Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Content

In this video I try to recreate the legendary lost material: Starlite.

Files

Previews only

A Super-Material You Can Make In Your Kitchen (Starlite?)

In this video I attempt to recreate a lost supermaterial called Starlite. This material could supposedly resist temperatures up to 10,000 degrees Celsius, having undergone testing by NASA and the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the UK. I believe in this video I have come close in function to the original formula for Starlite, but there is still some work to be done. My result works very well, but for a few reasons I may talk about in a future video I do not believe Starlite used PVA glue as it's binder, and I also suspect a different CO2 producer was used instead of baking soda. More experiments are required. Before he passed away in 2011 the creator of Starlite, Maurice Ward, created a YouTube channel where a few of the test videos were uploaded for anyone to see: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIXwe1It6Df9jBPD3xwnbmA If there is enough interest in this video I may put together a follow up where I demonstrate alternate compositions for how to make Starlite, and discuss my thoughts on why Starlite was never successfully commercialized. A big thanks to my Patreon supporters who continue to support my videos through thick and thin! You all are awesome. A special thanks to my top Patrons: Syniurge, Matthew Leitzke, TheBackyardScientist, Enzo Breda Lee, John Johnson, & Thibaud Peverelli! Check out my Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/NightHawkProjects Thanks for watching!

Comments

jock mctavish

Very insightful. And how good of you to share. How again like an engineer! Years back I encountered another creative engineer, and thought about how engineers invent solutions. The poem to him then quite applies to you you now. imagineering first one must see, must imagine, what is needed, what will solve, what will work, what might be. air is the hiding place of discovery. only then in the mind's eye. will wave equations form. only then will misty shape appear. water is the flowing of our knowing. then will hands build, while chaos resists order, and patience finds its limit. fire is the illuminator and refiner. so a new thing comes to be, a new purpose is known, a new name is given. earth is our refound home. elias http://1journey.net/1journey/Work/imagineering.htm

Dustin Andrews

I was disappointed to see you never followed up on this. This video is what got me here! I have a bunch of questions, but rather than asking you to test it out I did some tests myself. In Summary: You can substitute glue made from flour and sugar for PVA glue. You can substitute flour for corn starch. In the flour version you can substitute water for glue. All the additional samples I tried (dried them all first) were less solid than the original. The flour versions seemed pretty usable and had the difference of being sticky. The version with corn starch and flour glue was the most crumbly and least likely to hold up. Drying it more slowly could help. I did some envelope math and determined that at 1/4" thickness these samples are [edit for bad math:] within the same price per square foot range as ceramic fiber blankets (about $1.00 sq.ft. @ 1/4") Starlite coming it at about $10/sq.ft. The glue is the expensive part. flour, baking powder, and water version at about $1.00 sq.ft. My napkin math is always suspect. I don't have ceramic blanket to test with so I can't say how 1/4" compares.

NightHawkInLight

I'm glad you were able to do some tests of your own, very helpful results. I may do a follow up soon with an improved version and more history, but what you have done is the result I hoped for from my video: that viewers would expand and improve on my own experiments. As I have many projects in the works all the time I never get a chance to focus on one for as long as I would like to.