[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] In today's video, we're going to take a look at a few different methods
for how to fill bubbles with fuel so you can light them on fire.
[Music]
In the past, we've shown you a fun way to make bubbles
that you can hold down your hand,
and light on fire.
This is just a little bit of bubble soap diluted with some water,
and a can of butane that I'm just turning upside down,
and pressing onto the bottom of the bowl.
That releases the butane,
it forms bubbles in the soap,
you can then scoop them up onto your hands,
and light them on fire.
It's a cool trick that when you do it correctly,
is not all that dangerous.
Although of course, you still need to be very sure that you're being careful.
But it's not quite what you might imagine if you think of fire bubbles.
It is bubbles and they can be lit on fire,
but we wanted to see if we could do something a little bit different.
I was hoping that I could take an actual bubble machine and modify it,
so that instead of just blowing normal bubbles,
it blew bubbles full of a fuel,
so you could then light the bubbles on fire.
I'm going to walk you through the process I went through
as I explored whether or not this was a viable project.
On the back of the bubble machine,
there's a small fan that blows air through the machine
until it comes out the front.
A little circle of bubble wands dips down into some soap,
rotates around and ends up right in front of the fan.
That's where the bubbles are all blown out.
So, my thought was that if we could isolate the air intake,
and flood that with fuel,
it would just start blowing fuel-filled bubbles out of the front.
Like with the bath of bubbles,
the plan was to use butane as a fuel.
A butane canister is cheap,
and we know that it doesn't just destroy bubbles on contact with them.
There's probably several types of fuel that are like that,
but we already know the butane works,
so that's the one I wanted to try.
So, how to direct the butane from our little canister
onto the back of our bubble machine?
Well, what I came up with was uh-- it was gloves.
I decided to try using one of these rubber gloves
to see if I could attach it onto the back of the fan,
and then to just use one of the fingers as a fill point for the butane here.
So first step, I'm just gonna use some tape,
and tape it down over the whole air intake area.
[Music]
That's a glove just taped down over the entire air intake
of this bubble dispenser,
and now, at this point,
if I hit this button,
it will actually suck some of the air out of the glove.
Turn it on.
So, we know the air intakes is trying to pull air from out of the glove.
That's what we want.
And now we need to attach the other end of this glove to our butane container.
To do that, I'm just going to stab or cut a very small hole
in the tip of one of the fingers,
and then I'm going to just attach it around the nozzle.
Okay, we now have our nozzle attached to the finger of the glove,
and the rest of the glove is attached to the air intake of the fan.
See if we can...
See, I need to elevate this a little bit more.
All right, for my workshop, I have a one of these just sitting there.
So, I'm going to use this.
The goal is to elevate the bubble machine just enough
that I'm not kinking the connection between the glove and the butane,
so it has a better chance of filling correctly,
and not just getting trapped in there.
All right. Let's see what happens if I grab the nozzle and press down on it.
[Music]
The glove seems to inflate just a tiny tiny bit.
[Music]
You can see the finger certainly inflated.
[Music]
But most of the glove doesn't,
and I'm pretty sure that's actually just because
it's going all the way through the glove,
through the fan,
and coming out in the front of the bubble machine.
I have a-- I think an effective, if somewhat dumb way to test that.
[Music]
Set this right-- Oh!
[Music]
I think that's test confirmed right there.
Enough butane had just settled around here that it lit on fire.
But you can see that it becomes flammable when I press down on here,
butane is traveling through.
So now the test is to see what happens
if we turn on the machine while we're pushing down on the butane nozzle.
Will we get bubbles flying out the front?
[Music]
Well, it was definitely flammable.
It was definitely taking the fuel from the canister,
and blowing it out in the air.
But, you probably noticed,
it didn't actually successfully make any bubbles.
See the bubble machine works by just blowing a fan constantly,
and then the circular bubble wand moves the different bubble wand
heads in front of the fan,
and that's where all the bubbles come out.
But it doesn't only blow the air
when the wand is right in front of the fan.
It's constantly blowing it out.
In between every one of these bubble wands,
there's a lot of space.
If you try and light the bubbles anywhere close to the machine,
you have a very real chance of just hitting the stoichiometry,
where the fuel and the air are mixed together
just right to go up in a big old fire ball.
I think it would need to be something a lot more precise
to be a fully automated machine,
something that dip the bubble wand into bubbles,
puts in front of a nozzle,
a carefully shaped small volume nozzle
that's just going to blow the fuel right into the bubble wand,
instead of just blanket spraying fuel everywhere,
and hoping it catches some bubbles as they move by.
So moving on from using the pre-made bubble machine,
I still like the idea of getting bubbles blown
through a bubble wand of some sort.
So, I wanted to try a slightly different method
that did not use the bubble machine.
This bubble soap came with this gnarly bubble wand
that does a pretty good job of making some good size bubbles.
So, I thought maybe I could modify a butane canister,
so we can just blow bubbles through here.
Those are good bubbles.
I like those bubbles.
So, I wanted a way to direct butane sideways,
but by leaving the canister straight up and down,
and that kind of made me think of a can of spray paint.
