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Attempting to make transparent wood

NileRed · 8.5M views · 2018-11-21 · 35:49

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Overview

NileRed attempts to make transparent wood, inspired by an AvE video, by removing lignin and infiltrating the wood with resin. It is a long, detailed walkthrough of the chemistry and the practical difficulties.

On Hacker News

Linked as the go-to hands-on demonstration of how transparent wood is made and why scaling it to large pieces is hard.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2021

Topics

ChemistryMaterials science
Search by tags
nileredtransparent woodligninepoxy

What people said

valine · 2020-10 · Recommendation

NileRed on youtube has a cool video detailing the steps to create transparent wood. His result isn’t quite as clear as in the article but the process seems similar. [VIDEO]

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robbedpeter · 2021-10 · Reference

This looks like it can be accomplished with minimal basic chemistry and a hydraulic press. I'd love to see what type of acoustic guitars could be created using this material. Super thin tops and super rigid bodies are exciting. The NileRed YouTube channel goes into the lignin removal chemistry here [VIDEO] There's also great progress in using nanocrystalline cellulose to produce super strong composite materials. Embedding graphene or carbon nanotubes gives you super light, super tough material that is suitable for replacing aluminum and steel structures.

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jrockway · 2021-02 · Reference

> Not sure how they "infuse" it. That sounds like driving it deeper. NileRed did a video about preparing this from a different paper: [VIDEO] It seems that you just soak the thing in epoxy in a vacuum. The results were not great, though.

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Sources

Video by NileRed, played through YouTube.

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