As useful as corrugated cardboard is, we generally don’t consider it to be a very sturdy material. The moment it’s exposed to moisture, it begins to fall apart, and it’s easily damaged even when kept dry. That said, there are ways to make corrugated cardboard a lot more durable, as demonstrated by the [NightHawkInLight]. Gluing multiple panels together so that the corrugation alternates by 90 degrees every other panel makes them more sturdy, with wheat paste (1:5 mixture of flour and water) recommended as adhesive.
Other tricks are folding over edges help to protect against damage, and integrating wood supports. Normal woodworking tools like saws can cut these glued-together panels. Adding the wheat paste to external surfaces can also protect against damage. By applying kindergarten papier-mâché skills, a custom outside layer can be made that can be sanded and painted for making furniture, etc.
Beyond these and other tips, there remains the issue of protection against water intrusion. The (biodegradable) solution here is shellac. Unfortunately, pure (canned) shellac isn’t good enough for long-term exposure to moisture, so the recipe recommended here is: 0.5 L of (~91%) IPA, 125 g of shellac flakes, and 15 g of beeswax. After heating and stirring, a paste wax is created that can be brushed on the cardboard to provide water resistance, without turning said cardboard into chemical waste.
As an alternative waterproof coating (but not biodegradable) there’s another recipe: 100 g hot glue sticks, 25 g paraffine wax or beeswax, and 20 mL of mineral oil (which lowers the melting temperature).
Although these methods, including the also discussed UV protection coatings – require some time and materials investment. Since cardboard is effectively free, there’s something to be said for this approach, if only as a fun chemistry or physics project. For [NightHawkInLight] it’s being used as the roof on his DIY camper, for which it seems like a nice lightweight, waterproof option.
Thanks to [James Newton] for the tip.
Mod Podge Outdoor
As always, YMMV
I thought about this years ago with the idea of using soy protien’s that had been subjected to acidifcation or basification as the external covering layer for waterproofing.
Oh! I’ve been experimenting with this as well!
When making your ply-cardboard, I don’t know if you should limit yourself to right angles – some 45degree pieces seem like they’d help too! (that may limit your dimensions…)
For cheap waterproofing, take a trip to the “wrong color custom exterior paint section” of your local Home Depot or equivalent. There are almost always some “almost white” or “not too ugly brown” tints available, at something like $5/gal.
I have had luck getting the paint tech to add enough dye to make those “wrong color” paint cans “black”.
You can still usually see a hint of the previous color, especially when used right next to a different batch of “Black-ish” paint, but it can make projects a bit more ‘reaspectable’.
One time I knew I needed 6+ gallons of a consistent color for a project, so I just poured all the cans into a 10 gallon bucket and stirred them.
That said, I actually like the quirky look you get when you use whatever random color you get from the returned paints. Sometimes they are fun bold colors too.
Many of IKEA furniture are actually cardboard inside. Tables and shelves for eample.
Wow! And I thought pressboard was very worst in terms of quality, following plywood.
It kind of is. I think some cardboard composites are far superior to pressboard or chipboard or MDF. Still cheap and tacky, but in materials science terms they are often better.
Perhaps not acoustically. That’s the main one I’m unsure of, because I don’t often venture into speaker enclosures, and when I do, they don’t end up being very good.
Yes, but it’s a honeycomb not simple corrugated, and it’s aligned differently for stiffness.
Cheap interior doors are made the same way.
It’s done to make the object thicker, not for strength. It keeps costs and weight down and is more eco friendly than alternatives like MDF, solid wood (which is less eco friendly as you use far more of it, hence also more transport emissions), foam, etc.
It’s called a torsion box, and it’s stronger than you might think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_box
https://www.popularwoodworking.com/?s=torsion+box
Nice, I appreciate posting the technical term for further learning
Cardboard row boat?
the rowing boats are already cardboard honeycomb sandwiched between carbon fibre weave. https://rowingbanter.tumblr.com/post/49710780761/bad-rigger-bad
I gave up after a minute and a half after he started repeating his intro for the 4th or 5th time. It’s so annoying that those “professional” youtubers are wasting as much of your time as possible.
Yes! Signal vs Noise.
It’s not wasting your time, it’s a cheap way to lengthen the video above a threshold. Your time is collateral damage.
I would not advise the use of flour while on a planet that has insects and fungi.
Maybe for Mars though..
I would advise watching the video before commenting. He specifically wanted the end product to be biodegradable, while also being weatherproof for a useful amount of time.
I’m not interested in this video though, and what more is there to say than what is in the article, about gluing together some cardboard in an attempt to get some views that is.
Insects and fungi like cardboard also, so…
Consider to use wood directly before slashing it into pulp with tons of water and then trying to get it back to something less than wood quality.
Cardboard is made from wood scraps that can’t be used directly and wood grown and harvested quickly for the purpose, which saves land and other resources.
Also, this method has benefits over solid wood, such as light weight and compostability when no longer needed.
