Building An Updated Invisibility Shield... For Chris Ramsay!?!

[Music] so a while back on february 24th actually i put out a video on how i made my very own invisibility shield now credit where credit stu that project was inspired by a canadian company called hyperstill and i'll leave a link to their youtube video down in my description but i'll keep this intro short and sweet but trust me this needs to be prefaced that video did quite well you guys very much enjoyed it and i didn't tend to do a return to this project but not so soon and that was until another youtuber contacted me to ask i could make him his very own invisibility shield and that youtuber was chris freaking ramsey so naturally i said yes if you don't know who chris ramsay is i'll leave a link to his channel down in the description as well as well as a realtor to get you out from underneath of that rock that you're living under chris ramsay is most widely known for his puzzle solving and his magic check out his channel i think you'll really enjoy it and for all of you who couldn't get a hold of a riot shield this time i actually decided to make my own but out of necessity and i'll elaborate a little bit more on that later anyway i want to get right to the build so let's begin [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right ladies and gentlemen we're just about ready to thermoform our piece of acrylic to make our invisibility shield now making one from scratch is obviously a rather difficult thing to do but unfortunately riot shields like this one you see here and the one that i made my original invisibility shield out of are now only being sold to people who can show law enforcement credentials at checkout in other words civilians can no longer purchase riot shields hence the need for this contraption so this is the piece of clear plastic that we'll be using now this is acrylic and generally riot shields like that one are made out of polycarbonate because they're a lot more durable a lot more shock resistant they're not going to crack or break under very intense circumstances whereas this is a little less tough but because we're only using it to hold our lenticular sheets there shouldn't be an issue i believe it's 0.22 inch plexiglass and the whole sheet is three feet wide from this perspective and four feet tall so yeah it's just made from two by material with three strips of two inch wide by three quarter inch thick bits of scrap lumber and three places and then the whole thing is skinned in this which i've been told is wall paneling all right now our form is tightly secured to our metal table just temporarily with two by four and four screws and at the very bottom here you can see we've got it weighted down because we don't want this to move as soon as we start working with it all right and on top of that we have a cotton sheet this is just a leftover moving blanket and we want to use cotton to protect our surface of our plexiglas from any screw heads or marring that could be a result of any imperfections on this surface but we want to make sure that we pat it with cotton we use synthetics than any heat from our heat source in my case a heat gun could melt it and it could ruin the finish on the outside of our plexiglass create a sticky mess and of course be a fire hazard so cotton is important here so let me walk you through how this whole thing is going to work i've got my plexiglas there of course and then i have this piece of wood here that has two holes drilled in it and these holes are spaced out to go on these blocks that have secured to the outsides of the form so my current plan is to put the plexiglass with a four foot section going this way of course right along here and then clamp it down with this just using screws then i'll be going back and forth along the acrylic heating it a little bit at a time and slowly bending it over hopefully the weight of itself will also assist with that so it goes at its own pace because if you force plexiglas when doing any kind of thermoforming or bending you could risk cracking it so in order to bend plexiglas especially the thick stuff you need to get up to a relatively high temperature but generally on average that's about 325 degrees fahrenheit which this on its lowest setting is more than double but that's okay because i'm sure we won't actually reach that temperature with our plexiglass because it'll dissipate the heat before it can accumulate all right one more thing three by four is obviously a rather large sheet but i've oversized this whole setup just in case we have any malformations on any of the edges we have some room to work with so i think everything is set up we've got our frame we've got our heat source we've got our plexiglass and i guess now we begin [Music] okay the last thing we're going to do is take off the protective coating just in case we scratch it hopefully only we scratch the paper and not the acrylic so that stays on for now and hopefully because it's paper and not a plastic film it won't melt when we apply heat to it to bed in the acrylic so now i'm going to slowly very slowly apply heat along here until it bends a little bit on its own weight move up a very small amount and we want a high definition bend we want a gradual curve not an individual chunk chunk chunk chunk so we're going to be working our way across very very slowly and this is definitely going to require some patience [Music] okay so after heating it to the point that i could with a little bit of tension bend it all the way across this curve and then clamp it in place i went ahead and heated the whole thing as much as i could just to make sure that there was no inner compression or tension spots and i sure hope