In today's video,
we're testing out a comment asking
if it's possible to boil water in a wooden bowl.
[Music]
All right, we've got a couple of wooden bowls,
and we're going to try boiling water in them.
The problem of course is
that wood does not conduct heat nearly as well
as say a metal bowl,
which is what you'd normally want to do this in,
or maybe glass if it were in the microwave.
Wood pretty uncommon for boiling.
It doesn't conduct heat well.
It's a little bit more insulated.
So it's going to be a little bit harder
for that heat to transfer through.
And maybe it's so insulated even at the outside washer
like catch on fire or something like that
before it gets the water boiling.
So the question is if we can get the water to boil
without the bowl burning up and disintegrating.
Here's the basic idea.
We are going to try and boil water in our wooden bowl.
First on the electric burner, then on the propane stove,
and last in our forge.
First, let's try it on an electric burner.
[Music]
All right, we did not get water to boil on our electric stove.
Maybe it just doesn't get hot enough.
It burned quite a bit on the bottom.
It didn't ever really light on fire,
and we got water that started heating up,
like there is steam.
and was even I think some little bubbles down at the bottom.
It's very hot water,
but it definitely wasn't boiling water.
So I think we need to step our game up.
Now, we're going to try the propane stove.
As a comparison with this propane stove,
I want to try a metal bowl, and we're going to time it.
We're going to see how long it takes
for it to boil in a metal bowl,
and then compare that to the wooden bowl after.
If it will even boil in the metal bowl.
Is it bad that I'm hoping this doesn't work just so
that we can light the foundry?
I am very cold.
It's a metal bowl.
It's going to go pretty quick I suspect.
That is a decent amount of water,
and so, it does have a certain amount of energy it has to take
before it gets to a boiling point,
but it's already making
little bubbles right at the very contact,
like the bottom of the bowl.
I think it's going to go pretty quick.
We shouldn't have a problem here.
[Music]
Oh!
Wow!
You say that's boiling?
That's boiling.
That looks like boiling water.
2 minutes and 48 seconds, it took for that to hit full boil.
That's pretty quick.
Yeah.
[Music]
All right.
Now we see if we can get the water to boil,
or if we just have a bowl
that on fire, or maybe like the top will be on fire.
Normally, when you put anything that contains water in the fire,
the edges might burn.
But the water, it waits until it evaporates
until the material itself starts to burn.
So we could get a fire up here,
we could get scorching on the bottom,
but I don't think the sides are going to burn.
That's just not going to happen.
We'll find out.
Here we go.
It's a lot of fire.
And it is going up the sides of the bowl quite a bit.
In fact, some of those yellow flames
I believe are the bowl catching on fire already.
So we've got a bowl on fire.
Yeah.
But that doesn't mean this isn't going to work.
With paper cups, I have seen it.
If you put a paper cup
and you fill water, maybe with egg in there,
and it burns the edge,
like it burns down to the level of the water,
because what keeps burning is all the heat going
into the water instead of staying on the cup itself,
but on this top rim around it,
which definitely looks like it's lighting on fire.
Yup, that's the lacquer.
I think we're burning the lacquer coating right now.
It does kind of smell like that.
Yeah.
This doesn't smell like a wood burn.
This is a definitely a chemical, like lacquer burn here.
But it's also, down at the bottom, yeah,
we, the wood is like cracking and stuff down at the bottom.
So down there...
Oh actually, that's true.
This is a glued bowl.
This isn't like carved out of one piece.
So if we crack apart whatever is holding the bowl together...
It could just...
We might want to move away.
All right.
Well, can I just point out
that this looks like the Goblet of Fire
or something from Harry Potter,
because it's like a bowl that's on fire.
Does anybody have a scrap of paper?
I need to write my name immediately.
[Music]
The flame is definitely going out from where it was burning
the bowl, but look.
There are bubbles forming on the side of the bowl,
and I don't know if that's gas is expanding
through the sides of the bowl,
or if that's actually from the heat of the water.
Know what I'm loving here is
you can actually see this charred edge,
and then down below,
you're still seeing that beautiful wood finish.
Not only the chart edge,
but as you said, it is a bowl that's been glued together,
and it's splitting apart.
So we've just got these very even sections going.
