[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] In today's video, we are revisiting our hydrophobic sand,
In today's video, we are revisiting our hydrophobic sand,
trying to make it even more waterproof than before,
and using a variety of bright vibrant colors.
[Music]
A while back, we did a few experiments trying to find a good way
to make magic sand or hydrophobic sand.
That's a sand that you can pour into water,
but it repels the water, holding in a sort of shield of air around itself,
so that when you pull the sand back up out, it's dry sand,
and pours all over the same way dry sand would,
rather than clumping together the way wet sand does.
We tested a silicone waterproofing spray,
Scotch Guard and NeverWet,
a two-part product that's really just designed to repel water a lot.
We got some pretty good results with all of them,
with the most water repelling results from the NeverWet.
However, I've done a little bit more experimentation since there
and there are a couple issues that I keep running into with the NeverWet.
First off, it's a two-part spray,
and the first one really makes the sand clumped together.
It hardens into almost this solid shell,
and so after it dries,
you have to break it back up into the individual grains of sand.
It's hard to get a really fine grain after you've done all that.
Secondly, NeverWet seems to be increasingly hard to find in stores.
There are three places I used to know you can get it
that don't seem to carry it anymore.
So I decided to go back and try and see if we can get better
results with the other products.
So the goal today is to make hydrophobic sand
that repels water just as well as the NeverWet did
by using our silicone spray rather than the NeverWet.
I also went out and I found some colored jars of sand at a craft store,
and they do come all the way full, not half empty like they are here.
But I had to do some experimentation,
so that's why we're missing some of the sand in these jars.
To get started, all you really need is some colored sand,
your waterproofing silicone spray, a little cup and some aluminum foil.
Here's the basic idea.
Using colored sand from craft Store,
we're going to soak it in waterproofing silicone,
let it dry,
and then add a second and third layer of waterproofing
just to make sure it's extremely hydrophobic.
To start, let's take some of our sand and pour it into our small cup.
If you want to try and make a lot of it once,
you can use the whole jar.
If you only want a little bit,
then just measure out what you want to start with.
In my last trial, I tried spraying on three layers of the silicone spray,
and it did work fairly well.
We had some good repelling of the water.
We were able to get the sand go down into the water,
and come back up mostly dry.
But it wasn't quite as good as I want,
and I now believe that the reason for that is it wasn't completely coated.
So when experimenting, I just found a better way to coat the sand completely.
So it makes sure that every single grain is really slathered
and surrounded by the silicone spray.
That's why we have it in a cup rather than spread out on a cookie sheet,
the way we did before.
With our sand in the cup,
the goal is to now spray in so much of this silicone
that it actually gets our sand kind of soaking wet in the spray.
I'm going to do that outside because I definitely don't want
to be breathing that in in here.
Let's also take a small piece of aluminum foil about this size.
It's not very important and what we're actually going to use this for,
we'll bend it a little bit in the middle and we'll spray our silicone right onto the foil,
and let it drip and run down into the sand.
[Music]
At this point, our container is soaked with the silicone spray.
You can look at the bottom of the container and see that
even the sand all the way down there is completely covered in our silicone.
[Music]
Now, that our sand is completely soaked in our silicone,
what we want to do is let it dry, laying out flat on a piece of foil.
Here's a sheet of foil.
I like to turn the edges up so that when our sand is dry,
it's not so likely to just slide or blow off the edge.
Now let's take our sand, put it onto the foil and spread it out
about as thin as we can get it.
[Music]
With the sand spread out, now comes the slightly less exciting part.
You have to let it dry out and I mean completely dry out.
The silicone will get to a point where it no longer is causing the sand
to stick together.
And when that happens, it will act like normal sand when you pick it up.
it'll just drop down and be individual grains,
not sticking together at all.
If you leave it outside, it can take 24 to 48 hours.
If it's sunny and warm, it will definitely go faster.
As another option for speeding things up,
If you happen to have built one of our Dehydrotron 5000
food dehydrators,
you can also use this to help dry out your sand faster.
I wouldn't recommend using it at full heat,
but on medium heat with the fan going,
it will dry out much faster in this box than even sitting outside in the sun.
When I made the Dehydrotron 5000,
there were a few people who pointed out that I was risking my safety
by wiring the dimmer switch to the white wire in the cord,
rather than the black one.
You are correct.
It should be wired to the black went and I have since rewired it,
switching those together.
Soldering them together and using heat shrink
rather than electrical tape.
Whichever method you use, sunshine or dehydrator,
to dry out your sand,
once it's back to a dry crumbly state,
it's time to apply two more layers of the Silicon using the same methods.
Once again get our sand completely soaked in the silicone,
mix it up really well,
flatten it out and let it dry.
After the third time soaking the sand and letting it dry out,
whether in the Sun or the dehydrator
your sand should now be ready for testing and playing in the water.
I've gone ahead and made batches of our hydrophobic sand
in five different colors and I'm excited to see how it looks under water.
[Music]
Before we start using any of these hydrophobic sands under water,
I do want to take just a quick look at the difference
between the hydrophobic sand that we've created,
and the original untreated sand that it starts as.
Here's our untreated sand,
and here is the hydrophobic sand that we've made.
Now both of these are dry and pretty powdery.
You can see that there are little bits of differences.
I would say that the color on our treated hydrophobic sand
looks a tiny bit more vibrant than our untreated sand.
It's not a big difference but it's a slight change in color.
Another difference is that the hydrophobic sand actually just feels
somewhat softer,
which means that gathering up all of the tens of thousands of individual grains
covered in the silicone,
something is actually changing to make it feel just a little bit spongier almost.
I know some people think that sand is coarse and rough and irritating,
and it gets everywhere but the hydrophobic sand is a little less
course and rough and irritating.
[Music]
All right, here as the first test,
I have a spoonful of our red hydrophobic sand,
I'm just going to dip that down under the water,
not even pour it,
which is dip it down and then pull it back up.
[Music]
Look at that. Still just powder on top.
Let's pour some of those down into the water and see what happens.
[Music]
Guys, this stuff is a ton of fun.
It really does a pretty good job of being hydrophobic.
This sand has now been down in here for like 15-20 minutes kind of thing,
and when I pull it out, it's still like dry powdery sand on top.
Now eventually, this can get water absorbed into it,
and if that happens, all you need to do is spread it out,
let it dry again,
and it's back to being good as new.
Although in our case, we've now got, instead of five different colors of sand,
we've got five colors of sand all mixed together,
and you know if you like that look, great!
Otherwise, you want to keep your different colors separated in the water
if you ever want them to stay separated.
Once they're mixed, there's no unmixing them.
Although I think I saw an episode of that old Batman, the Adam West Batman,
he had a machine designed to separate out different colors of powders.
If we can get one of those, then this will be all settled.
Colored sand and some silicone waterproofing spray,
which is sold with shoes in most department stores.
It's just designed for spraying on and then you make your shoes waterproof.
But in this case we're doing the same thing with sand,
and it's pretty fun to play with.
You can make some cool like underwater sand castles and stuff,
and it just forms these weird little structures,
and then stays dry when you pull it out and it's just a powder again.
So much fun.
It is coarse and rough and irritating.
Like drawing my arm off.
It's just like under the paper towel so it's like hitting my arm with sandpaper,
Anakin was right!
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