In today's video,
we're taking really thin sheets of aluminum, and see
if we can twist them into something stronger,
a metal rope.
[Music]
On YouTube, Skylar Parks asked,
if we can make a rope using aluminum foil.
Skylar, that's an interesting question.
As most people know,
aluminum foil is not terribly strong.
It's made of metal, but it's so thin
that it shreds apart easily.
This is definitely
not something you would think of as holding any support.
Even when we take sort of a bunch of it at once,
it's pretty easy to bust right through it.
So can we take this super thin flimsy material,
and turn it into something stronger,
a cable or rope
that we can actually pull against with some strength.
Here's the basic idea.
In the past,
we've used uncommon materials to make rope.
Today, we're going to take something really light and thin,
and see if we can get the same result.
We've made rope
out of some uncommon or weak materials in the past.
We've used soda bottles cutting into strands.
We've used pretty weak string to make a fairly strong rope.
We've used coconut fibers
that we were able to twist together
into long continuous pieces.
All of those were able to take a fair amount of strength.
Our rope made out of paper towel was able to hold my weight,
and pull a car.
So we know that we can take something
weaker and bind it together into something stronger.
Today, we want to see
if we can make that work with aluminum foil.
The aluminum does present a few challenges
that other materials we've used don't have.
Most of the time,
when we've tried to make any sort of rope involves
taking long strips
or pieces of the material and twisting it together.
However, with the foil,
sometimes we run into a problem that if we keep twisting it,
rather than getting stronger, it becomes brittle,
and just breaks right apart.
I believe this is mostly
because rather than being strands or fibers
that are really strong pulled one direction,
the foil is sort of uniformly week in every direction.
Easy that direction.
Easy at an angle.
It just rips really easily.
So, it's not the same as others materials we've used.
Even paper towels,
which aren't very strong on their own, we were able
to twist into something that made a pretty strong rope,
because it is a fibrous material,
and twisting it together helped it bind even stronger.
With the foil, it's a different beast.
Before we get started with the whole rope,
we at least want to see if we can have a proof-of-concept.
Can we take one sheet of foil
and make it stronger by changing the shape at all?
[Music]
Two sheets of foil about the same size.
Now, we want to attach one
of these sheets of foil onto our scale to see
how hard we can pull on it before it breaks.
To try and make sure
that we're pulling evenly with the whole width of the foil,
I'm going to take a dowel,
and I'm going to tape it to either side.
That should make it
so that when pressure is being put on one spot,
it's transferred to the whole sheet at the same time.
Let's test this out.
[Music]
Now, I'm going to hold onto the dowel on this side.
I'm going to pull until something breaks.
And hopefully,
we're using the whole strength of the foil here.
[Music]
I think I saw that get 28 pounds,
which is surprising.
I really didn't think we were going to be able
to get that much force out of one sheet of foil.
Hard to know exactly where it did fail,
but we can see
that it did tear along this whole taped edge.
So I imagine it gave out in one spot first,
and then quickly spread to the sides.
The question now is if we take this sheet of foil,
and we modify it,
maybe by rolling it up, is it going to get stronger
or weaker than the whole sheet of foil spread out wide.
I'm going to start by wrapping the piece of foil
around this wooden dowel to make it into a nice tube shape,
and then I'll twist it from there.
I'm going to take this end,
fit it into the chuck of a drill,
hold on to the other end, and just let it spin.
[Music]
Wow, that's a lot shorter.
Okay.
Now this looks more like a rope.
Obviously, this is more rope shape than the sheet of foil.
Let's see what strength we can get off of this thing.
[Music]
I've got the foil attached at both sides,
and hopefully,
we'll get all of the strength being put into the foil,
and not too much into the tape and stuff like that.
I think it's going to work.
We may have to adjust if it doesn't.
Now, one thing I noticed,
just as I was putting on here and testing
if I had any tension at all, it started spinning.
Our foil is coiled up really tightly,
and when I start putting weight
on it, it starts uncoiling just a little bit.
Let's see what happens.
I might end up stretching this foil back out
as it twists a bit.
[Music]
That gave out early.
The scale got up to 9 pounds.
It took some pressure off to try
and hold the scales so the camera can see it better,
and then it seemed
to break it about 7 pounds when I was pulling on it again.
This highlights another worry that I had about the foil.
If you've ever held a little piece of thin metal,
like a paper clip,
and you bend it back and forth,
you may notice that it starts to get brittle,
it loses its ductility,
and you can't bend it as easily anymore.
And then when you put pressure on that twisted spot,
it just wants to break,
because you've already made the metal a little bit weaker.
Our first test shows
that a stretched-out piece of foil laid out flat
is actually holding more weight than a twisted up piece of foil.
A flat piece of foil may in theory be able
to hold more weight, but it's horrendously impractical.
You never want to try and pull anything with a sheet of foil.
So I think we can still turn our twisted aluminum foil
into something that can still take quite a bit of pull.
There's a few different things I want to try.
The first is sort of making the foil into a rope,
a little bit more the same way other ropes are made,
that's with thin strips twisted together,
and then twisting those thin pieces together.
