Hey guys welcome to the yard where today
We're going to be learning about how to do some homemade custom wood burning without a branding iron not long ago
I saw a video by youtuber Laura Kampf who showed how you can use a simple chemical process to burn wood
And I thought it was just the coolest thing ever I started doing some research on it
I found articles and crafting magazines going back seven or eight years talking about this process
And it is
Really cool and super simple to do really the only two ingredients we need for this are water and ammonium chloride in her video Laura
Kampf says you can buy ammonium chloride in a pharmacy and while that may be true where she is in Germany
It doesn't seem to be the case here in the United States, and you're best off buying it online
There are two forms that it comes in you can buy bags of the powdered ammonium chloride or you can buy it as a block
Of what's called Sal ammoniac? It's the exact same thing just compressed into a brick form
I already have some left over because this is the same chemical we used in our negative X experiments to start will one about
1/2 cup of water and 1 teaspoon of our powdered ammonium chloride
To get this into a powder form I'm just gonna start shaving bits of it off this brick
And if any of it is in chunks that are too big, I'll just crush those up
Those are the ingredients you need at this point we have the solution that works to chemically burn our wood
There are several methods. We can use to apply this on to our wood. Let's start by trying out a paint brush
We'll take the ammonium chloride solution, and we'll draw whatever design
We want to on the wood and we'll then hit it with a heat gun
The heat will activate the ammonium chloride and burn our design into the wood permanently
I'm just gonna go for a vine and leaf design
That's a pretty simple design, let's see how it takes when we hit it with our heat
This is something you'll need to be a little bit patient with it doesn't activate
immediately, it really has to get pretty hot before the burning starts happening I
Can see the design starting to appear? Right now it just looks like sort of a pale yellow
And now we can see that we have successfully burned our design into the wood
I may have been a little bit hasty in some spots if you concentrate the heat gun on one place too long
You're likely to start burning the wood itself everywhere that the heat gun is hitting rather than just where you painted the ammonium chloride
So you do want to be careful about how you apply to heat?
One of the cool things about using this liquid to make your designs in the wood is that there are a lot of different ways
You can apply it. I was using a paint brush
I also have this paint brush style pen which you can fill with whatever liquid you want
I'll try pouring some of our ammonium chloride into this pen
And then I should be able to just write with the tip of the brush
My handwriting is pretty much garbage
So this isn't gonna look very good
But conceptually you can just use your own handwriting to write something out and then burn it into a piece of wood really fun
Let's try a few other things
I've got a small piece of towel that I've soaked in our ammonium chloride solution
And I'm gonna try using a stamp and see if I can get a stamp to print onto the wood and then burn that in
Another great method is a three-step process that involves using stickers as a form of mask
You can use commercially available stickers if you've got them in the right shape or if you've got
Access to a vinyl cutter to cut custom shapes you can do that as well
Let's try taking some of these large alphabet stickers and using them as a mask to make a large welcome sign on this board
Our sticker has worked as a mask against the clear paint and will now apply our ammonium chloride
Mixture over the lettering we should only get the burning effect where we had the stickers
The ammonium chloride solution is relatively safe
But if you are going to be using this trick on anything that's going to be in contact with food make sure you wash it
Well first one thing
I really like about this technique is how easy it is to apply to curved surfaces as well as flat lines a
Real branding iron may have some advantages over this technique, but it would also have a fairly hard time
Burning evenly onto a curved surface
There's one more thing that I want to try and that's using a piece of sticker paper to cut out my own
Stencil and use that as a mask instead of using the pre-bought stickers that I've had before
The ammonium chloride and water solution is super easy to make and easy to apply in a variety of different methods
So you can completely choose the design you want to burn into wood
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