 I get compared a lot to this anime and manga series called Dr. Stone and they totally ripped off my format of trying to rebuild society from scratch. The worst part is they started doing it two years before I did, but it's a fictional version of what I tried to do on the channel of exploring different technologies and how to build yourself up starting from the Stone Age. But as a fictional series, it takes a lot of liberties, a few places here and there. Most of the things seem plausible, but in this video I wanted to put to the test a few of the more far-fetched ones and see if there's any truth to them and maybe I can learn something useful for some of our upcoming projects. One topic in this series I thought especially interesting was when they tried to make cotton candy. First of all it's just interesting because can you really make cotton candy with the kind of simple apparatus they constructed and secondly the real reason they built it is because they wanted to make wire and wire is something you need a lot of as we start delving into more electronics. It seems like a good idea if it works, but I'm pretty skeptical just how realistically you can make wire using basically a cotton candy machine or a centrifuge of sort. So I want to put that to the test. First we're gonna make some cotton candy, then we're gonna try and make some wire. In the series they use sugar crystals that are left over from some potato mirroring that they had made previously. It's not something I've done before, however I do have a fair amount of maple syrup. It just happens to be the middle of maple syrup season and it's hard to find a more readily available sugar source than the stuff that's flowing out of the trees in my own yard. So I want to try and use this source to make my own cotton candy, but first I want to make sure maple syrup is actually going to work for this because not all sugars are made the same. Usually for cotton candy you just use table sugar sometimes you have corn syrup and stuff mixed in it as well. Maple syrup is usually consumed as you know a syrup it actually can be turned into a sugar it's just a process to dry it out even further so I have some store-bought stuff we can test this with and if that works out we can start making our maple syrup and our own centrifuge. Definitely got some results it does appear to work it doesn't seem quite as good as a little bit more chunky a lot of it just split as crystals out of it so it might be a little bit harder to actually fluff it up as regular sugar. It might be some value to mix in some of the white sugar I've made before with my maple syrup to get a better result but it says definitely cotton candy so I think we have success and we can get started. That's pretty good. Once I tapped the four trees in my yard I was able to get roughly four to five gallons of sap as the weather cycles between below and above freezing each day. Then each day's worth needs to be boiled down to roughly a pint of finished syrup. So I have a few jars of maple syrup here that have been sitting around got a little overly dried and super saturated so the sugar is now already starting to crystallize in it so I'm going to pour it all out on this tray lit fully finished drying out and we'll just have a solid crystal we can then use for making the cotton candy. I got pretty thick I think this will be close enough to actually work just improve the results and I want to add some white sugar that we made last time out of sugar beads and get something a little bit more promising but I think now we can move on to the next step of building the centrifuge. Another interesting method used in Dr. Stone's series is how they cast the centrifuge itself casting in an open mold quickly pressing with a bamboo log from above and then piercing the holes while it's still hot. This method probably works really well in industrial factory where all these steps can be done super quickly with machines that I suspect it's going to cool way too quickly to effectively work but let's give it a shot and see if it works at all. Oh! Yeah! Oh scary. All right so here's the end result of that little experiment which is a very fun explosion of molten metal. Like I said it's wrong it does actually stay liquid long enough to push it around if had I dropped it a little bit more gently it might have turned out a little bit better but I definitely don't want to do it again because it's way too hazardous though I think. I think it's just a lot easier to do it the old-fashioned way and make wax mold than these posture or sand to actually cast into and you just get the whole thing with one pour. So let's do that instead. But first thank you to Better Health for sponsoring this video. If you feel like you're needing to speak to someone or you just need a mental health check-in Better Health is an amazing online resource that allows you to do just that. It's an online therapeutic resource that sets your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist all from the comfort of your home. People often forget that mental health is just as important as physical health I know I do. To get started head to betterhealth.com slash htme. Answer a few questions about your state of mind and before you know it you'll be matched with a licensed therapist who will work with you. It takes about as much effort as watching a youtube video to start your connection to Better Health. Better Health is about facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change therapists as needed. Head to betterhealth.com slash htme to answer a few questions and get paired up with a therapist. Oh yeah and you'll also get 10 off your first month when you click that link below. To help consistently spin the centerfuge in the series they make a basic gearbox to help make spinning it easy and consistent. I'm not sure why they didn't put a nice crank on it but we can replicate that and make some improvements too. To do a little bit of tweaking to get things to really line up well I might still need a little bit of tweaking but for the most part it seems to work now. So your normal store-bought cotton candy machine spins at about 3000 rpm which is going to be pretty fast. I don't know if this guy can keep up with it but with the gear system it'll get a bit more of a spin per turn. We'll see if we can make it work with a hand crank. All right so we have the sugar all mouth of down now it's just a matter of pouring it into a little crucible here but we'll see how well it actually forms cotton candy. So for most of it it looks like it just kind of clogged up. The sugar really either got too cold too quick and clogged it or wasn't spinning fast enough to actually get it out but it did make small quantities of candy floss so that I'm actually kind of impressed it did that much