Making transparent wood

about seven months ago I saw a video by a ve where he attempted to follow a paper that he found online which detailed how to make transparent wood the basic idea was to first treat the wood and then to fill it with a plastic resin I honestly think he made a good attempt at it but in the end it was pretty much a total failure however I didn't think it was because he lacked the skills to do it or anything and I thought that it was mostly the supplies that he used the paper called for a very specific wood and epoxy resin but he tried to substitute them for ones that were easier to get also I think the paper that he had was incomplete because he mentioned in the video that there was no procedure in it so unfortunately for him all he had to go on was from a couple of lines of text in one of the diagrams this can make things incredibly difficult and on top of not having the correct supplies I'm not really surprised that it didn't work out in any case his video was still very entertaining as usual and it got me interested in trying it out myself to get the highest chance of it working though I tracked down the exact supplies that were used in the paper I also found a complete copy of the paper which included an experimental section it still wasn't as detailed as I would have ideally liked it to be but it was definitely a lot better than just what was in the diagram so in terms of supplies the first and most important one was the wood they used bass wood from the walnut hollow company and it was very easy to order online the company itself didn't ship to Canada so I had to get it from eBay and it arrived a couple weeks later it was just this big carving block though and the paper called four three millimeter slices so I had to cut it I read online that the easiest way to do this was with a table saw so I tried it out I originally didn't plan to film this but I decided to at the last minute and because of this what you see here is definitely not the safest way to use a table saw and not something you should use as a reference I wanted to get the best shot possible but I didn't have a stand so I had to do it from a weird angle and push the wood sideways I'm also only using my right hand because my left one was holding my camera at the time I didn't really feel like this was unsafe at all but looking back now doesn't look very good but anyway that aside the first few cuts that I made were lengthwise ones which went along the grain of the wood the next ones were cut the other way and again it was done with poor technique when I was done I cleaned them all with sandpaper and this was the result the main difference with these cuts is the way that the grain runs across them and the paper had a good diagram of this would naturally contains a system of narrow tubes which allow the tree to move water and nutrients kind of like our blood vessels the exact anatomy and structure changes between hardwood and softwood and between species but that isn't really important here I think the only thing you really need to know from this is that these tubes do exist and they run in the same direction as the grain if we look closely at this piece which was cut lengthwise we can see grain lines running from end to end this means that the narrow tube spanned the entire length of it and only open up on the ends on the other hand the width wise cuts were against the grain so all the tubes were cut much shorter and the open ends are on the large flat part this means that the tubes are now quite short only about the thickness of this piece which is between three and four millimeters the paper detailed quite a bit about how this affects the resin doping process but I wanted to try it out for myself and to show you guys the result anyway the next step was to chemically treat this wood with a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite I got the sodium hydroxide his drain cleaner from my local hardware store and I think I bought the sodium sulfite from ebay a really long time ago I then looked at the paper to see how much he needed of each and I was sad to see that they just gave concentrations but somehow no volume amount I figured that it probably just needed enough liquid to cover all the wood and that five hundred mils would be more than enough and now that I had a target volume I could calculate how much I needed of each which came out to be about 50 grams of the sodium hydroxide and 25 grams of the sodium sulfite so now that I actually knew how much I needed of each I could move on to making the solution I went ahead and pulled out a 1 liter beaker and I filled it with distilled water up to around 400 mils then I turned on my stirring added 50 grams of the sodium hydroxide and waited for it all to dissolve a few minutes later there was no solid left and the solution had heated up quite a bit so I went ahead and poured in that 25 grams of the sodium sulphite and I waited for that to disappear as well now some of you might be wondering here why started with 400 mils if I did all my calculations based on 500 and the reason for this was that adding both the ingredients caused the volume to increase a bit if I started with 500 the final volume would have been slightly above that meaning my concentration would be a bit less than what it called for in theory and especially for this I don't think it's a really big deal