Cans of spray paint are up and down,
the nozzles on the top,
paint comes out sideways.
How perfect!
That's just what we're looking for.
I do have an extra spray paint nozzle from an empty spray paint.
This obviously was black spray paint,
and it fits fairly closely on top of our butane canister.
It's kind of loose still, it spins.
But even with it spinning loose like that,
if I press down on the nozzle,
I can feel the butane coming out the front.
I think there's also quite a bit leaking out the bottom,
because as I said, it's not a perfect seal.
So, what we want to do is attach this nozzle
onto the butane canister a little bit more permanently,
and to do that, we're going to use some two-part epoxy.
We're going to mix up a little bit of this,
apply it on the little stem of the nozzle here,
and then put our cap on,
and really try and make sure that we get a nice tight seal,
so there won't be any gaps and no leaking fuel,
except out the front.
Take our epoxy and start applying it.
And of course, we want to make sure
that it doesn't go all the way up onto the top of the nozzle,
because that would block it up,
and we do not want to block it up.
We just want to stop it from coming out the sides.
So we choose where it comes out.
Put that in.
I'm just going to twist it back and forth to try and get
that epoxy to bond on everywhere in a circle.
Right now, it's making contact all the way around.
So now, I'm going to flip it back right side up,
because I don't want to have any epoxy accidentally running down the nozzle,
and just filling and blocking it all up.
So right now,
that should be in a spot where it will be attached,
and form a seal all the way around,
but it should leave the nozzle open to spraying once the epoxy is cured.
It's been a few minutes, and the epoxy is cured.
So we have a nozzle on top of our butane canister,
and I believe we have butane only coming out the nozzle,
and not leaking out the bottom.
Let's give it the upside down test.
[Music]
Plenty of butane coming out the front,
but I don't see anything spraying out the gap here.
[Music]
I'd call that a success.
Let's see if we can use this butane bottle to fill some bubbles.
[Music]
Those are bubbles.
Blown with the butane canister.
So one of the main questions is whether or not we can get
enough butane into these bubbles for them to actually be flammable.
It could be that the Bernoulli effect is causing there
to be so much air inside the bubbles
that it no longer is a flammable level of fuel.
Here's a little bit of the science behind what might be happening.
The Bernoulli effect is something that occurs with high velocity fluids.
When something like a stream of air or gaseous fuel is moving really quickly,
it creates a low-pressure area.
Pressure always tries to move from high to low,
and so, all of the air outside of the low pressure zone
will try and rush in to fill the low pressure zone,
which means that air would get pulled through the bubble wand into the bubble,
along with the fuel.
Seems logical to me that the best way to test
if there's enough butane is to try and light them on fire.
Let's give it a shot.
Ideally, this isn't a one-person activity,
but I'm going to try and make it work anyway.
I have here a little party sparkler.
I'm going to light the party sparklers.
I'm going to blow some bubbles using the butane canister,
set that down,
quickly try and grab the sparkler,
and see if I can ignite the bubbles before they just pop on the ground.
[Music]
Wind to stop changing.
[Music]
Come back!
Oh! That one actually burned.
[Music]
Some of those worked.
It might have been really hard to see on camera because it's daylight,
and it's just a small little flame.
But those ignited.
The sparklers have been lighting off some of the bubbles.
But they don't do as good of a job as I think just using the torch might do,
so, I'm going to try just lighting the torch,
and blowing some bubbles,
and trying to light it off with that.
It might work a little bit better.
[Music]
Yeah!
[Music]
But I think I'm getting the hang of what does work.
If I don't press down quite as much,
letting out the butane in a slower stream,
it doesn't pop the bubble as often,
plus the pressure difference between
inside the bubble and outside the bubble is lower,
so we get less air and more butane,
which is more flammable.
This is working okay.
Actually, a little better than I thought it would.
But it's really hard to see in the daylight.
I think we need to go to night.
Okay.
There we go. That's better.
We should now be able to see if things are actually lighting on fire.
Let's give it another try.
[Music]
I saw a little flame.
[Music]
I saw another one.
[Music]
That was great.
[Music]
That was exciting.
All right, since I only have two hands,
I got my friend Keith to fill in.
He's got an extra hand.
He's gonna hold the torch.
I'm gonna make the bubbles.
Hopefully, we won't light each other on fire.
We'll see.
[Music]
>> Ah, it's like whack-a-mole.
Gotta get them all.
[Music]
>> Not so close.
[Music]
Butane in your face.
[Music]
He's in his 30s, folks.
>> I'm an adult.
>> But I'm the one blowing bubbles so you know...
Dancing with a sparkler.
Blowing bubbles.
We're both adults.
It didn't work out so well to make a bubble machine
that had flammable bubbles,
but just blowing gas into the bubble soap worked out quite nicely.
I really like that effect.
It's something that I think I would like to revisit.
Maybe trying to make bigger bubbles with more gaseous fireball flames in them.
Or maybe just using some cooler footage of doing this same thing.
Both of those would be really neat.
What would you like to see us try?
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Taunted by bubbles.