Today, we are making glue made out of food,
and putting it to the test to see
how well it holds up against commercially available products.
[Music]
Guys, everyone knows about Elmer's Glue, super glue,
lots of regular glues that you're going to find
around the house,
but did you know
that you can actually make these at home?
That's right.
Glue has been around for a lot longer
than the Elmer's Glue company,
and we wanted to take a look at some recipes that we found
that might have worked for older types of glue,
and see how they compare to what we're using from the store.
Now, I think it's safe to say
that not all glue is created equally.
You do not get the same results with Elmer's glue that you do
with say a super glue.
But there are lots
of variations of recipes that you can make at home.
So we want to try them out.
Glue has been around since approximately 70,000 BC,
when cavemen would use glue made out of tree sap
as a protective coating for cave paintings.
Around the year 2,000 BC,
Egyptians started using a liquid glue as an adhesive
in their wooden artifacts.
In 1932, Elmer's Glue was introduced,
and became a staple of the industry,
and still is today.
Here's the basic idea.
Using common household ingredients, most
of which are food,
we're going to make a variety of different types of glues,
and see how they hold up against their commercial counterparts.
So for our first glue,
we are going to go with the most basic of basic recipes.
This is probably one
that used to use in preschool or kindergarten.
It's just flour paste.
You need that,
and you need water, and that's it.
So for flour paste,
if you've never used it,
this stuff is really good for simple paper crafts,
or even if you're putting up posters outside,
and you don't want to use any sort of toxic glue.
This stuff is wonderful for it.
Making this glue is the easiest it could possibly be.
You're just going to mix water and flour together
until you have about a cake batter consistency,
and then throw it on the stove until it boils.
Now, we're going to be making multiple types of glue.
So just to keep them separate,
and keep track of them, we're also going to add
a little bit of food coloring to each of them.
This one's going to be green.
Sort of green.
Yellowish green.
Maybe I need more food coloring.
Well, it's definitely sticking to itself.
We made guacamole glue.
It does look like guacamole.
While our first glue recipe is cooling down off the stove,
we're going to be starting in our next one.
This recipe calls for water,
corn starch, 2 tablespoons of corn syrup, and finally,
1 teaspoon white vinegar.
This glue recipe is supposed to end up quite thick,
almost the consistency of a glue stick.
In the past, we've done some stuff with glue sticks
where we took a lot of them,
and we put them in a George Foreman grill.
It was a lot of fun.
Those glue sticks were purple,
and I think we're just going to carry on with that theme.
We've got a green glue.
Now, let's do a purple glue.
Now we put this on the stove, heat it up, and mix it
until it gets thick.
[Music]
It almost looks exactly like our melted glue sticks.
It does look very similar.
Okay, making that was fairly interesting.
I spent maybe four or five minutes stirring.
It was on medium heat.
Most of the time I was stirring it,
it was really thin.
It was like the consistency of milk,
although, you know purple,
because we added the purple food coloring.
But it's just thin, thin, thin, then all of a sudden,
I saw it starting
to sort of blob up on the end of the spatula,
and I was worried I'd done it wrong,
but I just kept stirring,
and the whole thing thickened very quickly.
All right, so we have got our two types
of homemade glue here.
This one is just regular craft paste.
So it doesn't have the strongest sticking power,
but we're still going to put it to the test
against Elmer's Glue.
The other one
that we've got here is technically glue stick glue,
and we want to compare that to glue sticks itself as well.
So what we're going to do is were actually going
to have a weight test.
Nate has a scale,
and we are going to hang stuff from the glue itself,
and actually see just
how much weight this stuff can take before it breaks.
[Music]
Okay.
Now, I think we need to let these dry,
and while we're letting these dry, we can try
are other types of glue.
So the glues we've made so far
are very water soluble as are their commercial counterparts.
So the glues were going
to make now should technically be waterproof.
We're going to make one that's a little bit simpler,
and then one
that should be strong enough to mend broken glass.
But we're going to put those to the test.
So this first one we're going to do is going to be glycerin,
water, gelatin, and vinegar.
