Making bulletproof wood

this video has been sponsored by brilliant a few years ago I was able to successfully make some transparent wood and I thought it was pretty cool while I was working on that project though I accidentally stumbled onto something else Wood related that I thought was really interesting more specifically I stumbled onto this paper published in nature and it was called processing bulk natural wood into a high performance structural material from this title alone it didn't sound too spectacular but their results were actually really impressive and they were apparently able to make pieces of wood which were by weight stronger than steel what I thought was even more interesting though was something that they said near the end of the paper it was just a quick comment but they suggested that with their super strong wood it might be possible to make lightweight and lowcost armor or in other words bulletproof wood up until this point the idea of using wood to block bullets had honestly never even occurred to me but the moment that I saw this I felt that I had to try making some the only tricky part was that again the idea of wooden armor was only a suggestion they made based on some small scale tests and they never actually tried to stop a bullet with it however if their wood were actually a strong as they claimed I felt that it should have been possible and I figured there was only one way to find out but anyway to get started the first step was to figure out how to even make it so I looked at the experimental section in the paper and it actually seemed surprisingly simple all I had to do was two basic steps where the first one was to treat almost any kind of wood using some commonly available chemicals and then after that I just had to squish it and heat it this was supposed to leave me with a really dense and strong piece of wood that that was roughly a fifth of the thickness of the original piece the only problem was that even though it seemed really simple I didn't really know exactly how to do it I mean for the first part I was totally fine and I had everything that was needed to treat some wood with some chemicals the second part was the issue though because I had no idea how I was supposed to evenly crush a piece of wood while heating it at the same time to do this I figured that I was going to need some sort of press thing and my first thought was to get something like a panini press and to stack a bunch of weight onto it however I then converted the 5 megap pascals of the paper set I needed into a unit that I could actually understand and it was apparently 725 lb per square in this meant that even for a small piece of wood I'd have to stack thousands of pounds onto it which I felt would be slightly difficult it was pretty clear that I was going to have to use some sort of machine that was actually designed to heat and Crush at high pressures and I decided to try looking online the first thing that I found were those press things that are used to squish designs onto t-shirts but unsurprisingly they didn't get even remotely close to enough pressure with a bit more searching though I stumbled onto what seemed like the perfect solution and it was something called the nugs Smasher Pro it was clearly meant to crush a different plant material and not wood but either way it basically had everything that I needed it had two nice big plates to squish things evenly it could crush things with up to 40,000 lbs of force which was way more than I needed and it had a built-in temperature controller that I could easily set to the required 100° C I really felt that it looked perfect and I wanted to just buy it until I notice that the plates were made of aluminum which would get destroyed by the chemicals I'd be using and it also cost $3,600 us which was almost $5,000 Canadian this pretty much killed almost any excitement that I had but it wasn't a complete loss because I now knew exactly what I needed so with this in mind I then ventured over to alib Baba and within a few minutes I found what actually looked like the perfect machine it had some nice stainless steel plates which could easily resist the chemicals it could crush with even more pressure and it could do around 60 ,000 lb of force and it had some easy to ous temperature controllers the only problem was that it was still really expensive and the final quote that I got was actually more than the nug Smasher pro at the time this was also significantly more than I'd ever spent on any project and the thought of paying that much on an idea that might not even work made me really uncomfortable I decided to ignore all logic and reasoning though and $5,000 and a few months later I was the proud owner of an extremely heavy wooden box I was actually kind of surprised by just how heavy it was and I was slightly worried that I wasn't going to be able to move it from where the delivery guys had dumped it with the help of Reggie though we were able to drag it partially across the room and I figured that this was a good place to crack it open so I went and got a knife and I started by cutting off all the plastic strapping I then started flipping up all the metal tabs that were holding down the top of the crate and after that I slowly opened it and revealed my beautiful little press I then carefully broke apart the rest of the crate and I got rid of all the plastic and the accessories Reggie and I also snapped our backs transferring this 400 lb hunk of metal to a dolly and at this point I was starting to get really excited after months of waiting the Press was actually here in front of me and it was finally time to try and make some bulletproof wood to get started with this the first thing that I needed was some wood and according to the paper it was possible to use many different kinds like Cedar Oak popler and pine I decided to go with pine though because it seemed to give some really good results and it was also by far the cheapest and easiest to get all had to do was quickly go to Home Depot and for around $20 I picked up one of the nicest pieces that I could find I then did some quick measurements and I started chopping it up and my goal was to get some pieces that were roughly 12 cm long 3.5 CM deep and 4.4 CM wide this was very close to what the paper said was the typical sample size that they used and I figured that at least for my first attempt I should probably do exactly what they did but either way with all of the pieces chopped off I then quickly sanded them to clean them up a bit and now my wood was ready to be cooked so I went and got a 1 L Beaker and I started by pouring