The second is I want to try using our rope machine.
You've probably seen us use this before.
You put some strands in,
you atttach drill onto the back, spin it.
It twists everything up, and coils them together.
Will this machine work with foil?
That twisting effect that makes it brittle
and break is something we've already seen happen by hand.
It could be even worse in the machine.
But even with that, I still think we'll be able
to twist pieces together into a strong rope,
whether we use this or not.
To cut nice long strips out of the sheet of foil,
I'm going to fold it over a few times,
so I don't have to cut in the whole length over and over.
This way, I'll be able to cut much shorter length,
but still get this strips running through the whole length
of the sheet.
Before I cut it though,
there is one other thing we have to do,
and that's to put a layer of paper towel in between foil.
If you try and cut foil,
fold it over without anything in between,
it tends to bind to itself.
So here I've got a piece, just folding it a couple
of times in half.
That's four layers thick right there.
Now, if I cut through, I have this strip of foil,
but the edges have sort of curled over each other,
and they don't always like to let go.
[Music]
I don't think the drill is the way to do this.
[Music]
We've got a much more string shaped piece of foil.
Maybe now, it will twist nicely?
[Music]
Twisted better than before,
but I think we're actually
getting a better result just by rolling it in our hands,
so it's not actually twisted up,
but it is still rolled up.
[Music]
We now have three decently long
fairly round strands of the aluminum,
and the goal is to see
if we can twist these together into a stronger cord.
[Music]
We've now got a cable made
from three strands of aluminum foil twisted together.
Attatch to the scale, pull test.
Oh, getting a lot of spinning.
And it broke.
Very low stress test on that one.
Oh, I think it just barely maxed out at about 6 pounds.
What do you think?
Are we going to get any better luck using our rope machine?
[Music]
Here it goes.
Oh, well, we got three or four inches of our rope,
and then our individual strands just snapped.
That's not a lot of rope, but it's a little bit,
so we can try and take this, and put it on the scale,
and see what is measuring at.
[Music]
Hey, our tape gave out.
Let's reinforce it and try again.
[Music]
There it is.
We got to 56 pounds.
That is something
that is definitely a higher result than the 28 pounds,
of course, we had with the plain flat sheet,
and this is still one sheet of foil just cut into thirds,
and then rolled up.
So we finally managed to get a little better
than the plain sheet.
However, we did use our rope machine to do this,
and then, all of our cables broke.
So the rope machine itself is
not a very effective way to keep making this rope.
I want to scale that up.
We're just gonna use a lot of aluminum foil,
we're you use whole sheets this time,
and I think I'm going to try and do three wrapped together,
and then three of those wrapped together,
so nine total sheets.
I lost about two feet in length doing that.
Let's do it eight more times.
We've got nine chords laid out now.
So we're going to start twisting them together.
We're going to twist 3 together, 3 together, 3 together,
and then we're going to twist all of those together,
and make ourselves sort of a big monster cable,
see how it works.
[Music]
Now we've got three cables,
and we need to twist them all together into one giant cable.
Let's turn it into one big ol rope.
[Music]
Giant foil rope.
Oh, that's great.
Question is, does it have any strength to it at all?
About 3 feet, 4 inches long.
Each sheet of foil before we started was about 6,
maybe 6 and 1/2 feet long.
So we've lost almost 50%
of our foil length in turning it into this rope.
We got to see how much weight this can take.
All right cable, rope foil, whatever you are.
[Music]
It holds.
[Music]
It's not the most comfortable rope to hold onto.
It does hold its shape better than most.
Today, we've got the truck,
which is got like 4 layers of paracord attached
to our foil rope.
I unwound the rope just a little bit,
and I sort of braided the paracord in there.
And then I've got a lot of layers of tape after braiding
the rope back around it.
Same thing on the other side, attached to our scale.
This is hooked onto the tow hook of a car.
And so now, we're just going to test.
We're going to have Mark drive away very slowly,
and we're going to see how our foil rope holds up.
See how many pounds
of pressure it takes before it just tears open.
[Music]
Broken.
That was a very relaxed break.
It just like...
Gone.
All right.
There we go.
Our rope broke.
It was not a very energetic breaking.
I thought that maybe it would just pop
and catastrophically fail all at once.
But really, it just was pulling and pulling,
and then just was like, I'm out,
and just let go, and everything kind of fell down.
But I'm quite sure I saw it over 200 pounds.
I think I saw it
about 215 or 225, something like that.
Overall though,
that's definitely a rope yhat was doing something.
Skylar Parks, thank you for your suggestion.
Guys, if you've got something you want to see us try,
let us know down in the comments below.
Guys, that's not all.
We've always got more for you see.
That box up at the top is going to take you to our last video.
You should go check that out.
The other box is going to show you
what YouTube thinks you should be watching next.
And if you hit this bomb here in the middle,
you'll be subscribed
to the channel so you never miss out on a video.
Don't forget to ring that bell,
and we'll see you in the next one.
Talk to you then.