Okay, so today I messed around with something called “rubber dancing hevea timber.” Sounds weird, right? It kinda is, but also pretty cool. It all started when I saw this video online about how they make rubber from trees. I was like, “Whoa, that’s a thing?”

So, first, I did a little digging. Turns out, “hevea timber” is just a fancy name for wood from rubber trees. And “rubber dancing”? That’s about how the wood reacts to changes in, like, humidity and stuff. It can warp and bend – “dance,” get it?

I didn’t have a giant rubber tree in my backyard, obviously. So, I started with a small piece of what I thought was rubberwood. I bought it off a guy some weeks ago. I’m not 100% sure, but it looked close enough from the pictures I saw online. It was a rough, unfinished plank.

My Little Experiment

My plan was simple (maybe too simple): see if I could make this wood “dance.”

• Step 1: I got the wood good and wet. I just soaked it in the sink for a few hours. I figured this would be like a super humid day for the wood.
• Step 2: Then, I took it out and put it in a dry spot. I have this little storage room that gets pretty warm and dry, especially in the afternoon. That was my “low humidity” zone.
• Step 3: I waited. And waited. And checked on it every few hours.

Honestly, at first, not much happened. I thought maybe I got the wrong kind of wood, or maybe I was doing it all wrong. But then, after a day or so, I started to see it. The wood started to curve… just a little. It wasn’t a dramatic “dance,” more like a slow, subtle sway.

I repeated the wet-dry cycle a few more times, and the curve became a bit more noticeable. It definitely wasn’t perfectly straight anymore! I even took some pictures (wish I could put’em in here), but they don’t really do it justice. You kinda had to be there, holding the wood, to really see the change.

So, my “rubber dancing hevea timber” experiment wasn’t exactly a wild success, but it wasn’t a total failure either. I learned that wood, even seemingly solid wood, is way more responsive to its environment than I thought. It’s like a slow-motion magic trick. I guess, I proved my theory that wood can “dance”. It would have been more impressive with a bigger, more dramatic piece of wood, but hey, I worked with what I had!