in about 600 Ms of water I then turned on the stirring and when I had a strong Vortex going I dumped in 80 g of sodium hydroxide drain cleaner this all quickly started dissolving and generating a lot of heat and over the next several minutes it all slowly disappeared when it looked more or less clear I then got this sodium sulfite that I bought on Amazon which was apparently supposed to be used to cure salmon eggs I wasn't exactly sure what that meant but either way I just dumped in 40.3 G of it and just like the drain cleaner I waited for it to dissolve this ended up going quicker than I thought and only a few minutes later I had a relatively clear solution and I was able to get rid of the stir bar at this point my chemical solution was ready and now it was time to add the wood so I carefully lowered in one of the pieces and while holding it in place I added more water until it got to the one ler Mark after that I put a heavy watch glass on top of it to push it back down into the water and what I had to do next was get it nice and hot so I turned on the hot plate and waited for it to heat up and over for the next 20 minutes it slowly got more and more yellow eventually it was just on the verge of boiling and it was around 100c and at this point I just had to leave it like this I then came back to it a couple hours later and it had become a dark orange and things seemed to be going well during this time I had also swapped the watch glass for a flask filled with cold water and I had added a small wood spacer this allowed me to completely submerge the piece of wood which I felt was a lot better even though it was probably fine how it was before but anyway at least based on the color there was clearly a reaction going on here and in theory the chemicals were supposed to be attacking the wood more specifically they were supposed to be attacking and removing two major components of the wood called lignan and hemicellulose which are the main things that keep the wood together it was very important to not get rid of them completely though because then all the wood would just fall apart and I would just be left with a bunch of loose cellulose so instead the goal was to only partially remove them which would make a lot of extra space in the wood and the research paper had some good photos of what was supposed to happen for example they included a super close-up shot that's looking down the end grain of a generic untreated piece of wood it's kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on but all of the gray stuff is technically the wood itself and all of the black areas are just empty space which is normally used by the tree to transport things like water this on the other hand was what it looked like after they treated it and there was a pretty big difference with a lot of the lignan and hemicellulose gone a lot of that gray stuff was gone as well and it now kind of just looked like a bunch of tubes these tubes were all mostly made of cellulose though and the important part was that there was a lot more space between them and way stuff holding them in place this was supposed to make the wood a lot easier to squish and this was very important for the next step but anyway according to the paper I just had to leave it like this for a total of 7 hours and this was supposed to get rid of the ideal amount of lignan and hemicellulose so I just let it sit here for another few hours and when I came back to it the solution was way darker than before this told me that a lot more stuff had been removed and what I had to do do now was wash the wood so I just quickly got rid of this hot red chemical solution and then into the same Beaker I started dumping in a bunch of boiling distilled water the goal here was to get rid of as much of the sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite as possible and to also wash away any side products that might have formed a lot of these chemicals and side products were deep inside the wood though so I had to soak it for a while the only unfortunate part was that the paper didn't say for how long and all it said was that I had to immerse it in boiling water several times I assumed that this meant more than just quickly dunking it in and out and based on almost nothing I decided that about an hour was a good time so I just left it there and over the next hour the color of the water slowly changed and I felt this was a good sign because it meant that it was pulling stuff from the wood after seeing this I assumed that after after each washing the water would get less and less colored but that didn't turn out to be the case it quickly became pretty clear to me that whatever was causing the color was not a good indicator to tell me when I was done washing it and instead I had to keep checking the pH if there were even a small amount of sodium hydroxide left it would turn purple which meant that it was strongly basic and it was still doing this even after the third washing it was only after washing it seven times that the color was L green which told me that it was around neutral it also told me that the wood should have been nice and clean and I dumped off all the water which was still orange but either way after about 15 hours of cooking and cleaning wood I was finally done the first part of the process what I was left with should have been a ligan reduced piece of wood that was free of nasty chemicals and I was really curious to see what it was like without a lot of the lignan and hem cellulose I was kind of expecting it to be really soft and Squishy but that wasn't at all the case even when I squeezed it as hard as I could I was barely able to do anything and it was definitely still pretty hard I also tried bending it which I wasn't able to do at all and I started wondering if I'd even done anything to the wood it really just felt like a generic piece of wood that had been sitting in hot water and it didn't feel like there was any major difference besides may be looking different with all that being said though even if it didn't look or feel special I had done exactly what the paper had said and it should have been good so now it was finally time to test out my new and beautiful hydraulic press and the first step was to turn on the temperature controllers I then waited for the plates to slowly heat up to 100° C and when they eventually got there I carefully loaded in my little piece of wood I did my best to make it as centered as possible and when I felt that it looked good I started lowering down the upper plate it was a bit slow and clunky but I was eventually able to sandwich the wood and now it was time