So you're going to start with 6 tablespoons of cold water,
and then two packets of unflavored gelatin.
Now, we're going to put this on the stove,
and we're going to heat it up
until the gelatin has dissolved completely.
Alright, so we've got the gelatin all dissolved.
Now, we're going to take it off the heat,
and we're going to add two tablespoons of white vinegar,
and a teaspoon of Glycerin.
And we're also adding just a bit of yellow food coloring.
So we can keep all of these separate.
You do want to use this glue warm,
but we want to make sure
that it's cooled just enough to touch,
and then we'll be able to use it.
So we are going to make one more glue
that's supposedly tougher than the rest.
Now, this is a waterproof glue.
The other two that we have our craft glues and paste,
but we're going to try one
that is specific for holding glass together.
Starting off,
we're taking three tablespoons of fat-free milk,
and we're going to heat that up on the stove.
You want this almost to boiling, but not quite.
While Nate is heating up the milk,
I'm going to mix 2 tablespoons of cold water with two packets
of gelatin again,
get those as dissolved as we can before we add the milk.
So perfect.
Yeah, we're starting to get a simmer,
so we can take that off,
and we're going to mix that directly into our gelatin mix.
So this recipe is both waterproof
and supposedly strong enough to hold together glass.
But it does have milk in it,
so it will spoil if you don't use it immediately.
One way that you can actually kind of combat
that is you can add some peppermint extract.
Keeps it from spoiling.
So I think that means we need some glass
that needs to be glued,
and right now, we've got glass that doesn't need to be glued.
So...
We're going to break some stuff.
We're not exactly sure
how high up we need to hold these to drop them,
and have them break their concrete.
So we're going to start low, and work our way up.
So these are thicker than your usual glasses,
and they're made of borosilicate glass,
which is going to be a little bit harder
for us to break than soda lime, but we're going to try it.
Okay, I'm going to go up to about a foot.
Okay.
3, 2, 1.
Something broke.
This one's broken.
Oh, mines in pieces.
All right, we get about 1 foot.
That one sounded
like it exploded into lots of pieces.
That one will never be a glass again.
[Music]
All right, which glue do we want to use on which cup.
So let's go from what we think will be the strongest
to the weakest.
So I'm going to say super glue for the worst.
Let's go ahead and take our glue made specifically
for glass to this piece,
and then our one that's almost intact,
we'll go ahead and use our waterproof glue for.
[Music]
All of our glue has had plenty of time to set,
so now we need to see how well it's working out.
I think first,
we can take a look at our glass glues,
compare those, see what we've got,
and we've actually done multiple tests with the glues.
For instance, I also glued these two pieces
of glass to each other,
and this piece of paper on here to act as sort of a label
that you're putting on a glass jar or something like that.
There's our breaking point right there.
Just removing the tape on that one,
it was too much for this.
And this is the one that the recipe said
it was specifically for glass, right?
It did.
Yeah.
That's what's so confusing.
Now, this recipe,
you're supposed to use at room temperature,
which is why it's
so gelatinous to glue glass to other pieces of glass.
Put a little bit of pressure on this that,
just right off.
You got those two pieces all right together.
The recipe I found
actually told you to keep it room temperature.
That's what all this is.
That's what fell apart.
I wasn't having it.
So I superheated it.
And this one that's actually staying together.
Yeah, that's actually holding really well.
I'm going to try and break it off.
All right, so one was able to come apart,
but so much more resistant than like,
that has almost no resistance,
it just falls right off, heating it up.
So when this is like nice and hot,
and very liquid,
it actually does an okay job of securing the glass together.
So room temperature,
this is just two pieces of glass glued to each other.
Let's see how well that holds.
Not really.
Virtually, none.
Might be good
if you're just trying to like keep a piece
of glass from sliding off another piece of glass.
I'll see this goes.
Go with this one,
see how well that comes to pieces.
It's already so much stronger than mine was.
It does have the advantage of being all together,
so it's just every side is being supported.
I'm gonna try and break that apart now.
