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Attempting to make transparent wood

NileRed1 HN recommenders · 2020–2021
8.5M views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2018-11-21

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.

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

ChemistryMaterials science

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6 comments from Hacker News

@valine2020 · in “Transparent wood could be the window of the future”

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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@riffraff2020 · in “A clear, strong, and thermally insulated wood for energy efficient windows”

there's a few videos from years ago attempting earlier versions of this[0]. In the end, it is very little "transparent wood" and more "plastic with wood bits in it". [0] e.g. [VIDEO]

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@grenoire2020 · in “Super Wood (2018)”

Process-wise I think this is an industrial version of what NileRed [0] and prior AvE [1] tried. Pretty cool, if it's truly a durable alternative. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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@jrockway2021 · in “Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood”

> 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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@adrianN2021 · in “Solar-assisted fabrication of large-scale, patternable transparent wood”

Nile Red has a video where he makes this: [VIDEO] As you can see from the video it is basically impossible to scale this process to large pieces of wood. Discussions about replacing windows with this are pretty pointless I think.

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@robbedpeter2021 · in “Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel”

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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