I Built a Transparent Katana

have you ever seen an invisible sword well I think I have a few days ago I saw this picture right here that is an invisible sword and now I want one just like that a sword that's not all invisible but also destructible and sharp a sword that's basically like a normal one but that you can't see I'm going to build one not sure how yet I'm going to have to figure it out and then I'm going to test its sharpness and durability against increasingly harder targets the first step was choosing the right material and the first one that popped into my head well it was glass glass is transparent when it's cleaner than that and you can make it pretty sharp by using a diamond Stone like it did here but even though there are some kinds of glass that can be more resistant than usual and even indestructible according to the companies that sell them the problem with glass is that glass is glass and glass breaks at least way too easily to make a katana out of it but there is another material that not only is transparent but it's 10 times more impact resistant than steel by weight I'm talking about polycarbonate it is generally used for riot shields armored vehicles safety glasses and other indestructible items and because of all that it sounds like the perfect material for the job but I kind of still want to see for myself how hard it actually is to find that out I'm carrying out a small sample from the panel I'm planning to use for the katana and the idea is to hit hit the polycarbonate as hard as I can with this unnecessarily big Sledgehammer 3 2 [Applause] 1 and well I'm not exactly sure what just happened I only know that even though B saw horses broke because of the impact the polycarbonate panel is completely fine this thing has one scratch but you can't even feel it it's not even bended or anything it's like insane and since polycarb is clearly resilient meaning it can bend like a lot without breaking it's definitely my best option so to make the katana I got a big panel of polycarbonate 2 m by 0.5 and 12 mm or 0.47 in Stick which is also the maximum thickness I could find for this material and this is going to be the invisible and indestructible body of the sword now to cut the right shape out of the panel I'm going to use tape what I mean is that tape should make it easier to draw the consistent curve of the katana on the panel and then I can use that as a reference for the actual cut and after outlining the tip the edge and completing the handle I can start to see the final shape of the sword there is just one thing to point out I involuntarily made this thing big like way too big it's basically twice as large as a normal Katana and I'm not sure if I should be excited because the katana is massive and it's going to be powerful or worried because the katana is massive and I might not be able to even lifted but after making a few scientific tests I realized that because polycarbonate is so much lighter than steel it shouldn't be a problem to swing the sword even if it's that big and so I'm not worried anymore I'm just really excited instead then I use the jigsaw to C out a smaller perimeter around the sword so that it's going to be easier to work with it in the next step and after doing that it became even more noticeable how big this thing is going to be now the next step is to crop the actual shape of the sword out of the panel and and to do that I'm going to use a b saw then after cutting the shape I can remove the protective film and I'm going to be able to see if the sword actually looks invisible the problem is that Ben sace don't look too friendly and most importantly I don't exactly know how to use one so I got pretty nervous uh I already cut one part I forgot to film I cut it really bad you see the good thing is that I need to follow the in interor line this part inside here so my terrible cut wasn't actually a big deal for now then I cut the extra material out of the other side of the katana and like that I was getting closer now comes the hardest part I need to follow these lines here and be precise now this is definitely scarier and I don't mind my fingers being close to a deadly saw but making a mistake here means removing material out of the final Katana and potentially having to start from zero luckily though I was getting the hang of it and after removing the extra material from the handle I'm fixing the final details on the Belt grinder as you can clearly see here anyways like that the first step to make the sword is complete I'm also happy to see the weight of the katana is not a problem at all it's not too light not too heavy and the katana is not bending on itself which means I'm definitely on the right track and now a few seconds of Silence while I remove the plastic wrap now the sword looks pretty invisible already but inside the shop the effect is actually weaker because of the lights like in real life like like this it's completely transparent for me wait what if I do this and that was already more like it or less like it but outside it gets even better bear in mind you can still see the edges because there is no blade and the spine is not polished so it might be that the katana also looks darker because the edges block the light but when the edges are perfectly perpendicular to the camera this thing looks fake the effect is even stronger when there is light behind it and I'm very excited to see what this Katana is going to look look like when it's done I'm going to get this thing sharp then I'm going to make the handle and then I'm going to test it against a lot of stuff the first step to get the sword sharp is to create a bevel on the blade so after marking the center of the blade using a caliper I'm retracing the line with a pencil this line is going to be my reference for the edge while grinding also to make sure I'm going to grind the blade symmetrically on both sides basically like this I made this tool this mechanism allows me to set a certain angle so that when I grind the sword with a belt grinder the angle should stay consistent as well as the bevel on both sides and this is all Theory by the way I've never grinded almost anything in my life and this could honestly mess up the entire sword but of course there is only one way to find out and well even though I felt like I was doing everything wrong at the beginning after basically 1 hour of grinding the first