In today's video, we're taking really thin sheets
of aluminum, and see if we can twist them
into something stronger, a metal rope. [Music] On YouTube, Skylar Parks asked, if we can make a rope
using aluminum foil. Skylar, that's an
interesting question. As most people know, aluminum foil is
not terribly strong. It's made of metal,
but it's so thin that it shreds apart easily. This is definitely not something you would think
of as holding any support. Even when we take sort
of a bunch of it at once, it's pretty easy to bust
right through it. So can we take this super
thin flimsy material, and turn it
into something stronger, a cable or rope that we can actually pull
against with some strength. Here's the basic idea. In the past, we've used uncommon
materials to make rope. Today, we're going to take
something really light and thin, and see if we can get
the same result. We've made rope out of some uncommon or weak
materials in the past. We've used soda bottles
cutting into strands. We've used pretty weak string
to make a fairly strong rope. We've used coconut fibers that we were able
to twist together into long continuous pieces. All of those were able to take
a fair amount of strength. Our rope made out of paper towel
was able to hold my weight, and pull a car. So we know that we
can take something weaker and bind it together
into something stronger. Today, we want to see if we can make that work
with aluminum foil. The aluminum does present
a few challenges that other materials
we've used don't have. Most of the time, when we've tried to make
any sort of rope involves taking long strips or pieces of the material
and twisting it together. However, with the foil, sometimes we run into a problem
that if we keep twisting it, rather than getting stronger,
it becomes brittle, and just breaks right apart. I believe this is mostly because rather than being
strands or fibers that are really strong
pulled one direction, the foil is sort of uniformly
week in every direction. Easy that direction. Easy that direction. Easy at an angle. It just rips really easily. So, it's not the same
as others materials we've used. Even paper towels, which aren't very strong
on their own, we were able to twist into something
that made a pretty strong rope, because it is
a fibrous material, and twisting it together
helped it bind even stronger. With the foil,
it's a different beast. Before we get started
with the whole rope, we at least want to see if we
can have a proof-of-concept. Can we take one sheet of foil and make it stronger
by changing the shape at all? [Music] Two sheets of foil
about the same size. Now, we want to attach one of these sheets of foil
onto our scale to see how hard we can pull on it
before it breaks. To try and make sure that we're pulling evenly with
the whole width of the foil, I'm going to take a dowel, and I'm going to tape
it to either side. That should make it so that when pressure
is being put on one spot, it's transferred to the whole
sheet at the same time. Let's test this out. [Music] Now, I'm going to hold
onto the dowel on this side. I'm going to pull
until something breaks. And hopefully, we're using the whole strength
of the foil here. [Music] I think I saw
that get 28 pounds, which is surprising. I really didn't think
we were going to be able to get that much force
out of one sheet of foil. Hard to know exactly
where it did fail, but we can see that it did tear
along this whole taped edge. So I imagine it gave out
in one spot first, and then quickly
spread to the sides. The question now is
if we take this sheet of foil, and we modify it, maybe by rolling it up,
is it going to get stronger or weaker than the whole sheet
of foil spread out wide. I'm going to start
by wrapping the piece of foil around this wooden dowel to make
it into a nice tube shape, and then I'll twist
it from there. I'm going to take this end, fit it into the chuck
of a drill, hold on to the other end,
and just let it spin. [Music] Wow, that's a lot shorter. Okay. Now this looks more like a rope. Obviously, this is more rope
shape than the sheet of foil. Let's see what strength we
can get off of this thing. [Music] I've got the foil attached
at both sides, and hopefully, we'll get all of the strength
being put into the foil, and not too much into the tape
and stuff like that. I think it's going to work. We may have to adjust
if it doesn't. Now, one thing I noticed, just as I was putting
on here and testing if I had any tension at all,
it started spinning. Our foil is coiled
up really tightly, and when I start putting weight on it, it starts uncoiling
just a little bit. Let's see what happens. I might end up stretching
this foil back out as it twists a bit. [Music] That gave out early. The scale got up to 9 pounds. It took some pressure off to try and hold the scales
so the camera can see it better, and then it seemed to break it about 7 pounds
when I was pulling on it again. This highlights another worry
that I had about the foil. If you've ever held
a little piece of thin metal, like a paper clip, and you bend it back and forth, you may notice
that it starts to get brittle, it loses its ductility, and you can't bend
it as easily anymore. And then when you put pressure
on that twisted spot, it just wants to break, because you've already made
the metal a little bit weaker. Our first test shows that a stretched-out piece
of foil laid out flat is actually holding more weight
than a twisted up piece of foil. A flat piece of foil
may in theory be able to hold more weight, but it's
horrendously impractical. You never want to try and pull
anything with a sheet of foil. So I think we can still turn
