Vapor pop even with lots of guar gum and baking powder.
I had a few minutes to do a test to see how Charmy performs as a Dawn substitute in the 'standard' guar mix. I started with a 25:1 water:Charmy ratio. 1/4 heaping teaspoon guar/liter water with NO baking powder or baking soda/citric acid.
The mix worked well. The bubbles had the specatacular ghostless 'vapor pop' that we see in Mr. Oono's charmy/pva laundry starch recipe. The colors tended to the red/green range -- indicating that Charmy is a somewhat weaker surfactant than Dawn Pro. 25:1 is probably too little Charmy. The colors were reminescent of somewhere in the 35:1 - 40:1 range. This may have impacted the size potential.
2013 07 26 Guar Charmy BP Pop
Charmy/Guar Gum/Baking Powder Juice is ghostless!
Charmy/PVA juice "standard" recipe. Notice the tendency towards transparency as tube grows.
Another 'classic Charmy recipe' tube as a point of comparison for the colors as a function of tube length.
Charmy/Guar/NO Baking Powder. Colors indicate the solution is pretty dilute. Note the lack of yellow/blue.
eGoo tube. Note that despite color shift tube still quite colorful as it grows large.
I compared to the standard Mr. Oono recipe. The Oono recipe resulted in much longer tubes and many more bubbles per dip; however, the long tubes became light amber or colorless as they reached maximum length. On multi-bubble dips, the bubbles were less colorful than earlier dips. With the Charmy/guar mix (at 25:1), the colors remained rich though the tubes were shorter and there were fewer bubbles in a dip.
I then poured off 500 ml of the guar/Charmy mix and added 1/4 very heaping teaspoon of baking powder. More than I normally use with my standard guar mixes.
There was a dramatic change in the performance. The solution began to behave like Mr. Oono's recipe despite the amount of surfactant being unchanged. The performance change when adding baking powder was much more dramatic than with Dawn Pro mixes.
I them did a few dips with eGoo and it behaved as I expected -- color remaining vibrant with long tubes and no transparent bubbles on multi-bubble dips.
I finally mixed the Charmy mixes (all) and the eGoo. The mix worked quite well and the ghosting was noticeably reduced.
Quick Conclusions[]
- Charmy and Guar Gum are compatible and can create bubbles on a par with those of Charmy/Japanese Laundry Starch
- Guar gum with or without baking powder creates no ghosts when used with Charmy
- Baking Powder dramatically alters the potential of a guar/Charmy bubble juice
- Charmy is a bit less potent than Dawn Pro. More Charmy needs to be used than Dawn Pro to get similar color profiles. Some experimentation needs to be done to find the best amount of Charmy to use in the guar juice recipe.
- Japanese PVA Laundry Starch is compatible with Dawn Pro (from yesterday).
I suspect that one could significantly reduce the amount of Charmy in the Oono recipe and achieve comparable results (at least with guar gum, but I suspect with the laundry starch, too).
Other thoughts[]
American laundry starch and PVA-only (polyvinyl alcohol) additives don't seem to benefit bubble juice the way that the Japanese PVA-containing laundry starch does. So, modified rice starch (which is used in these products) plus PVA works very differently from PVA and American laundry starch.