side of the bevel was completed and besides making an absolute mess everywhere including on my face I think it came out bad but much better than expected and so after repeating the process on the other side of the blade the rush shape of the sword is done the katana is not sharp yet but it has an edge now and so the next step is going to be making it invisible through do that I'm going to smooth out the angle between the spine and the bevel mainly to prevent Reflections like the ones you see here and while doing so I'm going to also remove the scratches I got from the belt grinder and hopefully turn turned the katana even more transparent than how it was before so I got a sander with eight different bads from a course crit to basically a polishing one and by sending the katana with each one of the pads in theory I'm going to be able to make it transparent and well after a little more than 2 hours I was basically done with a first pad anyways I made sure to remove every single scratch from the belt grinder and even after just the corser pad the katana already looks pretty cool now I'm going to repeat the process seven times and so I did each time with a finer grd and each time making sure to remove all the scratches that were there before and after about 1 hour and something I was using the final pad after that I'm sending everything with a 2500 great sandpaper by hand and with this I'm finally starting to see the first good results now it's looking good when it's wet it looks great right now there are still a lot of micro scratches on the surface of the blade and that's why the katana doesn't really look transparent yet so now I'm going to try to remove them using this headlight polisher and after applying it on the sword with a sponged pad the katana was polished and transparent there is just one problem that I'm realizing literally right now I forgot about physics yeah want to know what happens when a block of transparent material has variable thickness like in my case Distortion that's what happens and so even though the katana looks good and it's transparent when you look through it it's going to always distort the objects behind it basically like you see here and even though I actually like this Katana and I spent three days working on it I already wrote the title of this video and I don't want to clickbait you so the sword has to be more invisible than that now the problem is that I would always need a bevel to make the sword sharp and a bevel creates Distortion but what if what if I try to keep the thickness consistent as long as I can and then make a really short bevel by doing that in theory the entire sword will be invisible and only a small part of it would create distortions so to confirm the theory I tried making a small sample with this new concept and it turned out honestly great let's make another sword so I drew a new sword cut it out of the panel with the band saw flat in the edges and like that had the new Rush shape of the katana then I made a new shorter bevel on the Belt grinder and even though this took a while like a long long while the new Edge came out so much better than the old one so after polishing it and polishing the spine of the blade and turning my hand into a tomato after one one day of work the final blade is ready you can obviously still see the bevel and the bevel still distorts what's behind it but besides that now the entire blade is completely transparent for comparison this is how version one of the katana looked and this is how it looks now I really like this and the more I look at this thing the more I can't wait to test it the katana is also pretty sharp now and I know that because I randomly hit the damm's head with the blade and this happened so yeah it cuts at this point to complete the katana I got to make the handle and the guard Katana guards are pieces of art they're often handmade and they just look awesome but I'm a minimalist so mine is just transparent I actually tried to do something fancier but I ended up right away with a chubby Pac-Man and then it took me one day to make this hole but at least it fits nicely on the katana and at this point I only got the handle left so my initial plan was to use the acrylic block and then carve a handle of it but besides that taking a lot of time I fear it will probably not come out as transparent as I wanted because following the plan I need to make a hole into the block and then fit the handle into it and the problem with hose is that they are really hard to polish moreover I only need to add just a few extra centimeters on the thickness of the handle so why can't I just glue extra polycarbonate to it and then shape everything as a handle well I tried on a smaller sample first using super glue and it honestly worked perfectly it's actually really strong I hit it here and it didn't move so I cut two pieces of polycarbonate with the same dimensions of the handle and after placing an entire super glue bottle on each side of the handle I glued the two pieces to it now I need to smooth the edges and also reduce the thickness of the Block in order to get the shape of the final handle and I'm seeing this just because there is no way for you to tell but I got a big smile under the mask there mainly because after grinding for 30 minutes I was really happy about how the handle was turning out swear it's not dangerous besides that the tape I put on the guard to protect it didn't protect the guard at all but it created a sort of pattern that somehow reminds me of anime stuff so I think I'm going to keep it this way and since the handle already feels pretty good in my hands I simply finished it by polishing it as I previously did with the body of the sword and even though it was completely random the glue created a unique effect on the handle kind of looks like ice anyways with this the katana is finally completed and honestly I don't think it looks cool I think it just looks like I'm about to start my own anime Revenge arc when I'm holding this thing I absolutely love it of course you can still C The Edge but everything else is basically transparent especially when there is ground or objects behind it and now I want to test it though I want to find out if this actually works like a sword I want to see how well it can cut and how powerful it is to find it out I got a bunch of targets from soft to hard pineapple watermelon and pumpkin