but I still try to get it as accurate as possible so I started with a random lower volume let it increase as things dissolved and then just topped it off to the 500 mil mark when the solution was ready I also took out the stir bar because it's not going to be used for the rest of the prep the reason for this is because as the wood gets processed it becomes quite fragile and if the stirrings left on it would probably start breaking it apart in any case the solution was now ready and I just needed to heat it up so I turned on the hot plate and when it started boiling I dropped in some of the wood pieces I probably could have just thrown them in all at once but I decided to add them one by one just to make sure that it didn't bubble out of control when it was all added it seemed relatively tame so I turned the heat up a bit more this was probably a mistake though because within just a few minutes it started boiling way too violently it also started bubbling a lot more and I was kind of concerned that it would get out of the beaker so I took it off the hot plate for a bit then I put it back on about a minute later and I also turned the hot plate to a lower setting over the course of the next couple minutes the boiling slowed down a lot and it eventually got to a rate that I liked the idea here was to bring it to just around or below boiling but not to boil it too violently because then I would just be losing a whole bunch of water at this point I thought it looked decent so I added a bit more distilled water and I put a bowl on top the purpose of this bowl was to help cool the vapours Andry condense them into the beaker and to help with this I put a bit of water in it under ideal conditions I would have done this all in a round bottom flask and used the condenser column above it however these pieces of wood were clearly way too big too to the opening of a round bottom so I had to use this poor man's system instead okay so to understand what's going on here I first need to quickly go over the basic composition of wood in general what is made of three main components cellulose hemicellulose and lignin the cellulose is an unbranched polymer made of glucose and it forms long chains that are usually between 7,000 and 15,000 units long the Hemi cellulose on the other hand is a much shorter branched polymer usually between 500 and 3,000 units long and it's made from a mixture of glucose and some other sugars together these two biopolymers form the major framework of the wood but alone they aren't very strong so to increase the strength the tree uses another biopolymer that's called lignin this one's even more branched than the hemi cellulose and it also has no real defined structure it's kind of just a random network of phenolic units but it's really useful it serves to crosslink and hold in place all of the long hemi cellulose and cellulose fibres and it also fills up the empty space so with that being said I can now explain what I'm doing here in the presence of the sodium hydroxide and the sodium sulfite some of the lignin is getting chopped up and removed from the wood this whole wood treatment process that I'm doing is very similar to something called the Kraft process which is used to convert wood into pulp and then paper and in the future I'm definitely gonna try out the Kraft process for myself because I'm really interested in making some paper in any case the major idea here was that by removing the lignin it would just leave behind the porous network of cellulose and hemicellulose then in a future step I could inject epoxy and it would fill up all this empty space this process mostly just targets the laitanan but to a certain extent it also attacks some of the hemi cellulose in the end though there will still be some left so I'll have a mixture of cellulose and hemicellulose however for the rest of the video I thought it was kind of annoying to have to mention both every single time so whenever I mentioned cellulose just know that I'm including hemi cellulose as well in any case this reaction is quite slow so even with heating it still takes a while in the paper it said to soak it for 12 hours so I just left it overnight when I came back the next day I noticed that I had lost a lot of water and this was because my bowl had dried out this wasn't really an issue because they still had plenty of it left but I probably should have topped it off a bit more the night before regardless though at this point it was done so I took it off the hot plate this dark nearly black solution that almost looked like Coker Pepsi was dumped off into another beaker then my now treated dark pieces of wood were washed three times with boiling distilled water the purpose of these washings was to get rid of any reaction side products as well as any sodium hydroxide or a sodium sulfite that might remain so each time I just poured in the water mixed it around a bit and let it sit for about five or ten minutes each time this gave me a nice yellow colored solution which I would then pour off and dump in more distilled water by the third time I thought the yellow color would completely disappear but it didn't really seem like that was the case when I was done these three washings I topped it off with some more boiling distilled water just to make sure that the wood didn't dry out so at this point this was what the wood was like for the lengthwise