A Machine That Turns Plants Into Rope

hi everyone in this video I will be assembling and testing this industrial rope machine which has been sitting in the back corner of my workshop for about nine months now I ordered this about a year ago it took about three months to arrive and by then I was in the middle of working on another big project namely my radiative cooling paint project which is still in progress by the way don't give up on that series just yet now the cool thing about this machine and the reason why I really wanted to purchase one is that this can take fibers of all sorts of different Origins like straw grass various Industrial Waste materials and turn them into usable rope in that way you actually take waste products turn them into something practical some of the parts I can already tell are pretty shoddy this bearing on the end for example does not quite fit into the housing they sent with this so I'm sure there's going to be a few things that I'm going to need to fix along the way for now let's get to assembling this thing starting with the frame and hopefully the rest of the assembly will fall into place from there because no instructions whatsoever came with this machine it looks pretty straightforward though now this is the key mechanical component and when the main shaft is driven it spins these cones the same direction there are a few problems that I've noticed with this piece of the machine first of all there's a bearing in this sleeve which is a loose fit so I'm going to have to take this off see if I can maybe shim that bearing up so that the shaft doesn't move around so much I found in my scrap bin a few pieces of scrap rubber now these gears right here that these cones are inserted into these aren't writing in any bearings at all right well it has been a few days and I am back now with a roll of graphite foil that I have received in the mail this is pretty cool stuff it's electrically conductive it's very lubricating what I'm going to do is cut this into thin strips to line the cast iron channels in these cutouts and that should provide lubrication to these gears I've added some rubber shims in here and I am ready to bolt this back together yeah there we go no more wiggle waggle this gear is on good these gears seem lubricated I'm ready to assemble the rest of the machine yeah it works it's actually a lot quieter than I anticipated at this point I can give a brief demonstration of how this machine is meant to work it has two cones that both rotate in the same direction starting with a handful of natural fibers if I were to turn this into rope by hand I would tie a knot in one end and then divide the bundle into two sections a two-stranded rope is formed by turning each of these sections in the same direction my right hand is turning this side clockwise and my left hand is also turning this side clockwise as I continue to twist both sections the grass automatically wraps around itself in a double helix forming rope this machine with its two rotating cones is meant to work in exactly the same way the rest of the machine is really just there to pull the Rope as it forms and bundle it on the spool if you'd like to learn more about making rope by hand I have several videos on that topic foreign so now that I have this fully assembled and ready to use I have to figure out how to actually use it this is a piece of factory equipment so it is not made to be user friendly I think what needs to be done is you need to actually have a piece of rope threaded through the mechanics of the machine before you can actually start making more rope so what I will do is find some particularly long strands of straw feed them through this machine and then tape them to the end of that rope and hope that that's all this takes all right check this out as I turn the Machine by hand this is pretty cool oh no oh look at that oh it worked so good on the first little bit and then my further splices just didn't work so that was only a partially successful run as soon as I started adding additional splices of the straw on I ran into problems I think one of the keys to using this successfully is going to be prep I have to make sure that I have plenty of straight fibers to feed into this machine as it needs it first I need to like comb these things out get rid of the shorter stuff and have enough on hand oh and we're broken free let's inspect our result here straw is not going to cut it for this really wish I knew that before I uh busted open the Bale in the barn for this test I have moved on from the straw to grass that I cut from around my yard this has an average length of at least 24 inches so it should work much better it should be easier to feed in fresh strands as they run out hahaha let's see how the Rope is first of all unplug this deadly thing hey that is not bad for a third attempt this is definitely weak there are plenty of places in this rope where I did not feed the grass in properly and so there's lots of weak spots but I'm sure that's all my fault I think the machine itself is working perfectly now I just need to find a source of long fiber grass or some kind of straw that hasn't been bailed I suppose maybe that would run better let's go for a hike see what we can find maybe I can at least get some more grass like this well this rope machine has given me quite a challenge I have gone through multiple materials trying to successfully make rope first starting with straw in a rectangular bale as you saw that ended up having very short fibers in it so instead I switched to Hay from round bales now this hay supposedly is processed by a machine that rolls up the full length grass and so I should have had a longer product but in my experience the material that I grabbed from around Bale it was still quite short next I found an invasive read here in Michigan this is called fragmite and this actually might have worked If This Were a different time of year right now it's snowing in mid-november and so this stuff it still has some life in it but it's pretty dry and didn't feed through the machine very well the fiber snapped apart and kind of like bamboo it has little knuckles