Today, we're going to see what happens
if we take a vacuum storage bag,
and hook it up to a pump
that has way more power than a vacuum.
[Music]
Guys, I don't know
if you've ever seen these vacuum storage bags before.
I've seen commercials for them,
and them in stores quite a bit.
I've never actually used one before,
but I had a thought.
I wanted to see just how they work,
and if we can sort of up the ante a little bit.
I should point out, this is not a sponsored video.
I have no allegiance to this Magic Bag brand.
There's lots of brands out there.
They all work pretty much the same way.
These are just the ones that I bought at Walmart,
because I wanted to try this out.
Most of the time,
these bags work with a household vacuum
or a shop vacuum.
You put fluffy compressible things,
like clothing or blankets into them.
It's got a one-way valve.
Well, it occurred to me that we have some pretty
powerful tools around the shop.
Something that can pull a lot more air than just
a regular shop vacuum.
We've got vacuum pumps.
We've got a couple of them.
This one right here,
this is our Harvest Right vacuum pump.
This thing is quite powerful, I think,
and I wanted to see
if there's a difference between just using
our regular shop vacuum to pull air out,
and using our vacuum pump.
And then, I've got a few ideas for things
that we want to try putting these bags
that aren't exactly what the manufacturer recommends.
Here's the basic idea.
These storage bags are usually used with a household vacuum
to make your bedding and clothing smaller.
Well, we're going to try attaching it
to our vacuum pump to see just
how much air we can pull out of them.
To start off though,
we've got these ingredients over here.
You may recognize these
as the ingredients used for proto putty.
Proto putty is a mixture of silicon,
water-based activator,
and some corn starch to make it easier to manipulate.
If you haven't seen this before, we've used this several times.
We've got whole videos on how to make it.
It just becomes a sculptable rubber
that cures, and then,
it's just solid but slightly squishy rubber forever,
and I want to try using some
of that to make a seal for our vacuum pump.
This already pulls pretty well if I just put it on my hand,
or this valve right here,
but I want to make sure it really gets a tight seal to suck
out every last bit of air that we can get.
So let's start mixing up some proto putty.
[Music]
Now, I've got food coloring, and this serves two purposes.
One, it adds a little bit of color to it,
which is always nice.
But very importantly,
this food coloring is water-based,
and the silicone is activated by the water.
The water is a very necessary step.
In fact, you could use plain water with no food coloring,
and you'd get just sort of a translucent or clear
or white proto putty.
But we like to use the color
because we can see how much we're putting in,
and it's easy to control and it's single drops.
Now, if I just stir this up and let it sit for a while,
this will cure.
This will turn into a proto putty.
But it's immensely sticky.
This right now will stick to pretty much everything.
It's really hard to work in shape.
So, what we use is cornstarch.
You can use other things too.
If you wanted to use like talcum powder, baby powder,
which I think is mostly talcum powder,
you can do that as well.
But we use corn starch because it's cheap,
and it's, you know, it's edible.
So it's pretty safe to have around.
Just going to pour a bunch of that in there.
This will mix in.
It will make it a little bit more opaque.
But it also make it much much easier to handle,
and makes it less sticky,
and so, you have a chance to shape it.
Even with the cornstarch though,
it sometimes is helpful to just give it a little bit of time.
It takes some time,
a couple of minutes to really start curing with that water
mixed in, and so,
if it's too sticky, sometimes, the answer is more cornstarch.
But if you've just been mixing it for only a minute,
and then the answer might just be a wait a little bit.
And I should also warn you,
mixing this stuff up puts off a very strong acetic acid smell.
It's going to smell like vinegar,
way more concentrated
than an actual bottle of vinegar from the grocery store.
It's pretty strong.
So, good ventilation is a good idea.
[Music]
While it's coated in cornstarch, it's not going to be sticky.
Once all the corn starch gets mixed in,
it will start sticking to my gloves again.
There it is.
Just goes everywhere.
You know what?
I already have a vacuum right next to me.
So that's all right.
This doesn't actually leak much air.
Once it presses down, this--
So this brass collar actually moves up and down,
and once it's pressed down, it doesn't leak anymore.
It forms a tight seal.
But because we're not screwing
this onto a flange or a valve or anything like that,
it does have a little more flexibility.
So we're just going to throw this on just
to make sure we've got a nice tight seal on it.
Okay, we've got a couple of decently large blankets
and a very large bag.
I'm not sure
if I'm gonna be able to fit both of these in here,
but I'm going to try.
And we're going to see how flat they squish.
Just using the regular vacuum
before we move on to using the vacuum pump.