piece it was still rigid in the direction of the grain but in the other way it was kind of floppy and this made sense because we weren't supposed to be damaging the cellulose in any way so they should still be strong we were just getting rid of the lignin that held each fiber together for the other piece it was floppy in all directions which made sense because we had no long cellulose fibers here they were all cut very short basically to the thickness of this wood and now with very little lignin left there wasn't much holding them together at this point the pieces were more or less ready to be filled with the resin but there was still some lignin left that was making them Brown so the next step was to get rid of almost all the lignin that was left and to do this I used hydrogen peroxide in total I added a hundred mils of 35% peroxide and I stirred it around almost immediately though I realized that adding everything all at once was probably a mistake the peroxide quickly started breaking down into oxygen gas and water and the whole thing started to bubble up it also didn't really look like it was gonna stop anytime soon so I had to take it away and put it in a container and by the time I got it there and set up the camera again it was already foaming like crazy I left it here for a few minutes with occasional mixing and eventually it all went down I think the major reason why this happened was not only because I dumped in all the peroxide at once but I also kind of heated the solution before adding it the paper said that the wood needed to be boiled in the peroxide so I didn't really think it was an issue to preheat it but I mean it clearly was in any case when it was all under control I put it back on the hot plate but the volume was really low instead of just dumping everything off and remaking the whole thing from scratch I decided I would just top it up with regular 3% peroxide the reason I did it like this was not only because it was easier but also because I was kind of afraid of making it too concentrated I had hoped that by doing it this way the bubbling wouldn't get too crazy it initially seemed okay but as the temperature increased the foaming got worse and worse it wasn't nearly as bad as before but by the time that it got to boiling the foam was at the top and I had to take it off the hot plate there was something in the liquid that was making it foam a lot worse than usual so I dumped it all off and I filled it up with some fresh 3% peroxide this was then slowly heated and brought to a boil and while it still did foam it wasn't nearly as bad as before one thing that I do want to mention is that the paper called for a very specific concentration of peroxide which was why I initially made it by diluting the concentrated stuff by their instructions it comes out to be around an 8 or 9% solution but based on my experience from this run I think the dilute 3% stuff is more than good enough in any case the direction that it gave was to just boil it in the peroxide until the yellow color disc peared it gave no indication as to how long this would actually take and it also didn't really say how to determine when the yellow color was gone so my plan was to basically just keep boiling it until they turned white or something I also randomly added more peroxide at various intervals when I felt that it needed more there really wasn't much sign so that though and it was more or less just when I felt like the volume was too low or when it wasn't bubbling enough just like the last process this one was really slow and it took about five hours for it to look like this the ones that were cut widthwise were completely white but the lengthwise ones still had yellow on the edges so I kept this going for another hour or so but it didn't really seem to change so I took it off the hot plate I dumped out all the liquid and then these pieces were washed three times with distilled water this was done just to get rid of as much of the peroxide as possible before I dumped off the water from the last washing I took a closer look at them this was one of the pieces that was cut width wise and you can faintly see my fingers through it then by contrast I pulled out one of the lengthwise pieces and you couldn't see my fingers at all again this comes down to the direction of the grain because here they're all running lengthwise so it's perpendicular to the light that's hitting it this causes a lot of the light to be scattered and very little of it is able to make it through whereas on the other hand the width wise cuts have their cellulose and their tubes running parallel to the light so a lot more of its able to get transmitted in any case these wood pieces were now almost ready but there was just one last step the resin that I'll be using isn't compatible with water so I first need to somehow get it all out the most common way to do this normally would be to just leave it out in the air and to let it all evaporate however I can't do that in this case because now that the lignin is gone as they dried they would all shrink and get really hard all of the cellulose fibers would get really densely packed together and it would make it really hard to fill it with the resin so instead I used a solvent that could pick up and absorb the water but at the same time still be compatible with the resin the paper specifically said that they used 95 percent