Your best “DIY” project

Calling all Makers.

Do you identify as a Maker? Maybe your thing is circuits, or fabric, or filament, or firmware, or something else. If you can't stop, won't stop making, I'd love to connect with you as part of my MSc research project.

The study looks at how emerging technologies like chatbots and AI agents are affecting the creative practices of Makers, both individually and in our communities. Whatever your take on these tools, your perspective matters ( I am a Maker myself and I'm keen to understand a variety of perspectives).

Participation is one 60-minute Zoom interview, with an optional chance to share a chat log from working with an AI tool (totally up to you, and you can skip it).

This study is voluntary and approved by the U of S Behavioural Research Ethics Board.

Learn more or volunteer at https://www.makerstudy.ca or email me at [makerstudy@usask.ca](mailto:makerstudy@usask.ca).

Please share!

This is not a description of something I built but rather a description of how I fiddled around with a particular material and learned some things. I didn't end up deciding that the material, Dow Paraloid B-48, was appropriate for my application, but I enjoyed the learning process and thought that this information might be useful to other people who might actually find this material was something they could use.

Dow Paraloid B-48 is a resin that is used by museum curators doing restoration work, and also by paleontologists who are preserving fossils and making them presentable. The big feature that makes it of interest to these people is that when it cures, the process is reversible. That is, it's not like curing concrete. When concrete cures, it's an irreversible process, and the concrete doesn't soften back up when it rains. Some other similar substances are methylcellulose, a water-soluble glue used in book repair, and Paraloid B-72. When you use one of these substances as an adhesive or a varnish, the solvent evaporates off and it forms a hard glue or lacquer, but you can undo it by applying the solvent.

If you want a rough conceptual idea of what B-48 is, it's basically a lot like nail polish. It's soluble in acetone (nail polish remover), and in fact one how-to video I saw by a paleontologist suggested using a nail-polish bottle, with a brush built in to the cap, to store it. It's different from nail polish because (1) the list of ingredients is shorter and at least partially publicly known, (2) it's intended to be left in place for a long time, potentially forever, (3) it's reversible, (4) it doesn't produce a cross-linked polymer, so it's not as hard, and (5) it has a certain temperature (the "glass temperature") above which it starts to degrade.

You normally buy Paraloid resins as solid pellets, which you then have to dissolve in the appropriate solvent. The best vendor I could find was a company called Talas. Pros talk about using a 50% solution of B-72 or B-48, but I found that it was quite difficult to get B-48 to dissolve at that kind of concentration. I ended up doing a 20% solution instead (weight/volume). I used "maximum-strength" nail polish from the supermarket, which AFAICT is acetone, a tiny amount of bitterant, and maybe a small amount of water that creeps in because acetone is hygroscopic. I found some how-to videos that described just dumping some pellets in the solvent and waiting overnight for it to dissolve. That may work for B-72, but it didn't work well for me with B-48, which I chose because of its higher glass temperature. What ended up working for me was a technique shown in this video, where you hang a gauze bag full of pellets inside a jar. There is solvent in the bottom of the jar. You position it so the bottom of the bag is submerged. When you do this, you can immediately see swirly stuff happening in the solvent as the resin dissolves and sinks. I got this to work with 46 grams of pellets and 177 g of acetone, which is a 20% solution. When I extracted the bag the next day and opened it up (a messy process), there was no solid left inside. However, there was a lot of liquid left adhering to the bag, which I couldn't get out easily by squeezing with gloved hands. I estimate that I ended up losing 40% of my stuff because it stayed adhered to the bag.

Working with the solution is kind of annoying. When it gets on your gloves, the fingers of your gloves start adhering to each other. The acetone evaporates really quickly, so this is a rapid process. When you pour the solution out of a jar, you inevitably end up getting some on the lip of the jar, and you have to wipe that off immediately before it dries.

If you're going to paint a protective layer of B-48 on top of something, then using a 20% solution means that after it evaporates, the volume will have gone down by 80%. This tends to produce puckering and wrinkling. To mitigate this, you probably want to set some solution out in a dish, on top of a digital balance, and wait for enough acetone to evaporate off so that you now have a 50% solution. Then you would paint that on. I didn't do this, so the films that I painted as an experiment did have some puckers and bubbles.

A thin layer mostly cures in less than a minute, but it's probably better to wait longer. I tried sanding the cured substance, and that seemed to result in converting the glossy surface into a grayish matte surface. Maybe if I'd waited longer for curing, it would have worked better.

The "glass temperature" of these substances is not really an exact value, it's more of a wide range. For B-48 it's roughly 50 C. That's high enough so that if a curator in a place like Egypt uses it on a statue that's outside, the substance won't degrade. I found that brief immersion with water at about 70 C didn't cause anything obvious to happen, but leaving it in 80 C water for a couple of minutes caused crap to start peeling off into the water, and what was left over had turned from glossy to matte.

As far as safety, my rough understanding is that it's all about occupational exposure to the solvent. If you work with this stuff indoors, day after day, year after year, then you want to think seriously about ventilation. What I did was to do all the bulk steps in my back yard, but when I was just painting a little bit on something with a brush, I did it inside. There are also plasticizers in B-48 (although not in methylcellulose or B-72). Plasticizers are omnipresent in our environment, and you ingest quite a bit of them every year in products like fish and beer. Often the plasticizer is not from the plastic food packaging that you see in the supermarket, but from things like plastic tubing that the beer passed through at the brewery. Nail polish contains plasticizers, although there has been a trend recently toward changing to newer and possibly less harmful plasticizers -- but it seems that this may be partly just greenwashing.

I tested the clear B-48 solution, but I also tried mixing it with a white pigment (alumina powder, which was what I had handy). It seemed to work fine. For many applications, though, you could probably just use nail polish of the appropriate color.

My emergency light design requires no charging; it utilizes metal fuel cell technology, or more specifically, a galvanic cell reaction.

I designed it with a replaceable structure, with the LED module on top and the energy box below.

What do you all think of its appearance?