Channel: Nick Uhas

Category: Education

Description: Big thanks to Arm & Hammer™ Baking Soda for sponsoring this video! If you take Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and mix it with cornstarch and water it makes this super cool moldable clay. The way you make it at home is you first take 1 cup of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and mix it with 1 cup of corn starch. You then add 1 ¼ th cup water and mix it up in a bowl. From here you heat it up over a stovetop until you get a consistency of mashed potatoes. Take it off the pan and let it cool by placing a damp cloth on top. Once it’s cool to touch you can make whatever you want with this super fun moldable clay! And since it’s close to Christmas, we’re going to make a Christmas tree. Now if you want to keep your creation you can either let it air dry or put it in the oven for 1:00 hr at 300F. So by mixing Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and cornstarch, we got a material that feels pretty much like hard clay when it dries, so this got me thinking how large of an item could we make with this clay, and would it be possible to make a real working sled out of this baking soda clay? We did some earlier testing and made several batches of mini flat bricks with different ingredient combinations. We did this because we figured in order to scale up we would have to enhance the baking soda clay formula. We found that the optimal mixture is baking soda, corn starch, and a little bit of kaolin clay. The Kaolin clay acts as a binder and keeps the material all in place without cracking. Now that we have our materials in place we thought we would engineer three different types of sleds to make sure we can actually get down the sled hill. Our first concept we’re calling the Soda Sled Flier. This is a solid piece of soda clay mixture shaped into a sled that we’re letting air dry. Our second concept is called the Bricky Boi. This is a sled made from many soda clay “bricks” that we oven-baked with a second layer of polyurethane spray foam. This design allows for some flexibility so we don’t crack the sled on a rock or chunk of ice. Also, the polyethylene plastic sheet base could reduce friction while on the snow so this brick should slide pretty well. Our Third concept is called the Winter Barrow. This has the same material creation process as our Soda Sled Flier, but also with the combination of the spray foam. The Dish is also molded over a wheelbarrow that was inspired by our fake snow mountain test. Okay so it’s getting super close to Christmas and there is NO SNOW on the ground here in California! The sleds are also not quite dry yet and are kind of soft, so here’s what we're going to do. We’re going to give the sleds about another 2 weeks to dry and then we’re going to paint them, so they are waterproof. Then at the first heavy snow, we’re going to see which one of these soda sleds performs the best! Thanks again to Arm & Hammer for sponsoring this video and make sure to hit that subscribe button so you can see which sled is the best in part two of this soda sled experiment!