ethanol so that's what I used but I think it's also possible to use methanol or isopropanol but anyway that was about it after I added the ethanol I covered the top and I let it sit in the fridge for about a day to pull out as much water as possible okay so at this point the wood pieces were ready and I just had to put the resin in them in theory there are many different epoxies that can be used but the paper specifically called for this one there might be other reasons why they used it but it seemed like the major one was just that it had a low viscosity which made it a lot easier to pull it into the wood to use it it was pretty simple and I just had to mix Part A with B in a ratio of 2 to 1 so just for example here I measured out 40 mils of a and 20 mils of B both the parts were then transferred to a disposable plastic cup and I started mixing it around and after about 30 seconds or a minute when I felt that it was a pretty good mixture I dumped it into another plastic cup the major reason for this is that often at the sides of the cup it doesn't really get mixed very well so to fix this I just dump everything into a new cup and I leave all the potentially poorly mixed stuff in the old one this one was again thoroughly mixed around just for good measure and then it was good to go so for the first run I randomly picked out several small pieces and I put them all on some paper towel to soak up some of the ethanol all of these pieces came from a larger widthwise cut one that had fallen apart I then transferred them all to a bowl and on top of it I poured in the epoxy one thing to keep in mind is that right after making the epoxy it starts to set so because of this it was really important to pick all the pieces and to get them to this bowl as quickly as possible just letting these pieces soak in the epoxy really wouldn't work very well and I had to pull a vacuum so this entire bowl was sealed in a vacuum chamber and I turned on my pump as the pressure dropped air in both the wood and the epoxy started to get pulled out it also caused a lot of the ethanol in the wood to evaporate and because of this a lot of bubbling started happening the vacuum was held on for about 5 minutes and then I repress rised the chamber and when I did this the epoxy rushed into the wood to fill the empty space where there used to be ethyl or according to the paper this process then had to be repeated two more times in theory it would probably be best to be able to do this process several times but we're limited by the cure time of the epoxy the paper warned that by about the 30-minute mark the epoxy usually starts to get too thick after the third cycle the pieces weren't floating well anymore and it looked like they'd sunk down which I thought was a good sign I had hoped that this meant that most of the air and ethanol had been removed and replaced with epoxy what was unfortunate though was after this the paper wasn't super clear about the next step all it said was that the wood and the resin was kept static for 12 hours but I didn't really know what that meant if I just left it like this in the bowl it would completely solidify and just never come out there would also be so much extra epoxy around it which I didn't really think made sense so I decided to take the pieces out and to just let them sit on the back of a crystallizing dish I figured that this way when they all hardened they would be a lot easier to peel off I also thought that having a whole bunch of extra epoxy wouldn't be ideal so I did my best to clean things up then I left them out overnight and 12 hours later they were really easy to remove I expected to be quite hard but I was able to just pick them all off with my fingers the bottom of the dish was also relatively easy to clean by just scraping everything off these were the final pieces and I thought they kind of looked okay but they were definitely far from perfect to test them I put them on the printed out procedure from this paper just to see if the text could be read through them it was definitely possible to see that there was writing behind them but it was nowhere near clear enough to actually read it now taking a closer look at the pieces there were clearly some problems with them as this one cured it kind of pulled itself apart and I think it was just because there wasn't enough epoxy in it there was also this one as well which didn't have any cracks in it it was very slightly transparent around the edges but it almost looked like it was mostly just a surface coating and not much actually got inside to test its strength I tried breaking it and it really wasn't strong at all to be fair the epoxy still hadn't fully cured but if enough had gotten in there it definitely would have been better than in the paper it said that the vacuum was used to both get rid of the air as well as the ethanol however even after the third cycle it seemed like a lot of ethanol was still coming off so I thought this might have been the problem to fix this I thought that it might work to do a quick pre drawing step so into the bowl I put another piece of a widthwise cut and I put just this in the vacuum chamber then I turned on my pump and I pulled out a bunch of the ethanol as I did this the piece slowly turned white and it also shrank a bit I kind of didn't really have a real end point and I just stopped it when I felt like it looked