See mine just snapped apart.
[inaudible]
Okay, so I was able
to put a little bit of pressure on that,
and it's coming apart, but it's still tacky too.
Mine is not even tacky anymore.
Okay, there we go.
Once you've got one piece off.
They're all just gonna fall apart.
This glue was meant to glue glass to other pieces of glass.
This type of glue was simply meant to be waterproof.
So I'm curious about our little paper label.
We both had labels attached with our glue.
Let's see how well this is attached.
So this is just a piece of paper.
It did come off fairly easily.
But it also was staying on it.
Nothing was pulling that off.
It was sticking pretty nicely.
Now, this is fun.
This is actually pulling off like how I've seen a lot
of cooking labels.
This is actually how I've seen labels peel off before,
and this is--
Even leaving some behind.
Yeah.
Out of these two glues, which one would you use?
I would definitely go with the yellow one.
It definitely seems more useful,
easier to use by a little bit,
and a little bit stronger.
My superglued cup is just a huge mess,
still missing big old pieces,
because it broke quite a bit.
I couldn't get everything back together.
Some bits are still missing.
I think.
Wow.
Okay.
That actually just broke the glass again.
That didn't come apart at the glue.
This is where it was glued,
and here is a new break that I just put into it
by pulling it apart.
Superglue, better or worse than our homemade glues?
I have to say better.
Superglue actually has ingredients that we
don't just have lying around the house usually.
Can you order them?
Yes.
Is it possible to make?
Yes, but for convenience sake,
I would say reach for the Superglue.
We've got non-glass type glue,
and we've built some tests for that as well.
I think it's time to see how they hold up.
I want to start with our homemade flour paste,
and then I want to compare it to Elmer's Glue.
Wow.
[Music]
Oh, it didn't break the glue, it broke the paper clip.
I'm just gonna hang all of my weight from this.
You ready?
Oh!
See, that time, it got to four pounds.
I like our old result better.
We got over 20, and I kind of wonder
if just by pulling it twisted, just a little bit--
I think so.
I think it,
and it also hit the ground so, it could have, you know,
cracked a little bit.
That's interesting for a couple reasons.
When you're pulling straight apart,
when we were adding weight,
or you're pulling straight down, it held a lot of weight,
and that actually reminds me of something similar.
This is a paper bag from the grocery store.
These handles here, they're glued on.
It's just paper glued to paper.
And if you pull straight up on them,
you can put quite a bit of weight in these bags.
In fact, it even says on the bag,
pull handles up, not out.
So pulling straight up on these bags,
you can get quite a bit of weight going.
But as soon as you pull sideways,
they come off so easily.
But we got at least
25 pounds pulling straight down with our first glue.
Let's move on to our so-called glue stick glue.
[Music]
What did we get to?
I didn't see that time.
I didn't either.
Hopefully, Mark caught it.
When we did our video
with tons of glue sticks in the George Foreman grill,
I have never been super satisfied with the performance
of a glue stick in gluing things together.
However, now we're going to see how it does
in our fish scale test.
[Music]
14.
I think that was at 14 pounds.
Both of our homemade glues are almost doubly as strong
as the glue stick glue.
Elmer's Glue.
Now, this is the one we both thought was going
to be the best.
>> Holy cow. >> That's 40 ...
50...
Oh, we maxed out this scale.
We have a solution to this.
[Music]
Holy cow!
I think I saw that at about 55-60.
Oh, it didn't break the glue.
It tore through the popsicle stick.
[Music]
Glue made out of food at home.
It is doable,
and we got some pretty awesome results.
So with our glass glue and our waterproof glue,
it's going to work pretty well
if you've got some light crafts, you're working with kids,
but I was very impressed with our homemade flour paste
and stick glue.
Guys, that's not all.
We've always got more fee to see.
This box up here at the top will take you to our latest video.
That box of the bottom is
what YouTube thinks you should be watching next.
Hit this bomb in the middle to subscribe to the club.
Don't forget to ring that bell
so you never miss out on the fun,
and we'll see you in the next one.
Talk to you then.