a wooden plank a ballistic dummy and then a brick the plan is to try to cut all this and see what happens to the sword pineapple is first hardness one out of 10 a normal sword would easily cut this but I'm not even sure if my Katana can actually cut let's find out well it didn't took me much to realize three two one that a really does cut hi and well I'm really happy about that what I didn't know is that my happiness wasn't going to last long though because on the next attempt the second worst thing that could possibly happen happened no I wasn't expecting this at all like at all the sword snapped right after the handle and then I stood literally 5 minutes like this trying to figure out what why how was this possible polycarbonate is basically unbreakable then why did this happen the blade itself is absolutely fine though it doesn't even have a scratch and then it clicked the reason why polycarbonate is so resistant is because it can bend a lot and absorb the impacts and my theory is that by Glu in extra material on the handle I just made it way more rigid than the blade effectively removing its ability to bend so who says I need the handle if my theory is right the sword without the handle would be basically impossible to break I'm going to use it this way and if it works and if it's strong then I'm going to remove the sharpness here but if it works I mean it's perfect so watermelon is next hardness 3 out of 10 I'm temporarily using a clo as a handle to not cut myself and even though I'm a little worried there's only one way to find out what this sword can actually do one and luckily it went through the watermelon without problems it doesn't cut clean probably because of the thickness of the blade and the fact that the blade bends a lot but so far it cuts but I'm going to eat this one next pumpkin hardness 5 out of 10 and this is not a normal pumpkin besides the shape but even my super sonic chain whip struggled to slice one of this it's like it's way harder than it looks and yet the katana actually sliced this one and also pretty easily the cut is also fairly clean this time and once again the blade is completely fine now I'm getting to the hard targets St the next one is a wooden plank and it's pretty thick too so I think there are three possible ways this can go down the katana could snap and break in half it could Bend pretty badly and stay bended or but it's unlikely it will break the wood to find out I set up the wooden plank and I fix the bottom and the top so that it doesn't move when I hit it the problem is that I still haven't figure out how strong this blade actually is and at this point I really have no idea what's going to happen all right let's just do it 3 2 1 and well I wasn't expecting that it doesn't even have nothing I completely destroyed that and dented that one and the edge of the blade is absolutely perfect so I think I definitely underestimated this thing let me let me try again I'm going to try to break that piece I thought it was maybe just a fluke so I hit the plank again and the same thing happened this is the mark he left the wood is broken and the blade is not even dented at this point I only got the two hardest targets left so I quickly went back to the shop and it's m in the edges of the handle and now I got something like this and I wasn't expecting it but this handle works just as well as the old one and so I can move on with the next test this is a ballistic dummy it has a layer of ballistic gelatin which should simulate muscle tissue and it also simulate bones I'm going to hear it twice once here on the neck where there is a lot of gelatin and then once on the Skool I think it's going to break hit one neck I'm checking the blade right away to see if it's shipped or it cracked but it's perfect all right also the dummy looks fine though it didn't seem like the blade went through at first oh yeah I caught it oh no way and then I saw it I don't know if you can see but I got it right here and it turns out the katana not only sliced the gelatin and went deep oh my God but it actually shattered the bones below it that that is a piece of bone it's insane because after the handle I thought it was going to be an absolute fail and instead the edge of the katana was as sharp as when I started testing it this thing is insane I love it anyways now I'm going to go for the head three two one now a red thing is coming out of the head of the ballistic dummy and I wasn't expecting it so I'm switching to zombie mode for the next shots to make YouTube happy and here you can kind of see the damage the sko got cracked from here to here and there is a deep gut where the katana hit and the katana itself even after hitting the bone doesn't even have a scratch on it this thing is crazy the last Target though is a break hardness 10 out of 10 this is clearly a dumb test I shouldn't do this but so far the katana destroyed everything without getting damaged so where is the limit I want to find that I already know the edge is probably going to get damaged but I can always fix that by resharpen it but I want to see if it's going to crack or break and I hope not could have chosen a smaller brick to be fair well I got the thickest one I could find instead anyways after a bit of mental preparation I loaded my swing and I hit the Brak as hard as it could honestly this a win little chips and damage on the brick now I want also try to hit a smaller brick and see what happens to the katana and the break and this time the katana actually broke the break and I was definitely happy about it but the best part for me is not not even the broken break is the fact that after all that this is the only damage on the blade then I went back to the workshop and after fixing it and polishing it the blade itself has a few scratches but the edge is basically brand new Next I'm going to build an insanely powerful slingshot subscribe to see when it will come out and also let me know in the comments what you want to see me build after that one if you like my videos you can also get behind the scenes an early access to the videos on patreon as well as your name the end of the video like you see here check it out

Channel: Mike Shake

Views: 12,557,096

Keywords: mike shake, Skills, Learning new skills, Learn skills, learning skills, yesgo, mike, mike skills

Id: YQfC90O9HlI

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024