good enough so when it was done this was what I had there was still a bit of ethanol in it but I feel like most of it had been taken out so now again just like before I had to fill it up with resin and to do this I put it in the bowl dumped in the epoxy and put this in my vacuum chamber after the third cycle it looked pretty decent and I put it on the crystallizing dish to cure this time though I didn't wipe away any of the epoxy and I actually added extra then the next day when things were still soft I peeled it off the dish I also used a razor blade to cut off most of the excess stuff and when I was done with a few last finishing touches this was what it was like it still wasn't beautiful in uniform like what they had in the paper but it was definitely the best result that I had so far now looking closer at the piece it was still kind of soft because the epoxy hadn't fully cured and because of this when I peeled it off the dish I kind of put stress into this piece which made small tear lines in any case I wanted to test how transparent it was so just like in the last run I put it against some text this time I was happy to see that it was way better and I was actually able to read what was on the other side I'm not sure if this is actually because my pre drying step did anything though and it might just be because the top of this piece is smooth in the other runs I took away most of the excess epoxy and because of this the surface of the pieces became quite rough this would cause it to scatter light a lot more and it could be one of the major reasons what was interesting though and they covered this in the paper was that it really had to be right against the paper to read anything the reason for this was that because although it was transparent it was only barely so and the cellulose was still scattering a lot of the light now for my third run I wanted to try it with one of the lengthwise pieces so just like the other run I did a quick pre drying step and then I did the vacuum cycle three times then when it was done I put it on the crystallizing dish and I waited until the next day the next day when I came back the difference was pretty obvious the two ends were kind of able to become transparent but the middle of it was still quite white when I took a closer look I was able to see that barely any epoxy was able to make it to the center as I mentioned before the tubes in the wood were only open on the two ends so for the epoxy to get to the center it had to travel quite far on one end it looked like it almost made it a centimeter but on the other side it was only a few millimeters this is why these lengthwise ones aren't ideal for this purpose because it takes a lot more effort to get the epoxy in it the trade-off though is that if we are able to get the epoxy fully into this this piece will be a lot stronger than the other one this was highlighted by the clip you saw earlier where after the lignin was removed this piece was still kind of strong whereas the width wise one was ready to fall apart in any case these runs were moderately successful but I really didn't like the pre drying step it seemed to help to get out some of the extra ethanol but it also caused the piece to shrink this caused the cellulose fibers to pack more tightly together which meant it would be harder for the epoxy to get into it the paper didn't mention any issue about getting rid of the ethanol and especially nothing about any pre drying step so I started thinking that it was probably just an issue on my side and it was very likely just something to do with the equipment that I was using the pump that I use is a water circulating aspirating pump which is really useful and good for a lot of applications but it just doesn't pull that much air it's still able to get down to a really good vacuum but it just takes a while and I started thinking that if my pump didn't pull air very quickly and on top of this my vacuum chamber had a lot of dead space I just wasn't doing things very efficiently I figured that the next easiest thing to try would be to get a smaller chamber so I could pull a quicker vacuum so that's exactly what I did and I tried it both with a pre drying step and without one this was what it looked like the next day where the one on the top was the one that got pre dried and right off the bat I saw that that one had a much better result because the other one had already cracked it was also really white in the center which told me that the epoxy didn't penetrate it very well these results were definitely not as good as I had hoped for and they were actually significantly worse than one of the previous runs however I still thought there were a couple things that I could try I mentioned just a minute ago that my vacuum pump didn't pull that much air so one major improvement could be to just buy a faster pump on Amazon this really wasn't very expensive and I was able to pick one up for around a hundred dollars also one other major improvement would be to make these pieces thinner I thought of cutting it with a table saw like before but I didn't think it was gonna be possible to make pieces that thin so I ended up trying it with a hacksaw but it didn't really work out I ended up asking my dad for help and he said to just cut it freehand on the table saw this would have been really dangerous to do one-handed like I did before so this time