It's looking like a flower with petals.
I wonder what would happen
if you just set one of these bowls on fire,
would it just like boom out?
We definitely are not at a boil yet.
No, I can still put my hand in that so...
This is going to take longer.
[Music]
Well, it's been 31 minutes and counting.
Yeah, we are over half an hour.
Remember, it took 2 minutes and 48 seconds to boil
in our metal bowl, and over half an hour,
a lot of the bowl is burned.
The bottom of the bowl is just like made of embers.
The inside of the bowl,
the lacquer is actually starting to bubble up,
meaning the whole thing is starting to separate.
Yeah.
If I wasn't wearing gloves, yes, these aren't very insulating,
but there's still some protection.
If I didn't have gloves on,
I wouldn't be putting my hand in that,
but the fact
that I can still put my hand in there for several seconds,
I don't think we're that close to boiling yet.
I think we need to scale it up one more time.
We've got our foundry.
We're going to try a couple things.
First, we're going to use a lot more heat,
because that thing puts out a lot of heat,
and second, we're going to try filling the bowl all the way,
and it might be counter intuitive thinking like,
oh more water is going to be harder to boil,
but it should insulate the sides,
so less of the bowl burns up.
We're going to try it.
[Music]
This is much nicer.
I like this much more.
This is better.
Plenty of roaring heat coming off that.
Now, I expected still going to burn the outside of the bowl.
Oh yeah.
But the nice part about this is
that we're going to get an ambient heat all the way
around it just from the heat coming off of the top.
I think that's really going to help.
There we go.
There's our lacquer.
Yes, there it goes.
And I'm sure some of the wood lighting.
Already on the inside,
we've got that ring of bubbles forming so...
But you can also see--
And black ring around the top.
I think our lacquer
on the inside has already begun to melt.
[Music]
All right, we don't have the same kind of boil
that we did with the metal pot.
But we do have water boiling.
Weirdly, it seems to only be boiling on one side,
where more of the heat is directly going.
It was centered originally, but for some reason,
it has started to settle over to one edge,
and the other side just isn't boiling as much.
So it's very much
where it's right in contact with the fire.
We're getting this frothy boil,
and it's less than half the amount of time
that we spent on the one with the propane burner.
So yeah.
Yes, it's boiling.
We have--
We did it.
We made it happen.
So a rolling boil,
that's what happens when the average temperature is hot
enough that it will evaporate,
and I don't think we actually have that.
We have something you could cook in.
I think it is boiling, and you could cook with it,
but I don't think we have the same type of rolling boil
where the average temperatures hot enough to evaporate,
because it's only boiling
on the side with more heat directly blowing on to it.
But it's less than half the amount of time
that it took to even get this to start bubbling,
and there was more water,
so I'm calling that a success.
All right.
This is probably going to fall apart.
But let's see if we can pick it up.
Oh, it's soft.
Still bubbling.
That to me means we really did it,
because the water is still boiling.
Our bowl actually is basically on fire down here,
so it's still putting heat into the water.
So Nate was hungry, and it's lunchtime,
and we have some boiling water.
Mmm...
Chemical water.
But while Nate makes lunch,
I'm going to try and pick up the bowl that we had
on the propane burner.
I'm curious to see if it's gonna hold together.
So right now,
you can see there's ash in there,
the varnish has bubbled.
Going to pour this out real quick.
I think mostly at this point,
it's just steaming because it is freezing in here,
but you can see the varnish
that's just bubbled up off of this bowl.
Now, let's look at the bottom.
Nate, look at this.
I got this one now too.
Oh, wow!
So you can already the heat difference here.
That's pretty cool looking bowl honestly.
It's also much lighter weight.
Right?
It lost a lot of mass.
We set out to see
if you can boil water in a wooden bowl, and yes,
it turns out you can, it's just horrendously impractical.
In a survival situation,
if you didn't have a metal bowl,
you would probably have to stick a wooden bowl
right in the center of a fire.
So...
And I don't think you'd be able to do it too many times
before your bowl got used up.
There are traditional methods
of boiling water inflammable containers by like taking
a hot rock out of the fire,
and putting that into the water inside the container,
but we were trying
to actually just boil it the way you boil stuff in a bowl or pot.
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