to start crushing it so I just went ahead and started pressurizing it by manually cranking the handle that was on the side and it worked exactly like a hydraulic car jack the only difference was that it was way slower and each time I cranked it it looked like it barely moved the plate it was slowly crushing it though even if it didn't look like there was a huge difference and at this point it was probably already about 5% thinner however it was also oozing out a bunch of black liquid which I didn't really want to leak all over my press so I quickly cleaned it up with some paper towel I then started crushing it again and so far I was really happy with how it was going unlike with my hands the Press was doing a way better job at squishing it and it did seem like it was a lot easier than squishing a normal piece of wood this also made sense because as I mentioned earlier with a lot of the lignan and hemicellulose removed there was a lot more empty space and a lot less holding the cellulose together so with some added pressure these empty spaces were all supposed to start collapsing and I think the paper again included some really interesting photos of this this one is of course what I showed before and this was hopefully how my wood currently looked on the microscopic scale this on the other hand is what I was trying to do to it and again there was a massive difference all of the empty space was pretty much completely gone and all of those cellulose tubes had been completely flattened on top of that the flattened tubes had also become intertwined with all of the other flat tubes and this was supposed to greatly increase its strength but anyway I then just continued crushing the wood hoping that it would eventually end up like the second photo and at first it seemed to be going pretty well the only issue that I had was that when it got to a round half the thickness it seemed like something bad was happening at the top it looked like some of the wood was rolling over onto itself and I was a bit worried that it might be breaking or something however I figured that it probably wasn't a huge issue and that it's probably normal to have some defects when crushing a piece of wood like this so I just kept on going and the goal was to get it to around 20% of the original thickness and I eventually got there a few minutes later at this point it was almost shockingly thin and even though I had squished it myself I still kind of found it hard to believe that this used to be an entire block of wood besides just being super thin though the pressure on the wood was also around the 725 PSI that the paper had called for and I was apparently done crushing it so now what I had to do next was just leave it like this and all of the water that was still left in the wood was supposed to slowly get boiled out at the same time though the Heat and the pressure were also supposed to cause the wood itself to slowly get stronger this because according to the paper all of those flattened and intertwined cellulose tubes should start to form bonds within themselves and with their neighboring flat tubes all of these Bonds were technically only weak hydrogen bonds but because all of the cellulose was so closely packed together it should be able to form a ridiculous amount of them it was supposed to be enough to greatly increase the strength of the wood and more importantly to permanently lock it in its crushed form this would make it very different than normal wood which would just decompress once the pressure was gone and I was very curious to see how it would turn out with that being said though I then just had to let it cook like this for the next 24 hours and when I came back to it it looked like it had become even thinner I also noticed that the pressure gauge was at zero pressure which I felt was a really good sign this because it meant that even without any added pressure the wood was staying nice and thin and I started getting pretty excited it was now time to reveal I densified and hopefully bulletproof W and when I felt that I was ready I started lifting the upper plate I was really hoping to see a perfect little flat rectangle but I was immediately disappointed I mean it was definitely flat which I was happy about except it was also very wide which wasn't a good sign there had clearly been some sort of smooshing effect because the wood wasn't really supposed to spread out at all and this was a bit sad to see either way I then went to take it off the press and the moment that I touched it all of my sadness quickly vanished this because it felt completely different than I expected and it really didn't even feel like it was wood instead it was surprisingly heavy and extremely hard almost like some sort of ceramic at the same time though it somehow also kind of felt like plastic and it was genuinely really cool at the same time though it was definitely far from perfect and just by looking at it I could see that the fibers didn't get squished down properly when I looked at it from the side I could also see some very obvious diagonal cracks and I was really hoping they were just superficial I then compared it to the piece of wood that it came from and it was kind of surprising to see how different it was I mean in theory it probably should have been a little less different that had roughly the same width but but still I thought it was really impressive to see just how much thinner it had become and I found it hard to believe that this entire block had been squished to this thin little piece with that being said though the next very important thing that I had to do was test to see how strong it was so it was of course at this exact moment that it decided to spontaneously fall apart this was extremely sad to say the least and it didn't inspire a lot of Hope but that all changed when I tried stabbing it with a screwdriver I then just kept on stabbing it and I was honestly really impressed by just how little damage it was doing better than I thought it would be really doesn't do much of anything it's pretty hard to really test it though I felt that I had to try stabbing it as hard as I could and it was still really impressive what wasn't impressive was my aim but either way Not only was the screwdriver completely unable to stab into it it also seemed like it had a hard time even scratching it this was obviously not a perfect emulation of what would happen if a bullet hit it but it was looking really promising just as a comparison I then did the same thing to one of the untreated pieces of wood and the difference was pretty obvious the screwdriver was easily able to stab into