our twisted aluminum foil into something that can still
take quite a bit of pull. There's a few different
things I want to try. The first is sort of making
the foil into a rope, a little bit more the same way
other ropes are made, that's with thin strips
twisted together, and then twisting
those thin pieces together. The second is I want to try
using our rope machine. You've probably seen
us use this before. You put some strands in, you atttach drill
onto the back, spin it. It twists everything up,
and coils them together. Will this machine
work with foil? That twisting effect
that makes it brittle and break is something we've
already seen happen by hand. It could be even worse
in the machine. But even with that,
I still think we'll be able to twist pieces together
into a strong rope, whether we use this or not. To cut nice long strips
out of the sheet of foil, I'm going to fold it
over a few times, so I don't have to cut in
the whole length over and over. This way, I'll be able
to cut much shorter length, but still get this strips
running through the whole length of the sheet. Before I cut it though, there is one other
thing we have to do, and that's to put a layer
of paper towel in between foil. If you try and cut foil, fold it over without
anything in between, it tends to bind to itself. So here I've got a piece,
just folding it a couple of times in half. That's four layers
thick right there. Now, if I cut through,
I have this strip of foil, but the edges have sort
of curled over each other, and they don't always
like to let go. [Music] I don't think the drill is
the way to do this. [Music] We've got a much more
string shaped piece of foil. Maybe now, it will twist nicely? [Music] Twisted better than before, but I think we're actually getting a better result just
by rolling it in our hands, so it's not actually twisted up, but it is still rolled up. [Music] We now have three decently long fairly round strands
of the aluminum, and the goal is to see if we can twist these together
into a stronger cord. [Music] We've now got a cable made from three strands of
aluminum foil twisted together. Attatch to the scale, pull test. Oh, getting a lot of spinning. And it broke. Very low stress test
on that one. Oh, I think it just barely maxed
out at about 6 pounds. What do you think? Are we going to get any better
luck using our rope machine? [Music] Here it goes. Oh, well, we got three or four
inches of our rope, and then our individual
strands just snapped. That's not a lot of rope,
but it's a little bit, so we can try and take this,
and put it on the scale, and see what is measuring at. [Music] Hey, our tape gave out. Let's reinforce it
and try again. [Music] There it is. We got to 56 pounds. That is something that is definitely a higher
result than the 28 pounds, of course, we had
with the plain flat sheet, and this is still one sheet
of foil just cut into thirds, and then rolled up. So we finally managed
to get a little better than the plain sheet. However, we did use
our rope machine to do this, and then, all
of our cables broke. So the rope machine itself is not a very effective way
to keep making this rope. I want to scale that up. We're just gonna use
a lot of aluminum foil, we're you use whole
sheets this time, and I think I'm going to try
and do three wrapped together, and then three
of those wrapped together, so nine total sheets. I lost about two feet
in length doing that. Let's do it eight more times. We've got nine chords
laid out now. So we're going to start
twisting them together. We're going to twist 3 together,
3 together, 3 together, and then we're going to twist
all of those together, and make ourselves sort
of a big monster cable, see how it works. [Music] Now we've got three cables, and we need to twist them all
together into one giant cable. Let's turn it
into one big ol rope. [Music] Giant foil rope. Oh, that's great. Question is, does it have
any strength to it at all? About 3 feet, 4 inches long. Each sheet of foil
before we started was about 6, maybe 6 and 1/2 feet long. So we've lost almost 50% of our foil length
in turning it into this rope. We got to see
how much weight this can take. All right cable, rope foil,
whatever you are. [Music] It holds. [Music] It's not the most
comfortable rope to hold onto. It does hold its shape
better than most. Today, we've got the truck, which is got like 4 layers
of paracord attached to our foil rope. I unwound the rope
just a little bit, and I sort of braided
the paracord in there. And then I've got a lot
of layers of tape after braiding the rope back around it. Same thing on the other side,
attached to our scale. This is hooked onto
the tow hook of a car. And so now,
we're just going to test. We're going to have
Mark drive away very slowly, and we're going to see
how our foil rope holds up. See how many pounds of pressure it takes
before it just tears open. [Music] Broken. That was a very relaxed break. It just like... Gone. All right. There we go. Our rope broke. It was not a very
energetic breaking. I thought that maybe
it would just pop and catastrophically
fail all at once. But really, it just
was pulling and pulling, and then just was like, I'm out, and just let go, and everything
kind of fell down. But I'm quite sure I saw
it over 200 pounds. I think I saw it about 215 or 225,
something like that. Overall though, that's definitely a rope
yhat was doing something. Skylar Parks, thank you
for your suggestion. Guys, if you've got something
you want to see us try, let us know down
in the comments below. Guys, that's not all. We've always got more
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