Unless you are a homeless person, cardboard is not a natural resource.
It uses huge amounts of energy and water — no matter if the source is recycled paper or wood trash specifically grown. And as soon as you start adding additives (and there are lots) compostability is not really great unless done in industrial ways by adding stuff (again).
TL;DR: If you want rugged material do not use a degraded form but use the source material directly.
Aka wooden crates. As if cardboard isn’t hard enough to deal with, now I have to bust up wooden crates so someone can live the dream of a false economy.
Water is INXS in many places.
I doubt there are many cardboard manufacturing plants in the desert.
If your suggesting using crap wood in place of cardboard, that is already done (for cultural reasons) in Japan. Wood signals quality there. It’s a GD wasteful nightmare.
In this age of online ordering and shipping I’d say cardboard is a plentiful, if not “natural,” resource.
It’s not a natural resource, it’s an un-natural resource; trash, in this case. And I’m a big fan of using trash as a resource.
A trip to costco or other big box store will yield enough cardboard to build whatever you want, some already bonded together in double or trip-thickness versions (some with interesting engineering, such as different “grain” widths.) Sheets up to a meter square are common.
All of it is, at best, destined for recycling.
Time and a place for both – cardboard is usually a waste material, that might well have been part of the shipping for ‘real’ wood products your purchased even, and its strength or stiffness to weight ratio compared to wooden construction tends to massively in its favour.
If you are deliberately deforesting what could be prime lumber just to make it all into cardboard I’d be disappointed. But there is so much waste around that prime lumber that will make perfectly good cardboard, and what else do you do with it? MDF is another option, but I think I’d rather use cardboard in most cases…
paint could be used as the glue for making the ply
and the judicious use of of foam and fibreglass+ epoxy for bents could result in a very light frame for larger projects,with wood as main sills and
door framing, and attach points for built in accesories, shelves, etc and then wrapping the whole thing in “floor protector” heavy paper as a finish, with a final.water proofing should yield a reasonably weather proof structure thatcould still be moved with muscle power
There are many carboard boat reggatas that are held every year. The boats float long enough to make it across a lake. I used to watch them in the summer at Glen Ellyn lake in Glen Ellyn Illinois USA.
Well, of course you can make furniture out of cardboard. If you can build a bicycle, then furniture should be no problem 😸: https://www.dezeen.com/2012/11/12/cardboard-bicycle-by-izhar-gafni/
Unfortunately, I don’t know what they used to make the cardboard bikes waterproof.
‘(~91%) IPA’…
That’s some hardy yeast!
I assume the remaining 9% is pure malt and hops juice.
Yes I read TFA.
But, in my defense, not until 3 hours after posting.
Don’t permaban me.
Dad was a hippie back in the day and had a small library of homesteading books and manuals for these kinds of projects
An article that stuck with me was building geodesic domes out of layered cardboard, priming them with something that dried rough and water proof (I don’t remember what), and spraying them down with “shot-crete” or watery cement. After a few layers you had a geodesic cement shelter.
I can’t decided if mom should have let him build a concrete and cardboard yurt of not. It’d have been interesting either way.
Knowing some of the better varieties of hippies in my day (i.e. the outdoorsy and independent kind, not the vain & greasy urbanite kind) I have seen some similar endeavors. Often they go bad after a few years, but that’s just because new building techniques have not had the long-term glitches worked out yet. That takes generations.
There is so much knowledge and technique that goes into creating conventional houses and buildings which only becomes evident in its cleverness after twenty or thirty years. Or sometimes a couple centuries.
Hippies are assholes that LARP being good people.
Head bangers are good people that LARP being assholes.
FYI name escapes me, but one of the hippies that advocated for geodesic dome houses realized how bad an idea it was, after 25 years or so. He was the one that wrote the book all the other hippies quote…
Rectilinear rooms make much better use of space.
They also make wiring and plumbing much much easier.
You can make interesting room shapes, but you’ll basically just waste the space out to the smallest rectangle(s) that could contain it.
One of my hippie friends did the straw bale construction thing for an addition.
They took it down to sell the house, 10 years later.
Guess the work kept them out of trouble.
I assume KC’s dad was from the years of Hoffman’s definition of ‘hippie’.
Those hippies were better than current…Eric Cartman’s definition.
I was expecting some horrors of coating the stuff in plastics and stinky resins, but this is a lot better than what I expected… A lot of woodworking knowledge and technique transferred to some more easily-available materials. You could really elevate the old tradition of building a box fort with the kids.
In my music festival days I met and played with several makers of cardboard guitars and ukuleles. Very light and strong instruments but generally lacking low-end resonance while still being highly playable and pleasant to listen to.
I recently replaced seats to folding chairs using cardboard as the bases to which foam was applied and fabric stapled to. 3 or 4 layers 90 degrees flipped and glued together with Elmer’s wood glue with the outer sides covered in a few coats of polyurethane which I also dripping into exposed corrugation holes. Worked great and a good use for those empty kitty litter boxes.
Gesso