Protoplast experiments

Protoplast being awesome stuff we regularly singe our fingers playing with it, here are some examples of things we tried out, with pictures.

First we measured an amount to get a 2mm layer on our 30x30cm mirror.

Then we took everything into a glass and put it all into boiling water... which was taking waaay too long.

So long in fact we went to get something hot to speed up the process, a cable shrinker (I have no clue what the official name is for this thing).

The cable shrinker wasn't powerful enough, we switched to a heat gun.

That didn't work well either, after resorting to dunking the protoplast directly into a small frying pan, we resorted to just using the true and tested "Just dunk it into water" method.

Then we took the whole blob of Protoplast and spread it onto a mirror using fingers.

In our second Experiment round we first attempted a new way of heating the protoplast. we figured out that a putting it on a plate with some water and then heating it in the microwave works very well. 200 grams in 3 minutes approximately. It also has the advantage of not singing/burning the protoplast. Even after all the water evaporated the protoplast was still fine when we were still heating it.

We also tried a new method for flattening the protoplast. We took two plates of glass that we warmed up with one of the space heaters and then squished it. We got it down to a thickness of 3 millimetres. But we had to use some reheating and found out that that is not a good idea as that creates what we have named nurgle skin. See the image above.

We now also have a design of a better press as using our hands made the plates of protoplast somewhat lopsided. We will use the some old heavy desks that are adjustable in hight and we will drop those down on the piece we wish to squish.

Now the results were encouraging But unfortunatly it all ended too thick... seems the protoplast was cooling before it got squished. Even adding some weight on the table didn't help So as we went out to buy some pizza we found an awesome plate warmer and we bought it and brought it home... laid some protoplast on it and it looked very promising.

Unfortunatly the heatbed is a bit cheap, and thus it bends in the middle, not idea if you want your sheets 2mm thick, instead of 2mm thick on average by ranging between 1mm and 2mm...

Se we brought out some aluminium, as protoplast sticks to wood, and started rolling this looked nice but left some marks on the protoplast, and getting it to the right thikness is a bit tricky... to be contitued.