it and I didn't even have to use much force at all either way I was now feeling a lot more hopeful about my little densified piece of wood and the only thing that I had to do next was see if it could actually stop a bullet so I quickly made this little wood thing to mount it to and I clamped it in a vise I then quickly added one of my pieces of densified wood and with it securely in place I went and got my gun which was actually just a pellet gun this is not only because firing a real gun inside my building is both super d dangerous and a felony it was also because it made way more sense to start small I had to First make sure that it could actually stop a projectile and if it did I could then move up to the more powerful stuff with that being said though the pelet gun was now loaded and after a few days of work I was ready for the first real test so I carefully lined it up and gently started pulling on the trigger and I was really hoping to see the pellet just get deflected like the screwdriver driver one 2 three however that wasn't at all what happened and it was almost comical how bad it was the high-speed footage that I got was also completely pointless and it was kind of embarrassed that I had even set it up I then looked at the footage from the camera that was pointing at the back of it and it had apparently just exploded it really didn't look like it had even attempted to stop the pellet and this was honestly pretty sad to see especially after spending thousands of dollars and waiting for months to try this what also made it even sadder was that this pelet gun was over 16 times weaker than one of the weakest real guns so it wasn't even remotely close to being able to stop a real bullet and at this point things weren't exactly looking good at the same time though I was very aware that this was only my first first attempt and that the piece that ID made wasn't exactly the highest quality this was made very clear to me when it had spontaneously fallen in half and there was obviously a lot of room for improvement also I was still really impressed by how well it had blocked the screwdriver and in my mind this proved that it had the hardness to potentially block a projectile so I figured that all I had to do was somehow make it stronger and stop it from exploding and I had some ideas that I really thought would work the only issue was that right after this I had to start moving to my new office and I completely tore apart this entire lab I then had to build an entirely new one and it was only 6 months later that I was able to start working on this project again either way I then jumped right back into it and the first very sophisticated thing that I'd been waiting to try was to just use a much bigger piece of wood seriously though this was a very simple change but I really felt that it would make a huge difference and I'll explain why in a bit with that being said the first thing that I was going to have to do was treat it and I did pretty much the exact same thing as before because I didn't think anything really went wrong with this chemical step the only thing that I did slightly different this time was that I used a much bigger Beaker and I held it down with some glass tubing this way it would stay fully submerged the entire time and after heating it for 7 hours the solution had turned almost black I then quickly took everything apart carefully took out the wood and washed it to get rid of the chemicals and again after 15 hours of work I was left with a wet block of wood it looked and felt pretty much exactly the same as the first attempt and the only difference was that it was bigger and I loaded it into the hydraulic press this time though I oriented it with the end grain facing the camera and from from this point on things are going to be pretty different this because it was pretty clear to me that this pressing step was the major problem and I actually had a bunch of things that I wanted to try the first was to do my absolute best to center it perfectly on the plate and I'd made some markings to show me exactly where to put it I would also use a ruler to confirm the final placement of it and this was very different than last time where I just centered it entirely by ey with the wood in place though I then started lowering the upper plate and this was now the moment that I was hoping the bigger piece would start to be useful this is because with its much larger surface area there would now be a lot more space for the upper plate to sit on and in theory this should help keep it level this was something that never even occurred to me during the first attempt because I thought the upper plate was fixed in place but I discovered later on that it was apparently able to tell I also noticed that this was happening when I closely rewatched the footage and I saw a very subtle but clear tilt right before things started going wrong it was only an extremely small shift and it was probably less than a couple degrees but crushing the wood on even a slight angle would be really bad because it would force it to get pushed to one side and this would almost definitely cause it to smear out this was also especially likely to happen if the piece was significantly off center like mine was and if the upper plate was forced to just balance on a small piece of wood so basically the Tilt was the major thing that I was hoping to avoid here and I really felt that just using a bigger piece and centering it perfectly was going to have a massive effect on top of this though I also decided to not preheat the plates to 100° C and to try squishing the wood much more slowly I figured this would give the water a lot more time to get pushed out and avoid any weird internal pressure from building up and potentially damaging the wood and so far things were going pretty well it looked like it was basically just getting thinner and that was exactly what I was hoping for as I kept going though it unfortunately started to spread out at the bottom and it didn't seem like I could do anything to stop it going even slower didn't seem to do much either and when I looked over at the side of it I saw something horrible it had also started to roll over onto itself just like the first time but it didn't seem nearly as severe and I figured that it was probably okay so I just kept on going and eventually it seemed like the wood had hit its limit and instead of getting denser it was just squishing out on the sides at this point though the pressure on the gauge was also around the 725 PSI Mark and when I saw this I felt that it was the right time to start cooking it so I plugged in