with dual usb type-c
connectors and weighs 964 grams the only way it could be
heavier
is if they made it out of a heavier metal
so check it out at the link down below if you guys enjoyed this video and you
love crazy projects maybe you'd like our water cooled playstation 4. that's right
we did one of those away a while back let's uh we don't have anything current
gen look we're working on it okay