I had my dad cut the pieces while I did the filming these were all the pieces that were cut off and this time they were a lot thinner instead of being between three and four millimeters they were all between two and three I also only went with width wise cuts this time because I wanted to get the best results possible they were then treated just like last time where the first step was to remove most of the lignin and when that was done I treated it with the peroxide but this time I added the peroxide slowly and I started with a cold solution I then slowly brought this to a boil and it never ended a bubbling out of control however even after boiling it for almost the same amount of time it never fully whitened at the time I really didn't know what the reason for this was but now I'm thinking it was because of the washing steps in the first run even though I washed the pieces quite well there was still some sodium hydroxide that was stuck inside of them however in this case I think just because the pieces were a lot thinner it was way easier to wash out all the sodium hydroxide and because of this there was little to none of it left over which could catalyze the breakdown of the peroxide this was important though to generate oxygen gas in the wood and to destroy the rest of the lignin I'm not a hundred percent certain about this theory but it would explain why the pieces didn't whiten properly and why it didn't bubble very much unfortunately though while I was doing it I didn't think of that so I tried a different route I took out a small piece and I heated it with just regular bleach and I found that it worked quite well I considered splitting this batch into and trying to different treatment steps but in the end I kind of just said screw it and I pour it in a bunch of bleach I then turned on the hot plate and heated it to around 50 or 60 see the yellow color very quickly disappeared and it only took something like 10 minutes to become completely white and at this point it was taken off the hot plate and all the bleach was poured out looking at these pieces I was really happy with how white they were but I also noticed that a lot of them had fallen apart using straight up hot bleach was obviously a little bit too rough on these pieces so I don't think it was the best method what I think the best thing to do is to just not wash the pieces too thoroughly after removing the lignin or maybe it's possible to give them a pretreatment by soaking them in some sodium hydroxide if that fails though maybe a really dilute solution of bleach could work or maybe just not heating it at all and letting it sit overnight in any case it was then washed thoroughly with water and between each run I let it sit in the water for about 10 or 15 minutes just to soak up as much of the bleach as possible when I felt that it was done and I didn't really smell any bleach I added the 95 percent ethanol however almost immediately it started to get cloudy and I think it was because the ethanol was reacting with the bleach this ends up forming some chloroform which dissolves into the ethanol but it also forms sodium acetate which i think is what gave it the cloudiness in theory this honestly really isn't a big issue but I did want my pieces to be as clean as possible so I let them sit here for a few hours to fully react and then it dumped off the ethanol and I topped it up with some fresh stuff in hindsight it might have been a good idea to go back into another water washing to get rid of the sodium acetate but oh well the small amount that was present probably really wouldn't affect very much anyway with all this I was ready to try things out and for my first run because I had this new vacuum pump a new vacuum chamber and thinner pieces I didn't really think a pre drying step made any sense also in the mean time I looked at the paper and I realized something pretty significant I focused on the fact that in the procedure they said that their sample pieces were peeled off in the end but when I looked at the pictures they actually kind of looked different in this small image I thought the entire transparent piece was the wood but it's actually not the woods just in the middle and it's surrounded by a bunch of plastic in my mind though to get a relatively thick but still really uniform piece like this they had to have use some sort of mold they couldn't have just peeled it off a dish like I did so I decided to try this out and I went and got the silicone molds that I used for my making soap video using scissors I cut out a few sections to make sample wells and I was ready to get started for the first run I used the largest piece that I had and I just put it in the well and covered it with epoxy then I turned on the vacuum and the difference was immediately evident with the smaller chamber and the faster pump it got to a vacuum way quicker it also clearly pulled a better vacuum because there was way more bubbling as it continued it got kind of crazy and it caused a lot of splashing after the third cycle though this is all really important to clean up with ethanol otherwise it'll all get caked on and kind of ruined the chamber in any case this was what it looked like when it was done and it was probably the best run that I had so far I let it cure overnight and the next day I took it out of the mold unfortunately the piece had floated a bit to the top