the press to some sockets that I made by hijacking the power for my dishwasher because I didn't have any real 220 Outlets yet after that though I was able to turn on the heating and now I just had to wait and hope that it wasn't another disaster I then came back to it 24 hours later and I was really curious to know how it turned out so I carefully started lifting the upper plate and this time I wasn't immediately disappointed God still really hot but looks pretty good I mean it definitely still had a bunch of issues and it had those diagonal cracks like before but what I thought was really exciting was the other side of it which was honestly kind of perfect it didn't look like there were any cracks at all and the top part was also really nice it was actually very similar to the original Pine that IID started with and it didn't have a weird looking texture or any gaps between the fibers this part just looks really good it's like perfect I then compared it to the original piece and I saw that it didn't spread out nearly as much and it was definitely way better than the first attempt so clearly using a much bigger piece and doing all of the other little things had helped a lot and I was really happy with how it turned out to know if it were actually better though and not just a nicer looking piece of crap I was going to have to shoot it so I got my pellet gun again and I figured I'd blast the ugly side first and I was kind of expecting it to just explode like last time however it was instead just deflected and it hit me in the head and I was genuinely really surprised there was clearly a significant Improvement and even on the crappy part it didn't even look like the pellet had a chance of making it through it only made a small dent before getting completely flattened and I thought that it was really cool to see it get bounced away as a little pancake just for a good measure though and to make sure it wasn't a fluke or something I decided to shoot it a few more times and each time it was bounced away with ease so apparently just by squishing it better I had made it way stronger and my pet gun wasn't even a challenge anymore instead of exploding it it was now only only making small dents and after seeing this I started getting really excited this because I now had some real evidence that this would could stop a projectile and the idea of stopping a real bullet was feeling like it might actually be possible the only issue was that even with this very significant strength Improvement I was pretty sure that a real bullet would still destroy it this is because my pellet gun was only shooting 22 caliber pellets which weighed less than a and they were only going around 500 ft per second on the other hand though this is the equivalent 22 caliber reel bullet the 22 LR and it weighs over twice the amount and goes almost triple the speed in theory this means that it should be able to deliver over 16 times more energy than the pellet and I really didn't think my piece of wood could take that I mean maybe it could have done something that was double or triple but over 16 times was just insane for some reason though I still had faith that this would could do it but I was for sure going to have to somehow strengthen it even more in my mind there was also only one real way to do this and I was going to have to somehow stop it from spreading out if I were able to do this this should not only give me something that was significantly denser and way stronger it should also just be higher quality in general and without any of those diagonal cracks I really thought that it would be enough to stop at least the 22 LR and again I had some ideas that I thought would work however long story short nothing I did seemed to make a difference and after a couple weeks of trying a whole bunch of different things I was kind of losing my mind this because I tried everything that I could think of for both the chemical and pressing parts and it eventually got to the point that I was just blaming the wood itself I was really starting to think that maybe Pine actually just just sucked and that it was too soft to hold its shape so as a completely last ditch effort I tried switching to Oak which was a hardwood however this again didn't seem to make any real difference and the wood was still just getting squished out when I saw this I honestly just kind of felt like quitting but at the same time I was starting to think that it was really odd that the paper didn't mention anything about this I also suddenly realized that the only showed cartoon versions of their press and this made me start to think that this whole time they might have been secretly using more than just a simple press I mean I have no idea if that's actually true but I felt that they had to be using something to physically stop it from spreading out and after 30 minutes of having no idea what I was doing in Fusion 360 I was able to design these two pieces I then sent them to a machining company and after a few weeks I was was the proud owner of this hunk of stainless steel I was hoping that it would magically solve all my problems and the idea that I had was super simple all I had to do was wedge in my treated piece of wood and then on top of it I would add this other hunk of stainless steel I could then load this entire thing into my hydraulic press and now it would be impossible for the wood to squish out on the sides in my opinion there was no way that this could fail and I immediately started preparing a new piece of wood the only tricky part this time was that if I wanted the wood to fit perfectly into my template it had to be perfectly sized in an Ideal World I could have just pre-cut it to fit exactly into the template but that wasn't really possible because the wood expanded while it was being treated from a bunch of testing I also found that the amount that it expanded was kind of random and it depended on a bunch of factors like how much moisture was already in the wood and it wasn't going to be something I could reliably predict so instead I was going to have to cut it after the treatment and I went through the whole process of soaking and washing it then when I felt that it was as chemical-free as possible I ran it through my poor Band Saw having to cut wood while it was wet and potentially full of chemicals wasn't exactly ideal except I didn't have many other options but anyway up until now everything seemed to be going decently well until it was fully cut and I noticed something odd it looked like most of the inside of the wood was completely dry and it didn't seem like it had gotten treated at all at