[Music]
I am probably exceeding the recommended
total amount being put into this bag right now.
[Music]
All right.
Now, let's see if I can seal this off properly.
This isn't a zipper
that opens one way and closes the other.
It is just a little tool to help you close down
the to zip points.
All right, here it goes.
All right.
I think that has stopped moving.
That's pretty dense.
I'm going to be interested to see
how much more this can pull out,
because that seems like it's pulled out quite a bit.
It is definitely flattered and skinnier,
and it may add some unintended wrinkles into things,
but it's for storage.
Not bad.
We've got our suction cup.
Should just fit nicely on there.
Make a nice tight seal.
Turn this on.
Certainly, suctioning well to my hand.
Probably just gave myself a hickey in the middle of my palm.
Oh, that is still getting a lot flatter.
That is pulling out a lot more air.
So I'm gonna say, yeah.
We've got a lot
more suction power that than with our regular vacuum cleaner.
Oh my gosh.
I just want to let more air back in,
and watch it go.
I'm going to try and just break the seal here,
open the zipper,
and just have all that are rush in all at once.
Here it goes.
That's fun to watch.
So, we know
that the vacuum pump pulls a lot harder than our vacuum cleaner,
and we've seen what it can do to a pair of blankets.
It shrinks them down, it's basically a board.
But we're not just going to do this with blankets.
We've got some other things we want to try this with.
Let's see.
I think first off, I have a couple marshmallows.
I like these ones.
You can eat them like an apple.
[Music]
Marshmallows make a really
tight seal once they smush themselves together.
So it's not really able to pull more after that.
Although, I don't think there's much air in there,
except inside the confines of the marshmallows themselves.
It's kind of just making a interesting texture there too.
We've seen those gel like pillows.
I'm just gonna give this a quick little test.
That's not bad.
It's pretty good.
It's also really nice for good late-night snack.
You just like, oh man, I could go for a marshmallow.
Next up, we've got about two gallons of orbeez here,
and we're gonna see
what happens if we try and vacuum these.
This will be interesting.
[Music]
That pulled in water pretty quick,
and then it started pulling in orbeez.
We managed to pull in some orbeez sludge
into our hose here.
Don't think they got so far
as to actually get into the vacuum.
So that didn't last very long,
but we do have one more thing we're going to try with that.
We're going to use the shop vac.
It's a wet dry shop vac,
so that gets a little bit of water in it,
it's not going to cause any problems.
It's not going to pull as hard.
But at least,
it's not going to get orbeez stuck
inside our nice expensive vacuum pump.
So let's try this.
Orbeez?
Full of water,
large and non-compressible.
Marshmallows, full of air.
Unfortunately, non-porous.
But we do have one more thing
that we want to try that's mostly full of air,
and I think is fairly porous.
It should smash down quite a bit.
We're gonna use one of our big bags again.
This time we're going to start with the vacuum cleaner again,
our shop vac,
just because there's a good chance
that some of this popcorn could get crumbled up,
or the air flow going out could pull lots
of little bits into it,
and that's fine with the shop vac.
Again, we don't want
that to happen to the vacuum pump,
but I'm hoping that after it compresses down,
there will be less of that dust,
and we can move on to using that.
But let's see
how squished it gets was just our shop vacuum.
This is already quite entertaining.
There's there's no flexibility to this at this point.
All-- The air has been pulled out enough that like,
even though this is just single popped kernels of popcorn.
Like there's no bending.
They're just pressed together so tight.
Listen to that.
That's the sound of popcorn.
All right, let's try and kick this up a notch,
and see what's going to happen.
Hopefully, we don't end up pulling a lot
of popcorn dust into our pump.
Here it goes.
I can hear all the popcorn getting crushed.
[Music]
I gotta try something.
This feels very sturdy,
much more sturdy than popcorn traditionally is.
That's barely...
Like it's not moving,
and it's barely making any noise, even like...
Wonder if you can use this to sneak your own popcorn
into a theater.
Maybe I should have used the medium sized bag.
Guys, popcorn does compress down a little bit.
All the air gets pulled out,
and it just becomes really immobile and rigid,
which I thought was pretty cool.
That really had a lot of strength to it.
I was able to stand on it, like well.
It didn't even seem like it was moving or shifting.
Guys, if you have any ideas of things you'd like to see us try
putting in these vacuum bags,
let us know down in the comments.
You can actually add a hashtag.
So we're going to use the #vacuumbag.
If you use that,
we should be able to search and find it,
and find all of the things that linked to the video.
So, let us know if you've got some ideas.
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