Using a Rock Tumbler to Make This Popular Candy

today's video is sponsored by kiwico today we're going to take a look at how to build your own candy tumbler that lets you add a delicious candy coating to just about anything candy coatings are fun and surprisingly easy to do if you have the right equipment for a few weeks or maybe months we've had at least one person asking us down in the comments to see if we could make giant jelly beans it seemed like a fun idea but it's not really a step one make giant jelly beans there's a few steps that come before that and one of them is see if you can make regular sized jelly beans i was looking into that process and found that they're always done with a tumbler something that takes the candy and just rotates it in a drum for long periods of time i checked to see if you could just buy a candy tumbler and the only ones i actually found available were well over a thousand dollars which seemed like it was too much to me so i set about trying to see if i could build my own and i've come up with a way that i think actually works quite well here's the basic idea by modifying a rock tumbler we can build a machine that lets us add layers of candy coating with simple and cheap ingredients now guys this whole candy tumbler project has taken some creativity and thinking outside the box today's sponsor is a company helping kids all over push the boundaries of creativity kiwiko is accomplishing this with their super cool hands-on projects and toys which are designed to expose kids to concept in steam each monthly crate teaches a new theme through hands-on projects and fun and they have eight different subscription lines that cater to different age groups and topics now one of kiwiko's coolest projects is their small today big tomorrow campaign they believe that small lessons today can mean big ideas tomorrow kiwico is teaching innovation and creativity skills today to help prepare kids for the big world of tomorrow i've tinkered with kiwico projects before and love how they're fun and engaging kids can be entertained for hours with these crates and they're learning the whole time guys if you use our link you'll get 50 off your first month of any crate so check out our link at kiwico.com tcore50 and start your kiwico creative adventure you can also find the link in the description down below to get started we've got a rock tumbler that i bought at harbor freight a plastic bucket and just a little bit of other hardware some caster wheels a flat ball bearing and a few screws i've also got a glue gun which isn't necessary but i do think is helpful now i went ahead and did some prep work on this rock tumbler and by prep work i mean i took an angle grinder and i cut pieces out of it after cutting off all the extra bits to this machine i went ahead and used a file to just take down the edges because no one wants to be cutting their hands up on this when they're trying to make candy that's no fun there is a reason i went with a rock tumbler this is a motor that is designed to take a decently heavy load and rotate for days if not weeks on end it's a motor that should hold up to a good amount of abuse for long periods of time and that's exactly what we need for tumbling the candy we need to be able to run for hours and hours and not worry about whether the motor is going to burn out next up we've got a bucket this is a standard 5 gallon bucket you can get it pretty much any hardware store i got this one at walmart they're not hard to find and this bucket while great and cheap is uh not quite the size and shape we need we need to trim it down to fit the machine better so i'm just gonna take a sharpie here take our motor and what we want it to do is fit between this edge and this plate over here so we're just going to set the bucket right about there giving ourselves about a quarter inch gap and then we're going to mark over on this side again giving ourselves i'm going to go for more like three quarters of an inch on that side so i'm just gonna put a little mark right there on the bucket and now we need to make a mark at that same height that goes all the way around and cut the top of the bucket off got a utility knife here i'm gonna use to cut through the bucket go all the way around i'll try and follow the line as closely as i can all right we can see that the bucket now fits fairly nicely in between the back and the front the empty space of our rock tumbler here now right here we have rollers these were originally connected to the motor and they still are this one's connected to the motor this one just spins freely and right here i've wrapped a bunch of tape around this roller i've wrapped it up enough that it builds up a thick layer about a quarter of an inch thick on either side and i actually want two of those i want one down here at the back and one up here at the top this is what our bucket is going to rest on as it spins now the sides of our bucket are slightly tapered it's wider at the top than at the bottom and we can deal with that in a couple different ways one of which is we could try and make the two tape rolls different sizes but honestly i think it works just fine if you try and make them as close to the same size as you can and then we're going to have supporting rollers on the outside here we're not using both of these and those supporting rollers we can angle slightly which lets the different size of the top and bottom of the bucket not cause problems we need more supports and that's what we have these two wheels for the idea is that these they're little normal caster wheels they're on swivels so that if the bucket is like a slightly different angle the wheel should actually adjust to support it just right so the main basic idea with it is that these are going to sit off to the side elevated slightly more than that but the bucket will then roll on the rock tumbler rollers and on these supporting casters off to the side to keep all this nice and contained we're going to grab a board set all this on it take some measurements of where we want to cut it and then trim it down so we can just mount all of this to one board so it stays right where we put it with our casters mounted to this board we can then try and position it so that the bucket makes good contact with four points at once the two tape rolls and the two casters before we get our wheels mounted down we want to make sure that the rock tumbler itself isn't going to go anywhere so while i cut the edges off of this piece i also drilled two holes into the metal casing down at the bottom we're going to use those to use two screws to attach it to our board now turn the rock tumbler on and see how the bucket does it doesn't have very good grip right now because the plastic of the bucket is pretty slippery and it can still move side to side we'll fix both of those things coming up this is just to