so it wasn't completely covered with the epoxy on top of this the epoxy had kind of shrank in on itself which made the whole thing have a bit of a curve nonetheless though it was still a pretty nice piece and it was definitely transparent I cut off the extra epoxy with a hacksaw and then I tried to see if I could read through it unfortunately even though it was quite clear I couldn't because I think the epoxy was spacing it up from the paper and as we saw before taking it just a little bit away from the paper can make things too hazy to see through it properly I thought this piece was pretty good but when I let it cure for another day or so it ended up cracking itself in my mind the major reason for this was that the top part didn't end up getting covered properly so I tried to do something about this I did another run and like before the piece slowly floated to the top I tried occasionally poking it back down but it didn't really work at all what I ended up doing was waiting about an hour for it to harden a little bit and then on top of this I poured some fresh epoxy I think I added too much though so using a syringe I pulled out some of the excess and when I felt I got into a good level I just put it on the side and waited for it to cure overnight the next day it looked okay so I D molded it and cut off the excess with a hacksaw this was the final result which I thought looked decent but it was still definitely far from perfect when I looked at it on the side I could see that there was a whole bunch of extra epoxy above and below the wood and also the piece was curved I'm not exactly sure what the reason for this was but apparently it still happens even when the top is completely covered in any case I started thinking that maybe using a mold like this wasn't actually a good idea when I was doing it before by just putting it on the back of a dish I didn't have a problem with any of my pieces bending so I decided to try doing that again except this time I had a much better pump and a better vacuum chamber unfortunately at this point I didn't have any large pieces left so I just used a couple medium sized ones when they were done I laid them out on the dish and I made sure that they had a huge excess of epoxy I also came back about 30 or 40 minutes later and I covered the top with the half cured epoxy that I'd pulled these pieces from this was what it looked like the next day and the piece on the right was probably my best one so far unfortunately the one on the left didn't get fully filled so it was kind of just scrapped I peeled it off cleaned it up with a razor blade and then I did my transparency test and this time it was pretty good it was a bit hazy but the text on the other side was still pretty easy to read so I guess these conditions were my best so far but there is definitely a lot of improvement that can still be made for example as the piece cured over the next couple days it ended up just bending itself again it luckily didn't end up cracking but it was still definitely a problem however it did kind of work pretty well as a nasty overgrown thumbnail anyway I think that's about it in general I had a lot of fun working on this project but I definitely think it was a lot more difficult than I expected and this was mostly because again there just wasn't very much detail in the paper I think the overall takeaway though is that for this process to work well you need a good vacuum chamber a pretty good vacuum and to have the pieces as thin as possible and one final thing which I never really mentioned was the reason why these people even tried making transparent wood in the first place and the reason for this was that not only did it make a strong composite material it was also transparent and it came from a renewable resource the major issue with it though as we saw in this video is that getting the epoxy into it is really hard so making larger pieces is gonna be difficult in the future I might revisit this because I think I still do want to make a large piece of it I would start out with using the same two millimeter thickness but just have a really large face and then I might move into some other thicker or weird shapes I have so many projects to do before that though so I have no idea when or if I'll ever get around to doing that as usual a big things goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see my videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube also everyone on patreon can directly message me and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 2,838,444

Rating: 4.8727221 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, transparent, wood, ave, paper, pulp, cellulose, lignin, removal, bleach

Id: x1H-323d838

Length: 35min 49sec (2149 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/gatekeepr]

NileRed is so sweet towards AvE

[u/The_J485]

There's something so cool about seeing some of my favorite YouTubers intermingleify like this

[u/grolas]

The bending of the best piece could be due to him adding epoxy in two layers causing stress as the layers set differently.

[u/Damogran6]

Holy Crap that was a lot of Scientific Method.

[u/grungemuffin]

Bro he got so close to that table saw grabbing at the piece of wood

[u/shaneucf]

Lol I just want to say that soooo many papers hide their know-how or blur out the procedure on purpose. Academia has its own kind of evil.