even. I think if I preheat the actual centerfuge it might work a little bit better. I think just the copper sucks the heat out so quickly that it cools before it can make it to the holes. Also really challenging to both pour and spin at the same time but I think in theory we've proven that this does actually work. The wind just got out. Oh man. All right so do a few tests preheating the crucible using a powered drill and still not the greatest result. You kind of got a little cobwebby at the bottom here and it's all stringy as it's shot out. Part of it might be that it's overheating and caramelizing because I'm not able to do it just right temperature trying to make my own cotton candy machine is not really working out too well. Next is kind of the real questionable part of trying to actually make a wire by casting metal through the holes in the centerfuge. I'm pretty sure this isn't going to work. I can't find any references of this being done commercially at any scale so I'm highly skeptical of this but in theory it seems like it should work. In the past I've done a video on trying to make my own wire and use gold we collected in California and then went through the whole process of trying to draw it into a long wire. Gold is one of the most ductible materials and theoretically the smaller piece we got could have been stretched for miles but actually doing that was a lot harder than I expected and ended up with a fairly short length of wire that I wasn't really sure what exactly I could do with so I ended up building this small little house for William Osmond and use that as kind of electrical wiring in it. Not really sure what happened to that house but anyways I know from experience a drawing wire is pretty tedious and a bit difficult so if this is a way to actually make wire that works that'll be really impressive. So in that they use gold the quantities they use are really impressive because we're talking probably millions of dollars worth of gold that they're using to make the wire and I'd love to be able to test that but even like a half cup of liquid gold would be well over a hundred thousand dollars. So I'm going to try a few cheaper metals. Metals with lower melting points will probably be easier to try with that so I think I'm going to start first on the lower end of the spectrum with tin. Even with preheating the crucible the holes seem to clog pretty quickly with just a few beads of liquid metal making it out. Unfortunately each attempt damaged and threw the centrifuge out of alignment so the results got worse and worse with each attempt although I'm not sure it made a bunch of difference in the end. I tried putting together something a little bit better to try it with but I had trouble getting that to be stable but then I figured I already bought a cotton candy machine let's just test it's myth out for real with the actual machine. There's no way this isn't a bad idea. Here we go. That was cool. Yeah. Consistent with my other results it only ended up shooting out small pallets of metal before everything bursted into flames. I think this idea is pretty well busted. So as I kind of expected the casting with the cotton candy machine was a little bit farfetched for the series but they do also make wire one other way which is a little bit more straightforward and that's using the wood mold to just kind of pour it along. I've always thought using wood as a mold like they do in the series is a little weird. One of the like number one safety concerns with casting metals is moisture. If you're sand or you're wood or anything that's too much moisture you have a possibility of it just instantly being turned into steam and that basically shooting metal into your face. It's also more difficult to carve because you got to deal with the grain as you kind of carve a channel for it where really the the best solution is just sand just some dry dirt just drag your finger through it and you can make it pretty easy wire but we're going to try it like the series they do it with a board and they just carve a basic zigzag channel and then pour the copper into it so we see if we can get a wire using this method. So casting the wood ended up working even worse than I expected I think what might be seen here is the light and frost effect where the board had just enough moisture in it to form a vapor layer causing the bronze to pretty much just float right off of it. I also tried casting into sand and then actual casting sand to see if I could get better results but it's a challenge to pour at a consistent rate down the wire without it getting thick and spots along the way. So unfortunately none of these methods seem to really work too great for making a really nice wire. This looks almost more like cat turds to be honest. This one in the casting sand is a little bit better but still not the greatest wire hard to move around and everything not the best result. The centrifuge method seems like it should work in theory but I think there's just a lot of things working against you both kind of the characteristics of metal itself tends to not really be gooey or sticky and want to stay together like sugar does but I was curious about trying a little bit more and tried to simplify it in a little bit instead of having a complex centrifuge I just had a little metal container and put a hole in it and then heated it up and poured the molten metal into it. I used tin to test it and the first time I did that it seemed to just kind of spitter out and not really work too well so then it took some inspiration from lamin or flow water where you just try and get all the water flowing without any turbulence. So I put a little tube at the end of the bucket and heated that but as it hit the water and cooled rapidly it still broke apart but I did get like some little bits that a wire like this is a lot more promising than anything else I've tried so far. So that method might have some promise it may be worth experimenting with some more but I think at the end I've kind of disproven a lot of things that happened in Dr. Stone. I think the most interesting thing that I actually built out of this is the gearing here this has going to have a lot of different uses I think it worked okay for the centrifuge really needs to go even faster I think it's interesting to see what I can put this to use for but after this I have another Dr. Stone video I'm working on that's a little bit more promising to actually be a little bit more useful just because I was at the stage of wanting to do it anyways and that's making a lead acid battery and then connecting it to some form of generator so that video should be coming up pretty soon thank you again to all of our supporters on patreon without you this won't be possible thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching