Making Spider-Man's Web in real life

i reckon spider-man is the coolest superhero and other than super strength super speed and even worse work-life balance the only thing that separates me from him are his webs so let's do something about that so we're here at ice stand academy with my mate ross who's a real stunt man and i've brought my spiderweb along we're going to test it out by swinging from this bar we've set up testing rig testing rig and we're going to see if we can trip over and disarm some bad guys so let's go but before we get to that let me tell you how i got here and what exactly it is that i've done also i'd like to thank nordvpn for sponsoring this video now i actually have tried building a device to let me swing like spider-man once before but i thought for this video i'd just like to start fresh and focus specifically on replicating spider-man's web as closely as possible in the movies it generally looks like this it's like a rope made from scaled-up spider silk that's strong enough to stop a train and sticky enough to swing from now peter parker just throws together some chemicals to make this which seems like pure science fiction but it turns out there are a few simple ways to actually produce a fiber from liquid without needing industrial equipment the one i'm going to do now is actually a super cool way of making viscose also known as rayon also known as artificial silk so to do this process i'm going to need some sulfuric acid some ammonia and also a rock malachite specifically turns out that malachite is almost pure basic copper carbonate so i took some chips of it and like any good chemist i smashed the heck out of it with a hammer until i had a fine powder when i add the malachite to the ammonia it turns a very satisfying blue color and this compound is uniquely able to dissolve cellulose which is the primary material in wood and also cotton wool once that's all dissolved i can fill a syringe and extrude it into this sulfuric acid where it forms these strands of artificial silk so this is really cool it seems like a very straightforward way of making webs i should be swinging around in no time right well not quite so this is artificial silk but why is it so weak well on a molecular level a polymer is made from small groups of atoms called monomers which connect end to end with other monomers to form a chain different monomers produce chains with different strengths but that's not the whole story making these chains longer dramatically increases the strength of your finished product like this ziploc bag it's made of polyethylene where the chains are i'm guessing around 200 monomers long and it's not very strong but those same monomers in chains of like 200 000 makes the strongest fiber in the world more than twice the strength of real spider silk and well probably several thousand times the strength of my attempts unfortunately it's really hard to make the chains that much longer so they need to use some complicated and expensive industrial processes to achieve it so instead of reinventing the turbo jet engine i'll just use some of this pre-made ultra strong fiber even if i could make this exact material from liquid this is just a lot less messy all right so i've got my rope now all i need is a way to make it stick and that's got to be pretty strong because if my web bun sticks while swinging you know that'll be a pretty sticky situation or wait so i explored a whole bunch of concepts of how this could work like electromagnets super glue vacuum pads and more some of these ideas were interesting but some quick math showed me that they were going to be impractical other ideas were just stupid but i did the maths anyway and threw everything onto a matrix so that way i look like i know what i'm doing the crucial thing here is that whatever i made needed to be cheap and simple because spider-man leaves hundreds of these webs all over the city and that thought led me to velcro now obviously velcro is way too weak for this but the way it works is with a bunch of hooks sticking to a bunch of loops and i thought well maybe i can make like a super velcro using dyneema loops and steel hooks the steel hooks were the hard part i designed and tested so many prototypes before i finally arrived at this design the pinnacle of functional simplicity then i used some math and a stress simulation to find exactly the smallest size i could get away with if i used high strength alloy steel so i had the hooks laser cut by a nearby shop and i was ready to go well i needed to quickly grind off the sharp edge first now i've been working really hard to make sure that this web is as secure as possible but maybe you're concerned about a different kind of web security in which case let me tell you a little bit about this video's sponsor lord vpn is really well known for being very fast and it he got an editor's choice award on pc mag for several years running can make it look like you're browsing from a country that you're not currently in for me that's really useful because i'm australian but i'm currently in south africa there are some aussie web services that i just can't get unless they think i'm browsing from inside the country and this could also be useful to you if you're in or visiting a country with heavy internet censorship and nordvpn has obfuscated servers specifically for that purpose now if you're interested you can check this out at nordvpn.com built irl to get your two-year membership plus an extra month for huge discounts now that link is quite important because it's what lets nordvpn know that you've come from my channel and that way you get your discount and they also see that it's worth sponsoring some more videos like this one so please do check them out if you're in the market and now after tying the hooks on the sticking mechanism was finished in testing i found i didn't even need the loops the string itself worked just fine i call this creation the hook chain now this is one of those cases where the end result seems kind of basic but that's the funny thing with engineering design simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve and often you have to take a tour of complex ideas before you can know how to make something simple okay that's enough backstory let's go back to that stunt facility you saw the beginning of the video so i can test this thing out cool so i'm here with my web and together with where is ross actually and together with ross we're going to see if we can do some tripping and disarming [Music] you almost it that was brilliant yeah i think that worked that was cool but the real test is going to be trying to swing from this and i don't know about you seems like this would be really hard to hold so i could try wrapping it around my hand like spidey does in the comics but man that just seems so unpleasant so i brought this gym ring to hold on to got my rip off miles morales safety wear and uh well let's give this a shot hey all right that was terrible it's uh mostly my fault i think i'm sure i can do this there we go all right [Music] seems sturdy so hey it works well that works but spider-man can't just sit there waiting to see if the hook is going to catch on or not right sometimes he just needs to take a leap of faith so let's adjust our setup a little bit and give it a go yes this is great ross you want to go totally let me add we did a lot more testing than i'm showing here and the hook chain honestly had a really high success rate as long as we timed it right i'd say not even that far from 100 percent [Music] were you saying about 100 success rates well it's down to 90 now mine is still 100. there is one thing that i really do want to try let's see if it works okay spiderman yeah okay well this is tremendously fun i'm really happy with it but you're probably thinking it would be way cooler if you could shoot the webs and swing multiple times and if you didn't have this bulky gym ring nonsense and even if you're not thinking about i am so check back in the next video for some more of that i just wanted to say a massive thank you to nathan john greg and especially ross from my stunt academy for freely lending their time equipment and skills to make this video possible big thanks to nordvpn also for sponsoring this video and thanks to you for watching hey guys new york style pizza do we need you now tell me oh this is like that bit of spider-man 2 where spider-man delivers well it still tastes good

Channel: Built IRL

Views: 5,035,799

Keywords: IRL, In Real Life, Make it real, Spider-Man, Chemistry

Id: ky-3Vm4LQ8U

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021