first I started thinking that maybe the band saw had just dried the wood from friction but that wouldn't make sense because there was still a perfect line of wetness at the top and the bottom either way I decided to just hope that it would magically be okay and I carefully loaded it into my new template then on top of it I added the huge metal block and now I had to load this entire thing into my press to do this I just carefully slid it in and I did my best to line up all of the edges this way it would be perfectly centered in the middle of the plates and when I felt that it looked good I lowered down the top plate with all of this in place it should have been good to go and all I had to do was start crushing it this time I didn't have to worry at all about it squishing out to the sides and I was also able to go way faster and this was a million times better than anything I was doing before also just based on the amount of water that was coming out I felt that there was no way that the inside of the wood wasn't treated in total I was able to collect a few hundred Ms which to me was way too much if it was just coming from the outer part of the wood but who who knows either way it was eventually done and over the next few hours I went back to it every 20 minutes to repressurize it this wasn't something i' done in the earlier runs but from all my failed attempts I had learned that it was important this is because as the water boiled out of the wood the wood itself slowly shrank and the pressure on it gradually decreased so if I wanted to maintain the high pressure that was needed I had to keep coming back to it until pretty much all the water was gone and then I left it for 24 hours when I eventually came back to it the next day I was really curious to see what it was like at least from the small part that I could see at the front it already seemed like it was by far the best result that I had ever had and all I had to do next was open it up the only thing that I was kind of concerned about was all of the dark goo and I was honestly really worried that it might have glued the two pieces of metal together this would make it an absolute nightmare to take apart but that thankfully wasn't the case inside of it was a beautiful piece of densified wood and it really was by far the best result I had ever gotten look at that that looks really good and the edges how flat they are sharp and flat that's really nice one extremely important thing too was that it didn't have any of those diagonal cracks and on top of this it was even thinner than any of the other attempts considering that it also didn't push any of its volume out to the side this meant that it was significantly denser and overall it just felt way stronger and more durable I was genuinely really impressed and after a long time of going in circles on what seemed to be a really simple task I had finally made some significant progress and I felt that it was close to perfect it really didn't seem like there was much more that I could do to improve it and I felt that now it was finally time to do a real test it was time to see if this could actually stop a real bullet and I honestly felt like it could do it I I have faith that I could test it like this this was also perfect timing because i' spent the last year trying to get my gun license here in Canada specifically for this project and just by chance I had received it a few days earlier so with this license in hand I was able to legally borrow a 22 rifle from my friend and I drove very far away to where it wouldn't be a felony to shoot it I mean in theory I probably could have just gone to a local range or something but for some reason I really wanted to do it in a forest and it had actually taken months to find land that I could legally shoot on either way I then started putting together the whole setup up and I couldn't help get flashbacks from the time I made tho acetone and I had to set up a bunch of stuff in a random Forest this time though it was actually worse because it was way colder and wet and it was on and off raining and I had a lot more stuff to set up however it still wasn't that bad because on the drive over I picked up my friend Evan who runs the channel code bullet and he was helping me out the only sad part was that he was also not dressed ly at all and that his first experience in Canada was this wet and cold Forest but anyway we had eventually set up all the cameras and it was time to put the wood in place to do this I decided to go with a very sophisticated method and I just gorilla taped it to a large styrofoam block Evan then wedged a stick behind it to prevent it from tipping back and at this point I was finally ready for the first real test the only challenge now was was that I had to actually have decent aim and hit the wood and also not destroy my cameras which were uncomfortably close either way though with all this in mind I then loaded the gun with a single 22 LR bullet and it was finally time to see if all this work was worth it so I just carefully aimed a gun that I had only shot once before and then I quickly ran to stop the high-speed camera the moment I got closer though h i was immediately concerned by what I saw I then quickly got rid of the gun that I probably shouldn't have been running with and I went back to take a closer look so looks like there's a a hole right there and uh I there's a hole on the back too I think the verdict is that it wasn't bulletproof no on the bright side I had actually hit it but on the sad side it was pretty clear that a real gun was way more powerful than a pellet gun yeah that uh that didn't work just like the very first attempt it also kind of looked like the back of it had just exploded and that it hadn't even stood a chance this was definitely not the result that I was hoping for and I was genuinely feeling pretty sad about it okay that's it let's go home when I got back though I was able to clean it up and take a better look at it and I realized it wasn't actually as bad as I thought I mean it still wasn't ideal and the bullet had clearly gone right through it but what was important was that it hadn't just catastrophically exploded it instead it looked like it had been sequentially peeled back in layers and it didn't even seem like much of the wood had been removed it also seemed like if I pushed on it hard enough I could basically put it back together and this made me feel like it wasn't actually that far off from stopping it I really felt that something just slightly stronger would have been able to do it and as one final test I wanted to try adding a second layer this