today on Applied
Science I'd like to
talk about bending wood with a chemical
process so take a look at what we can
achieve here this is a quarter-inch
walnut dowel that I've tied into a knot
and it's rigid at this point but it was
of course flexible when I tied it into
this knot here we have a piece of blood
wood maybe about a sixteenth almost an
eighth of an inch thick
that I've bent into a helix this is an
even thicker piece of walnut that
started to come apart here but you can
see this piece started off almost 3/8 of
an inch thick fairly thick for bending
like this it also works on maple this
has just been stained by a piece of wood
that was laying next to it in the
treatment chamber I think this is also
blood wood and this one I sanded down a
bit so you can see that even though a
lot of these pieces of wood looks sort
of nasty on the surface here it's a
result of the treatment after just a
little bit of sanding it's it looks fine
underneath a lot of people would
consider this not really a DIY project
because it involves a very hazardous
chemical but of course there's no magic
involved so in this video I'm going to
talk about the process the basic idea is
to treat the wood with high pressure
ammonia gas and so to do this we need a
pressure chamber that can hold the
ammonia and the it's big enough to
contain the wood that we want to Bend so
in this case I'm using schedule 80 steel
pipe it's important to use a steel
vessel or stainless steel vessel because
the ammonia gas will corrode brass and
copper fittings and so all the valves
and fittings and pipe sections that I'm
using are all steel or stainless steel
for this project we only need to take
the ammonia gas up to about 150 psi
and so schedule 80 steel pipe is is
quite overkill for this I wanted to test
a variety of different materials and so
I tried particle board plywood a couple
different kinds of hardwood softwood I
also threw in a brass pipe fitting and a
piece of copper wire just to see how bad
the corrosion was going to be on those
items and I also tossed in a dollar bill
which I'll talk about later I added a
glass viewport so that I could see if
anything interesting
was going on during the process inside
there and then sealed everything up and
the next step is to remove the air
because the air is going to get between
the ammonia and the wood and not allow
it to react as well so I used a vacuum
pump to pull out as much air as possible
and with a micron gauge which shows very
low levels of vacuum you'll notice that
getting it lower than about 1,500
microns will be really difficult because
the water that's in the would you know
just naturally in the wood will start to
evaporate and keep the pressure about
1,500 microns so at this point I
disconnected the vacuum pump closed
batten valve and then opened the valve
that is connected to my tank of
anhydrous ammonia now we don't need the
liquid in this case really what we want
to do is just flow the gas into the
chamber and just keeping the bottle
upright and opening the valve hole you
know draw the gas out and you can see it
flowing in here I know that the gas that
I this is actually ammonia that I
created in a previous video and it's
probably quite wet there's there's
probably a lot of water vapor mixed in
with the ammonia so you can see as the
gas flows into the chamber it's sort of
raining inside there probably because
the water is condensing on the walls
the pressure in the system will depend
on the ambient temperature in the room
so the warmer it is the higher the
pressure in the ammonia bottle and that
will make the pressure in the chamber
higher so if you need a little bit more
pressure you can use a hot-air gun to
heat up the ammonia bottle and get more
pressure in but it's still just gas
flowing from the bottle to the chamber
after reaching this pressure I shut all
the valves on the chamber and just let
it sit overnight without ever heating
the chamber itself so it was always at
ambient temperature however I should
note it was interesting when the ammonia
was added the chamber itself became
hotter all by itself it was the process
of the ammonia dissolving into the water
that's in the wood and this actually
releases quite a bit more heat than you
might think so the metal pipe you know
the steel pipe probably got up to about
I don't know 100 or 110 F just just from
the reaction of the ammonia going into
the water
I removed the wood samples and found
that the particle board and plywood
didn't work at all I thought that the
plywood might be interesting cuz the
layers would kind of slide past each
other but it doesn't do that at all it
just falls apart the copper wire and
brass fitting were definitely corroded
but it's not like they turn to powder or
anything like that I'll talk about the
dollar bill in a future video and then
also surprisingly the softwood which was
some kind of pine didn't really soften
that well either it just snapped
however the hardwood samples all did
pretty well some of them were quite
flexible indeed in order to make the
arcs and the helixes I just wrapped them
around a cylindrical object and just
clamped it at two points it really
doesn't take much and for the most part
the wood held together if you bend it
too tightly it will start to snap but
it's quite flexible you can easily bend
it with just hand strength after a few
hours in the clamped position the
ammonia dissipates and the wood returns
to almost its original strength or it
certainly becomes stiff like it
originally was this makes it really
useful and there's not very much spring
back either so if you put it into the
mould and then take it out you don't
really have to compensate very much for
the for the wood springing back to its
original shape the reason that this
process works is because the ammonia
entered
years with the molecular bonding inside
the wood so the thing that gives the
wood its structure is lignin and
cellulose which are manufactured by the
plant to help give it its structure and
I couldn't find a definitive reference
on this but it seems like the ammonia
gets sort of in between the hydrogen
bonds that are in the lignin especially
so while the ammonia is there it's sort
of taking the place that those hydrogen
bonds normally would between different
parts of the lignin molecules and this
means that the molecule can slide past
it the other neighboring lignin
molecules you basically unglued the wood
from itself almost but then once the
ammonia leaves all that hydrogen bonding
resumes in its new shape and now you
have a stiff piece of wood again in the
bent form a clever person came up with
an idea for a product that makes use of
this if you soak a piece of wood in
ammonia and then seal it up in a bag you
can sort of sell that whole thing as an
object and then the end user can bend it
into whatever shape they want and they
just have to pierce the bag and let the
ammonia dissipate and then they have
wood in whatever shape they need so I'll
put a link to the patent in the
description of the video and
interestingly that patent just expired
in the last year or two so you can buy a
product now on Inventables that I think
uses this process I haven't bought it
myself and so I don't know for sure but
they market it as bendable wood you bend
it into whatever shape you want and then
it somehow hardens and so it might
actually be this very process for those
of you who saw my last video in which i
made Samman hydrous ammonia you'll
recognize this was the pressure tank
that I was using at the time and then
someone pointed out in the comments
you know those tanks aren't welded
that's actually a brazed
seam here and sure enough I scraped the
paint away and looked at it and yeah
it's braised so the next day I went out
to the shop and put this back into the
freezer to liquify what was in here and
I went in with the gauge actually I
first noticed them it looks like a lot
of the blue paint kind of came off
that's weird and then I went in here
with the gauge or the plug remover and
unscrewed it and heard snap
sure enough the anhydrous ammonia had
corroded the little pin which is brass
that the safety valve is made from and
under the microscope you can see it's
covered in
is really brilliant blue actually wiped
most of it off unfortunately but a
really interesting sort of ammonia
complex there and so while I was trying
to figure out what to do I kid you not
the freezer stopped working so at that
point I had about an hour to find
another container or you know throw the
ammonia outside or something or run away
or something so I ran around the shop
and found this which is actually an
all-aluminum high-pressure paintball
tank and I threaded this on the lathe as
quickly as I've ever threaded something
and got it all together and then filled
this up with the ammonia so I don't know
I tried to find out if aluminum is
actually sort of an okay material to
hold anhydrous ammonia and couldn't
actually found conflicting references on
the web so in any case this isn't going
to be permanent storage I'll probably
use this up and then empty it and use
the tank for something else
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