If you ever wondered how to make a giant-sized gold bar out of sheets of pink household insulation, well, there is a video showing you the steps. YouTube workshop guru [Jimmy DiResta] built oversized prop gold bricks out of foam. He cut sheets of 1.5″ Owens Corning foam insulation on his Saw Stop, making angled edges onto each piece so they could fit together in the trapezoidal ingot shape we know and love.
The pieces were put together with Great Stuff insulating foam sealant, the sort of spray foam used for filling up gaps in your house’s insulation, but here serving as glue. [Jimmy] created lettering by lasering out the shapes in what appears to be cardboard, then gluing the letters in place, using the leftover material from the laser cut to place the letters in neat rows. He then sanded down the edges, priming and painting the bars with gold paint–but there were too many imperfections visible so he re-sanded and repainted.
We have been inundated in foam projects recently, like this ultralight built out of foam insulation and a foam cutter built with a 9V battery.
that’s pretty cool and all but why would you want one of those? is it one of those “because i can” article again?
Looks like film props.
Ah, video description has it: “Watch me make Large gold bricks for in store props!”
Surely a bar that size would weigh a lot more than 1kg…
Hard to guess the volume of the completed bars from the picture. He used 1.5″ foam board, which typically comes in 4’x8′ sheets. A slab of solid gold that size would be 2188 kg, about $90 million worth.
That calculation doesn’t sound right
Not checking calculation but metal aren’t light. In the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy grabbed the golden idol, it was estimated a solid gold version of that size would have been around 80 pounds. No wonder the trap was tripped, a sack of sand is just a few pounds,
Whoever said the idol was *solid* gold?
Gold weighs 19.34g per cubic cm, that idol looks like roughly 1000cc (one litre), so it should weigh roughly 19kg.
40 lb sounds like it’s in the right ballpark.
A 20kg bag of sand is roughly the size of a potato sack, so I don’t think that tiny sandbag that Henry Jones Jr used could have weighed more than a couple of kilos.
Or in other words, that tiny bag of sand had gold in it instead of sand.
He wanted to do the decent thing and not steal the thing but pay for it I guess :)
Cutting pink househood insulation on a Sawstop? No thanks, I like having lungs.
They look great. I like these even better than the mostly-tungsten gold ingots people were passing off as real a few years ago.
if you can drill it all the way, then it is not tungsten, but still, it is a bummer if you got it instead of gold :)
Problem is that they most often stamp the lettering in instead of it being raised, although sometimes it is, but either way the lettering is less sharp on the real thing, more rounded edges and less pristine.
I would just hire a jeweler to clean up the lettering. All my gold bars should be *perfect*!
You sound like someone who really SHOULD be a billionaire.
I wonder how much gold leaf it would take to totally cover one of those?
Almost big enough to troll Google Earth imaging if you leave them out in your back yard long enough. :-) Now to build giant scissors or better yet, LEGO bricks. :-)
I bet there are already buildings looking like lego bricks somewhere.
Found this in a quick search:
http://dzinetrip.com/temporary-lego-like-pavillion-at-grenswerk-festival-in-enschede-in-netherlands/
Pretty cool construction idea for open air public centers. The fact that the blocks are not quite LEGO-like enough and that they built a structure that looks like a church but isn’t one leaves a bad taste in my mouth, almost an obamination on both counts. I’ll bet is been there long enough to show up on google earth. Thanks for sharing. :-)
It was just a random search result, hopefully there are less church-like samples.
And talking of which, it’s a bit all too often that such no-real-purpose things resemble churches. And I agree, it’s a pity.
I guess since they are so lego-like they could take apart the structure and make something else with the blocks if they get inspired to do that. Recyclable architecture …. hmmmm.
Beware of large styrofoam greedy dragons. :-)