HowStuffWorks’ most popular April Fools’ day article yesterday was this:

Chew On This: Rechargeable Gum

From the article:

ReBubble plans to offer two different versions of the ReCHEWvenation Chamber. The first plugs into a standard power socket (120 volts only — apologies to Europe). This unit can recharge an entire pack’s worth of gum in just under three hours. The second unit can accommodate only a single stick of gum and connects to a computer via a USB cable. Hopefully you’ll have a second piece of gum on hand — the USB station requires eight full hours of charging.

Thousands of people read the article. The funny thing is, this isn’t a joke. If you know how gum works, you realize that you can recharge any piece of gum yourself. And it doesn’t take eight hours.

The easiest way to learn how gum works is to buy a gum-making kit, like one of these:

1) It’s easy and Fun to make your own Chewing Gum from scratch!

2) Bubble Gum Kit

3) Scientific Explorer’s Bubble Gum Fun Gum Making Kit

What you get in a kit is gum base, confectioners sugar and/or corn syrup, and some flavoring concentrate. In these kits the gum base is usually natural chicle. Chicle is just a form of rubber – it comes from the sap of a Chicle tree just like natural latex comes from the sap of a rubber tree. Chicle happens to soften at a low temperature, like the temperature of a human mouth.

To make the gum, you heat up the gum base to soften it. Then you start mixing the sugar into the gum. You put about equal amounts of gum base and sugar together. Then you add a few drops of whatever flavoring you want. The whole process takes less than half an hour.

After you’ve made gum this way, you immediately realize that “used” gum is reusable. It is inescapable. You could collect up all the flavorless pieces of gum you have left over, heat them up and repeat the process of adding sugar and flavoring. All it is is rubber – there’s nothing magical here. If you can mix sugar into it once, there’s nothing to stop you (except sqeemishness) from doing it again.

Most of the gum you buy at the store isn’t natural chicle – It’s a synthetic rubber base. But it’s the same idea. If you want to try it, get one of the gum kits and do it with the natural stuff so you can get the right amounts of the ingredients and see that it really does work. Then try experimenting with old wads of the synthetic stuff and see what happens.

So, now you can see that recharging gum manually is easy. If you would like to automate the process… It shouldn’t be that hard to rig up a little motorized mixer thingy with a heater that plugs into the wall or a USB port for power… And presto, you have real ReBubble!

See also:

[[[See previous DIY]]]