it's good enough because my heat gun is toast [Music] [Applause] now you might notice as i move the sheet of plexiglass back and forth and it changes your viewing angle slightly there are some imperfections and some distortions within the plexiglas itself and that's because it's not a complete uniform curve that just isn't achievable with the equipment and setup that i had and i think that's okay because our goal here is to distort light i think it can only work to our benefit [Music] all right so our shield blank is clean all the dirt you see is on the underside and the next thing i've done is i've created this cardboard template now this is obviously going to be much larger than the original riot shield in fact it's about 40 inches by 30 inches of course that measurement is 40 inches tall 30 inches wide but i've left about a quarter inch all the way around the edge just so i can do some final sanding of the final product this will be a substantial upgrade over our old invisibility shield because as you can see i believe this is only about 36 by 20. so i'm going to temporarily fix this in place trace it and then cut it out with the jigsaw [Music] [Music] so to cut up my plexiglas shield i'll be using a jigsaw with a 20 tooth per inch scroll cut wood blade you want a relatively fine blade for cutting plexiglas something with a lot of teeth and in my case since i'll be doing some relatively tight corners i'll be using something thin for example this scroll cut blade [Music] all right so last night i spent a little bit more time heating up individual parts of the shield and just trying to get it a little bit more uniform and its curve another thing i decided to do is actually cut it down in size it was a little bit too cumbersome a little bit too unrealistically large so it is still quite a bit wider than the original but it's about the same in height now the next thing we're going to do is bend these tabs over and as i said these tabs are there to be bent down hopefully in an angle similar to these legs here and then they'll end up being our attachment points for our handles which i have yet to figure out but i've got a pretty good idea of how i'm going to do that [Music] fan freaking tastic it did split but i don't believe it split all the way through so we're just gonna roll with it i guess because frankly we don't have another choice so the reason why that one split and that one didn't is because i was more distributed with the heat on this side so basically all of the change of shape that this was experiencing was spread over a larger area or as opposed to that side i was keeping it all in a more finite line and it ended up being too much movement for the plexiglass and a split okay so we are getting closer into putting the invisibility into our invisibility shield first thing we need to do though is make sure that we finish all of the prep work that we can't do once the lenses are on and part of that is addressing this edge so obviously it's pretty uneven all the way around there's a lot of rough artifacts left over from cutting it with a saw and because this is just a soft plastic i'm not unlike most others what we can do is just take a standard sander run all the way around with some medium grit sandpaper make sure it's nice and smooth and then do the final touch-up work before we're ready to glue on our panels [Music] [Music] there's one more thing we need to do before this thing is ready to put the lenticular sheets on to make this the invisibility shield that you came to see so the process of this is actually called flame polishing and let me show you exactly what it looks like this is the scrap left over and so it's not unlike the same edge that was on this before i sanded it as you can see it's quite rough and all those little irregularities and the mountains and the valleys in that can also be a place where pressure and force can start accumulating and could result in a crack so flame polishing which looks like this is simply the process of essentially getting just a little bit of it into a liquid state getting rid of all the little imperfections and making it just one homogenous shape one more quick note you have to have a map gas torch for this a propane torch won't get hot enough to get to plain polish on this edge [Music] alright so how does our invisibility shield actually work we have the plastic shield but obviously we need to actually make it function and the secret to that lies in these plastic sheets so to help better explain it i put together this diagram if some of you have seen it before for my old invisibility shield video then feel free to skip it to this time stamp and it'll skip over all this but for those of you who are interested here's how this works so this is our lenticular sheet here obviously it's extremely zoomed in because i wanted to show each individual lens that are on the sheets of this plastic now this plastic of lenticular lenses are actually used most commonly in 3d imagery and those pictures that change depending on your perspective like you see in a haunted house for example and that bookmark that you had in elementary school recognize that sound so as i said basically the plastic is just a whole bunch of these individual lenses on a very very small scale all running parallel to each other the length of our plastic sheet each one of these individual lenses is known as a lenticule and basically they're just a little convex lens so this eye up here this is you or the camera or any other sort of seeing device that you're trying to hide from or hide something from obviously these work by taking in light from our surroundings then converting it into an image signal no matter if it's a camera