was actually something that the paper tested and they found that only one extra layer could make it over five times stronger and I felt that this would be more than enough to try this though I was of course going to have to make at least a couple more pieces and unfortunately I had to go back to cooking and crushing wood however to go faster I decided to scale up the whole cooking part and in this large stainless steel pot I was able to load in four pieces the setup itself was also super simple and to keep the them all separated I just used a bunch of glass rods and I used the stainless steel cookie rack to keep them spaced from the bottom I also used another cookie rack at the top to help hold it all together and I wedged in some heavy steel rods to keep everything in place I was then heating all of this using a generic induction stove and in general this was way better than doing each one individually and it saved me a couple days of work the only weird part was that I ended up having a lot of trouble with the crushing step and every piece of wood that I made was having issues when I took it out of the press it would be nice and flat but as it was cooling down it would slowly get Warped and weird and this was not an issue that I had before I had no idea why or how the first attempt had just magically worked but either way after a few days of repeated failures I was really starting to get worried if I couldn't get the pieces perfectly flat and get rid of all the warping it would be impossible to make a decent two-layered version in some way though this problem ended up actually being a good thing and it made me accidentally improve the wood this because in a desperate attempt to fix it I just threw one of the pieces back into the Press at 100 C and I squished it down with 60,000 lb of force I then let it slowly cool down to room temperature and when I took it out the piece was not only perfectly flat it was also even thinner it was actually about 10% thinner than it was before which also meant that it was about 10% denser and it was hopefully even stronger but anyway I then ended up making a bunch of extras just in case I needed them and after a week of frustration it was finally time to glue some together to do this I just chose one of the pieces that I liked the most and I quickly sanded the top of it this was very important to do because the surface was so shiny and I was worried that the glue would have a hard time sticking to it when I eventually felt that it was nice and rough though I cleaned off the dust with a paper towel and what I had to do next was add the glue I had no idea which glue to use and what would be the best to take a bullet but I found this stuff at Home Depot and it claimed that it was impact resistant so I decided to just go with it and I emptied almost the entire bottle and I did my best to cover the whole piece piece then knowing that this piece had its grain pattern going in the vertical Direction I went and got my second piece and I carefully lowered it down with the grain going horizontally this way the grain patterns would not be perfectly aligned and they'd be at 90 de to each other and doing it like this was supposed to make it significantly stronger with that being said though I just kept sliding it around to spread out the glue as much as possible and when I eventually felt that it was nice and even I squished it down with the large metal block just for good measure I also dropped a Tungsten Cube on it and I left it to cure I then went back to it 24 hours later and I got rid of all the metal and cleaned it up and this was the final result what I had now was a nice block of densified wood and just by looking at it it honestly didn't seem that much stronger however the way that it felt was actually very different and I'm not sure how to describe it there was just something about it that made it feel way more solid and significantly stronger than the single piece it also really felt like it would actually be able to stop the 22 and that it wouldn't be a pathetic failure like the other one there was of course only one way to find out though so I went back out to the forest and this time it was bad in a different way this because I had taken so long to make the wood that all the snow was gone and it had been replaced with a million mosquitoes and black flies this is insane an entire can of bug spray didn't even seem to help and to survive we just had to go as fast as possible but anyway on a more positive note I had made a much better mounting system for the wood and I clamped it into this metal thing I then shoved it into a much stronger and heavier foam block and it was time to shoot it should be it all right that's all we need I have faith I think I think it'll be good I think it'll be good I then loaded the gun with one bullet and I got ready to blast it again I was really hoping that I wasn't just going to completely miss it and then I immediately ran to turn off the high-speed camera unlike the other time though I wasn't immediately disappointed because I didn't see the same clean hole as before this time it looked like the bullet had spint entered the front part and for some reason I felt that this was a good sign I don't know if it went through yeah I I don't I don't know if it went through it went right through [Laughter] no how the moment that I saw this I was honestly a bit frustrated because I genuinely thought this was going to work are you serious I was also starting to think that this project might just be completely hopeless because if I couldn't even stop a 22 LR there was no chance of making anything I could remotely call bulletproof right through really oh no actually it stopped it it stopped it so the back splitting was just it was just absorbing all the energy if you look how deep the bullet went right it looks kind of the same distance that it pushed the wood out so it stopped it oh my God is that a success so apparently I just lost hope way too early and with two layers of the densified wood I had technically stopped the 22LR in my opinion this was really cool but at the same time I didn't feel that it was quite good enough because the back still got split apart I was actually a bit worried that this would happen though and this was why just in case I had also made a three-layered version in theory this should have been even stronger than the two-layered one and I felt that it would solve all my problems however at the same time I also felt that this was my absolute last chance to make it work because adding any more layers would make it way too thick right now it was still thinck