see how it does with the casters seems to be doing okay right there so now we're going to screw this piece that's holding the casters down into the base plate we're just going to add a line of tape all the way around the bucket at the two spots where our tape rollers are contacting it now as i said the bucket is tapered so we can't just use one piece because as it goes around the curved and tapered surface of the bucket it would end up dipping down so we're just going to do it in as many pieces as it takes to make a nice strip all the way around to equal heights there's a couple main goals with a candy tumbler one is that whatever you're tumbling keeps rotating for a long time but another good thing about them is that they're usually open on one side so you can keep reaching in and adding ingredients to help build up layers of a candy coating to help that work with this bucket what we're actually going to do is tip the entire thing up at an angle but if we just do that as it is the bucket's going to be sliding backwards and rubbing a lot on the back of our machine so we've got this this is a little flat bearing with a ball in it that i've mounted just to a piece of wood i got this at harbor freight they may sell them other places as well but it was like a dollar twenty there so i got that just put on this piece of wood and then i added an l bracket on the back and this we're going to take and we're going to mount so that it's pressing onto the bottom of the bucket just enough to keep it away from the back of the machine at this point we have a working candy tumbler now there's a lot of things that you can do with candy tumblers lots of different coatings and ways to cover things and change what they taste like i admit i don't know all of those i'm pretty new to this myself but there are a few things i've been experimenting with that i've found work pretty well on the channel how to cook that ann reardon has a whole video on how to make your own jelly beans she has the recipe for making the centers and then adding a coating and she actually uses a rock tumbler for that like i said there are some downsides to not having a real candy tumbler specifically that it's not open it's a lot harder to add more layers and additional coatings to stuff but we are going to try out her recommendation on how to add a basic coating by using corn syrup that we've added flavor to and a little bit of sugar as a building up coating on it at the moment i'm not going to be using a from scratch jelly bean recipe i'm probably going to try in the future and like i said we are hoping to try and make those giant jelly beans but as a sort of quick and dirty substitute today i've got some swedish fish and i'm going to cut them up so they're about the size of jelly bean centers following the recipe on how to cook that we're starting with corn syrup and then we're going to add some flavor and some color to it that's going to be the first part of the coating on these got some orange oil flavoring here throw some of that in yellow food coloring but it's gonna be fairly concentrated which i bet is gonna give us a fairly orange result now we're just gonna stir all this in sometimes things like these swedish fish bits are very smooth and they don't actually tumble very well at first so i'm just going to take a hot glue gun and add three short little lines inside the bucket to help things tumble and turn a little better all right let's see how this tumbles oh tumbly tumbly tumbly beautiful [Applause] it's actually not the glue it's just the sticky side of one of the insides made it stick nicely to the glue i guess it's just that texture all right so with that tumbling we're going to add some of our syrup [Applause] and yep this is very sticky to the point that everything is kind of sticking to the sides now we're going to start adding sugar i have here some extra fine sugar it's not powdered sugar which is even finer and usually has cornstarch added but it's finer granules than regular sugar i'm gonna sprinkle some of that down in there and then get everything off the walls again it's all gonna start tumbling together oh i hit it too hard [Applause] there you go now it's starting to tumble quite nicely what i do recommend is after just about one minute of tumbling turn it off and find all the pieces that have stuck themselves together we're not trying to make giant globs of things here just little individual coated pieces and you may have to do this a couple of times that's looking good now we just need to leave it for a while all right i've had a chance to make a few different varieties here what i just finished up here is a batch of candied peanuts which are unbelievably good so i'm just going to walk you through a few of the things that i've learned trying this out i actually have the first experiment batch i did where i added like several layers of the candy coating there's more coating on here than there is actual swedish fish on the inside but they look nice it's up to you what you want to make and you could probably combine them as well if i wanted to get a really smooth outer coating on top of the sugar coating that i put on the fish pieces then i could probably get it closer in look to jelly beans which was part of the drive to make this thing the first place was figuring out how to make our own jelly beans guys this is actually pretty simple to build it does take a little bit of tool use to cut the rock tumbler and build this platform but everything is actually really simple this is a pretty cool project and the experimentation is just super delicious it's pretty fun to build it works really well i've had really good results with everything that i've tried so far and there's plenty more to try going forward guys if you ever end up making one of these candy tumblers and especially if you make something with it i want to see it you should definitely post it on instagram and tag tkor thanks again to kiwiko for sponsoring today's video go check out kiwico.com tcore50 or click the link in the description to get started with your first crate today guys that's it for today but we've always got tons of stuff for you to see hit that box right there to check out another one of our favorite videos and we'll see in the next one talk to you [Music] then

Channel: TKOR

Views: 720,573

Keywords: candy, jelly beans, swedish fish, candy making, diy candy, homemade candy, how to make your own candy, rock tumbler, using a rock tumbler, rock tumbler reveal, tumbling, tumbling rocks, how to smoothen rocks, how to make rocks smooth, rock tumbler before and after, rock tumbler review, rock tumbler diy, rock tumbler for beginners, rocker tumbler instructions, jelli beans, making popular candy, homemade jelly jean, easy candy, candy coating, best way to make candy

Id: ZXijWrcHoMU

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021