in each section that tend to snap rather than twist along into a nice long fibrous rope the last attempt was to use cattails so I'm going to try to get the ones that uh do not have a cattail head on them because that would be a whole nother mess in my barn sample if I take something like this well first of all it's got the fluff here but also a solid Rod running through the center so if I take the ones without the Cattail head then all I get are the soft flexible reeds now these actually ended up working for me in my machine but not right away they require a little bit of processing I found because they're too dry and brittle in this state fresh out of the swamp the first step to processing these for making rope is to step on them crush the material flat because there's actually a little bit of a three-dimensional shape to these Reeds they have a foam core and that three-dimensional shape actually keeps them rigid by stomping on them pressing them flat with my feet that breaks that structure and allows them to wind into rope much more successfully in addition to that they need to be moistened they need to have a little bit of water reintroduced to their structure in order to gain some flexibility so I can Mist them down with water in this case I'm actually using water with a little bit of rubbing alcohol mixed into it rubbing alcohol is actually significantly wetter than water believe it or not that's a thing being especially wet means that it can wet surfaces that normally water would roll off of alcohol will stick to those surfaces and then it much more readily absorbs into them and gives them back that flexibility that we need for making our rope I have my Cattails right next to me here and to prepare them to feed in all you do is take the leaves and peel them off the stalk one at a time this one was particularly easy so I'll start with two Leafs on each side feed them through my cones and this time I'm just going to press them all the way through the machine until they come out here where I have my my pull rope ready and waiting attaching these fibers to the end here with a bit of tape nice and slow because I'm not good at this yet well you can see that I'm still pretty shy about using this thing I definitely have a hard time keeping Pace with the machine actually what I just noticed is that this rope hopped off the guide put that back on there and tighten it up but it's going pretty well I think I have oh probably 10 feet already and what was that about a minute worth of feeding this at very low speed let's see if I can keep going see how much rope I get through when I move through this whole stack foreign [Applause] all right that was awesome I had no fear at any point of that rope breaking which is way better than when I was attempting to use this with grass and straw I think I have maybe that's got to be at least 50 feet of rope there in under 10 minutes of work maybe an additional five minutes for the amount of time it took me to gather The Cattails in the swamp all right let's take it off the spool I haven't tried taking this spool off the machine yet let's unplug it so I don't accidentally turn it on and break an arm it should be easy to release take this out and does the whole thing just come off or what oh whoa I didn't know it did that that is pretty cool I'll unwind this it doesn't need to be on this spool and that'll allow me to see how much length I have and here is my yield I think I might have undershot it with the 50-foot guess let's find out I got a tape measure around here somewhere all right so here's how we'll measure this I have my tape measure we'll measure it 25 feet at a time thank you right there is 25 feet let's do the rest wow that was pretty close with my guess because we're at the end of the Rope here and it is 49 feet or 14.6 meters of Cattail rope in total for about 10 or 15 minutes work not bad well one of the reasons why making natural rope is of interest to me is this guy you all remember Moe's he is a kayak parrot and he enjoys chewing things a lot natural rope is a great toy for him and it can also be useful for making lots of other things as a precaution to make sure this rope is free of mold which might have been growing on The Cattails this time of year in the swamp I threw this in my oven at the lowest setting for about an hour and that should make sure it's safe for most to chew on Cattails will be a good option for me to make rope in the short term but I would like to try straw one more time this time using a good old-fashioned Scythe to cut it down by hand at full length I think that would work much better than what I was able to find in machine processed Bales well this video's sponsor is brilliant.org my favorite way to learn math science and computer science with thousands of lessons what I like best about brilliant is how they teach through interactive problem solving starting with very simple building blocks since you learned something by assembling all the components from the ground up by the time you've reached the end of a lesson not only do you understand a completely new concept but you know exactly how and why it works recently I've started brilliant series of courses about knowledge and uncertainty just give one of these lessons a try and you'll see how much they hold your interest did you know that English has 10 times as many unique sounding syllables as Japanese now I understand language in a completely new way because of this lesson every time I log into brilliant I see a new topic I'd like to learn more about to get started for free visit brilliant.org forward slash Nighthawk or click on the link in the video description below the first 200 to do so will get 20 off Brilliance annual premium subscription I hope you've enjoyed this video I know it's been a while I'm back to work now on new projects and videos should be arriving more frequently thank you everyone for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 514,282

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Id: kHDC70iC5jg

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022

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