thinner than just one of the untreated pieces that I had started with and I felt that this was the absolute limit if this didn't work I'd have to come up with some other solution or more likely I'd probably just quit okay I think it's good but anyway at this point I was ready to test it so I carefully aimed the gun and this time my aim was terrible I ended up kind of missing which was a little bit sad but what wasn't sad was the result it looked like the bullet hadn't even made it past the first layer and just to confirm that this was real I shot it again what happened it just it just chunked it that's all it did look at that that's it yo H not even splintered at all so apparently three layers was significantly better than two and when I looked at the highp speeed it looked like the 22 LR didn't even stand a chance I mean it totally exploded the first layer of wood but the bullet itself was also completely destroyed and it was bounced away as a bunch of fragments after seeing this I was really excited because I had finally stopped a real bullet using wood and by definition I had made bulletproof wood however it was also one of the weakest bullets possible and when I looked up the levels of bulletproof armor the charts didn't even go as low as 22 LR it seemed like the lowest rating was the common 9 mm which is often used in handguns and this was the bare minimum of what many people considered Bulletproof the only scary part was that the 9 mm was significantly bigger and compared to the 22 LR it would have around 2 and 1 half times more energy on top of that though it also had a copper jacket which would give it more penetrating power and I really didn't think my poor block of wood could stop one however I felt that if I actually wanted to consider what IID made bulletproof it had to stop a 9mm and I had thankfully borrowed another gun from my friend this one just felt way more powerful than the other one and I was really not feeling optimistic okay safety off th this my poor wood is just evaporating this time I actually saw chunks fly off the piece of wood and I was also kind of shocked by what I saw wait yo it stopped it it actually stopped it what the it's it's there it's just flat dude you see the whole bullet just flattened in there that's cool whoa it didn't even get deeper than the uh than the 22 they're like the same depth and it's an injured piece of wood so apparently the 9 mm didn't actually just destroy it and adding that third layer had clearly made it a lot stronger it was also really cool to see the bullet get almost instantly flattened and completely stopped by the second layer and I was genuinely surprised that this happened the only concerning part was when I looked at the back of it and it looked like it had almost exploded it was uh it was on the verge of not making it either way though it did stop it and at this point I felt that I could officially say that IID made some bulletproof W I mean it was of course still far from perfect but it was way better than anything I ever expected and it was definitely better than the regular wood that I had started with this was made especially clear to me when I tried shooting a huge stack of it with the same 9 mm and even with seven layers it almost wasn't enough the bullet was actually really close to going through the entire thing and in comparison it was kind of shockingly bad it literally got stopped in the last one wow with all that being said though this entire project was mostly just meant to be a proof of concept and to see if wooden armor was even possible and I guess the answer is that it is I mean it still definitely needs a lot of Improvement and this is not anything that I would currently want to wear but I think that it has a lot of potential I also think that it could be really interesting to try combining it with other materials like plastic metal or even Kevlar I genuinely think that it's possible to make something that's less than half the thickness but still easily able to stop the 9 mm and maybe even some more powerful bullets for now though I think I'm tired of cooking crushing and shooting wood and instead I'm going to work on some more tasty projects like turning styrofoam into cinnamon candy all right so this project ended up being a lot more tedious than I initially thought and ultimately it took a lot more than just chemistry to get it done this is actually one of the major reasons why it took me so long to finish it and I've been finding that my lack of non-chemistry skills in general have been delaying at least a few other projects So lately I've been putting a lot more effort into getting better at things like math physics and programming and thankfully there's been a really fun easy and free way for me to do this more specifically though I've been using brilliant which I think is one of the best ways to learn math data science and computer science this because not only are all their lessons super concise and interesting they're also all interactive which I think makes them a lot more fun and a lot more like a game on top of that what I really like is that all their lessons are chopped up into many small sections which lets me go through each Topic at my own pace this has been great for me because I often only have 5 minutes here or there but I've still been able to progress in particular I've been working on the programming with python course and I'm only several lessons in but I've already learned a lot I've also made a lot of mistakes though and what has been really nice is that each time time there's been a super useful and helpful explanation but anyway with all that being said I've been really enjoying brilliant and if you're interested in learning something new in a fun way I definitely recommend checking them out right now you can also try everything that brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 Days by just going to brilliant.org Nile red or by clicking the link in the description on top of that the first 200 people who sign up using my link we'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription and uh yeah that's it as usual a big Thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube You'll also get access to all the older videos that I had to take down and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at theend end like you see [Music] here

Channel: NileRed

Views: 8,647,156

Keywords: nilered, nile, red, science, chemistry, wood, wooden, bullet, proof, bullet proof, bulletproof, armor, armour, stop, stopping

Id: CglNRNrMFGM

Length: 59min 37sec (3577 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023