Liquid Sand Bin - Zorian and Mason's Maker Faire Project

The Liquid Sand Bin

Zorian and Mason

5/20/19

For our Maker Faire, we decided to do a Mark Rober inspired liquid sand bin. A liquid sand bin would be a small bin/box with PVC pipes wired below the sand in the box to blow air through it, making it liquidy. Early Sunday morning we got to work. First, we used a bandsaw to cut a bunch of pieces of PVC to length, then got caps for them. Next, we fit the pieces together in a small bin to make sure they fit well. Next, we used a drill press to drill two sixteenth inch holes 90 degrees apart from each other, and again and again down the pipe two and a half millimeters apart from each other. After that, we went to home depot for some parts including Teflon tape, new PVC glue, and valves for the big compressor we had. We went back to our house and started gluing all the PVC together, and drilled the holes in the plastic box to fit the PVC through. After a few more mistakes and cuts on my dad’s band saw, we were ready to glue the last pieces into place. After that, we plugged in the air compressor and hooked it up to the contraption. Then we realized we had a problem. Even when we turned up the air compressor to full capacity, it only gave us about 10 seconds of good run time. We did some troubleshooting and realized a lot of people used big compressed Nitrogen or CO2 tanks. We weren't sure where to get a tank of Nitrogen, so we went to Atlas Welding, and rented a tank, but had no regulator. Instead of a nitrogen regulator, we used an argon regulator, which is the main reason why the gas didn’t work well, so we mostly ended up using the air compressor, but the gas was fine too. Here is a short clip of when we turned up the air super high. If we had some more money and time, we could make an entire hot tub of “liquid sand”, using a much larger air compressor. I think we learned a lot about all of the machines and tools we used, and we will definitely remember next time to be careful when we are gluing, and to anyone else out there who might want to do this project, you really don’t have to follow exactly what Mark Rober did, as we did not follow many of his instructions. We totaled up all the costs and we got $26. This included storage boxes, 50 lbs of sand, lots of PVC pipe, PVC glue, and some valves and valve adapters, as well as the $10 for the compressed nitrogen. all the pipes we just borrowed and gave back.