or an eye or whatever and so what our lenticular sheet does to make our little person here seemingly disappear is it takes the photons from either side and scatters the ones coming from him if that makes sense so the principle that this works off of is known as snell's law and basically snell's law just says that light going from one medium to another will change direction slightly so in our example that's light from the air going through our lenticular lenses being reflected through the plastic then being reflected again out to the air and to your eye a common example of snell's law that you're probably very familiar with is the classic take a known to be straight object put it into water and watch it seemingly either change positions or bend so essentially what we're doing is we're taking the light from the surroundings and what's behind mr joe here and we're redirecting it to the eye and all the light that's coming from mr joe is being refracted in other directions scattering it almost completely away from the eye making him seemingly disappear there's also one interesting thing to note with these lenticular lenses since they all run in one direction you need to make sure that your target item is also being oriented in the same direction as the way the lenses are oriented for example if i was standing up behind the shield i'd want to be parallel to the lenticules now another name for these is actually lubor's lenses and they're used in magic with that exact purpose in mind that i just mentioned where i can say pencil is still there but if i change it pencil disappears and that's because the lenticules are running in this direction so if i mimic that direction gone disappears going this direction obviously you can still see it so we need to keep that in mind when actually mounting these to our shield and another cool thing about these is that because it's all uniform and it works the same way it doesn't matter what the perspective of the viewer is as long as there's material between the eye and the object we're trying to hide meaning that this actively changes the image that this person is seeing as they move possibly left or right so i bought 50 28 inch by 20 inch lenticular lenses may have gone overkill but they only sold in bulk all right now that we're just about ready to glue this down i'm gonna give it one good final clean all right so in an ideal world you would have the lenticular lenses actually be optically connected i guess you could say to the shield itself meaning that you would have some sort of liquid so that it wasn't transferring between a slight air space in between the sheets and shield itself because you'll have a little bit of refraction that'll make the image not quite as clear as it could be if you'll notice on the old invisibility shield here where the glue goes around it's much clearer where it's bonded with adhesive but as you guys said in the comment section of that video there's really no way to do that unless you put this whole thing in a vacuum chamber big enough to accept it which of course i don't quite have so for now we're going to be doing the same thing i did on that one now before beginning make sure you have some isopropyl alcohol on hand just in case you have any mishaps with the glue because what can happen is since we're relying on the geometry of the lenticules if you have anything that optically bridges between them it'll just be more like a clear plastic rather than something with those lenses so we have to be very very careful when putting these on with the smooth side down not get any glue on the surface [Music] [Music] so [Music] so i wasn't going to show this but i wasn't happy with the way the glue looks so i ended up replacing this lenticular sheet entirely removing the old one removing glue and putting one back on and i found a good way to hold the lenticular sheets down for gluing on the edges where you can't get a clamp i took a couple of magnets wrapped in cloth to protect the surface and it seemed to work pretty well and once you get the bulk off with scissors it's much easier to get a much closer cut using a razor knife [Music] all right ladies and gentlemen our shield is basically done and what i've done different with this handle assembly as opposed to that one is i've actually put it together with screws so it's all mechanical bondage that can be undone just because i'm shipping this thing all the way to chris ramsay it'll be a lot easier if i can take it apart put it in a package and then i can reassemble it upon arrival so yeah now that it's done we're going to give it a final clean and then i'm going to take it out and play around with it [Music] all right ladies and gentlemen i think that's about it so if you want to see more of this project go ahead and head on over to chris ramsey's channel so you can see what he has in store for it alright that was really fun i hope you enjoyed this video as much as i enjoyed making it and chris if you ever need anything else built i'm your guy anyway if you want to support my channel i would really appreciate a like and if you want to really helps me out if you subscribed as well and when i release a new video you won't miss it if you want to see more of my projects then check them out at the end of the video which are probably up by now and i hope you have a good day thanks for watching you

Channel: Randomn

Views: 4,217,962

Rating: 4.9349198 out of 5

Keywords: invisible, invisibility, shield, plexiglass, Chris Ramsay, DIY, weekend project, homemade, how, to, build, make, create, project, acrylic, magic, disappear, made, home, science, vanish, illusion

Id: G93bju1qCSI

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020