As fun as it is to decorate Easter eggs, the road to a hollow hen’s egg is a gross and gooey avenue. Trust us, it sucks to blow out eggs, and it’s hard to get it right. Plus, you know, there’s that whole salmonella thing. [Phil] decided to speed things up this year by using an air compressor to do the dirty work.

Of course, one must approach this problem delicately because eggs are fragile. It would be nice to drill the egg instead of poking the end with a needle, but how are you gonna pull that off without breaking it? As it turns out, all you need is a bench vise, the right piece of PVC, a bit of rubber to keep the egg safe, and some hose clamps to keep the business part together.

[Phil] built a two-stage contraption that serves both purposes — the bottom cup safely cradles the egg for drilling, and the identical top cup connects to the air compressor, which blows the goo out of the bottom hole. [Phil] might have used negative pressure instead, but doesn’t have a vacuum pump or hose. Be sure to check out the brief demo video below.

Don’t want to mess around with real eggs? There are tons of ways to beautify fake eggs, but few of them are as cool as lasers.

I’d think that a dremel at 30k rpm with a PCB drill bit would have no problem and not even require support. A food-safe vacuum pot would be useful in removing the contents.

And you could use the contents in a cake!

Unless the cake is a lie.

Pretty sure the phthalates in that flexible black PVC is NOT food safe.

In The Egg Scrambler would work too.

Our family always colored hard boiled eggs. Seems less wasteful anyways.

Should’ve also mentioned that we ate them…

It’s what normal families do.

Depends, my family did both. Full hardboiled eggs usually boiled with food grade colorant or natural colorants like onion peels where for eating. But we also did decorate egg shells those where elaborate works the best usually survived few years. My uncle loved drilling/carving them, my grandma used wax and my grand dad and me we would scratch out paint layer, my sister usuall used colorfull wool strings glued on… yea theres tonns of techniques of decoration you could use.

I think the idea is to make something more permanent. A properly emptied shell can be painted, carved or otherwise decorated and kept for years.

The risk of salmonella in eggs is, er, overblown.

For years, as a kid, I used to help my mom blow eggs for making pysanky, and I surblibed with only tribial bray dablage.

There’s a better way for drilling holes in eggs without breaking them. Use a cheap cone-shaped diamond burr in a handheld drill. Grinding is generally better than using a drill bit for brittle materials.

As for the blowing, another method skips the complexity of the air compressor and special jigs by using the egg shell’s strength to your advantage. Drill only one hole instead of two. Then stir up the egg contents with a bent wire in the drill chuck. Then use a syringe to inject air into the egg while holding it with the hole towards the bottom. Air pressure will force the contents out the hole. You can optionally rinse out the shell by injecting water with the syringe and repeating. Works great and also means you don’t have an unsightly hole left on the top of the egg.

Questions: (1) What is the diameter of the hole? (2) What is the pressure of air?

I can tell you that a single hole of a mm in diameter is too small (poked them with the tip of a injection needle). A hole of about 3mm on one side works fine. A pressure of 10bar is way too high – I had the hose attached to the wrong unregulated output of my compressor. The eggs popped all the time. Below 1 bar and even 0.5bar worked fine

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