Awesome Destruction

Unless you have a beater you don’t care about, we don’t recommend tossing a spark plug at your car window. Instead, we suggest watching The Slow Mo Guys video, in which Gav smashes sheets of tempered glass and captures the breakage at speeds up to 800,000 frames per second.

The guys from the Beyond the Press channel teamed up with the fabrication experts at Speweld to create a cube out of 2″ thick steel, then took it to a safe place to see what would happen if they set off a homemade grenade inside of it. We’re incredibly impressed by construction of the steel box.

When someone gets a bottle broken over their head in real life, it could do serious damage. That’s why TV and movie stunts use harmless replicas made out of hardened sugar or rubber. The guys from JOLLY got their jollies by playing around with a bunch of breakaway bottles and other props used for on-screen fakery.

We’re pretty sure you can stop a bullet with enough layers of any substance. DemolitionRanch took a bunch of Kraft’s processed cheese bricks and fired into them to see how much it would take to stop various ammunition in its tracks. Spoiler alert: it’s possible he needs a lot more cheese.

Blowing up a real submarine would be costly and impractical, so Gav from The Slow Mo Guys did the next best thing. He took a scale model of a sub, placed it inside a fish tank, and set off mini depth charges. The exterior shots were done with Phantom cameras, but the underwater shots were done with a GoPro Hero9 Black.

We recently witnessed some amazing drone footage of an Icelandic volcano in action. Photographer Garðar Ólafs went one better by flying his drone directly over the volcano’s vent, sacrificing his equipment to bring us this spectacular footage. We only wish we had an exterior shot of the drone melting.

Anni and Lauri of the Hydraulic Press and Beyond the Press Channels show of one of their deadliest creations, an air-powered launcher that can fling a circular saw blade at breakneck speeds. The sound it makes is both satisfying and terrifying.

The PressTube channel has made a name for itself by destroying stuff just for fun. In this video, they fed sheets of bulletproof glass into their industrial-strength shredding machine. Naturally, the shredder won, filling our ears with a jarring crunch as it chewed through progressively thicker panes.

The guys from How Ridiculous take a momentary vacation from tossing stuff off of a tower to play some golf. While on the fairway, they performed various destructive and unscientific experiments, including testing many hollow-core doors and panes of glass they could drive a golf ball through.

Photography Jens Heidler of Another Perspective uses ordinary objects to create extraordinary images. To make this video, he captured time-lapse macro footage of M&Ms melting in a fish tank. As the sugary shells slowly dissolve, colorful patterns emerge in the candies’ watery grave.

Stuck at home under quarantine, builder Colin Furze was feeling restless, so he decided to piece something together from items he had around his shop. The monstrosity you see here is a plastic shark head that Colin retrofitted with a 10-ton hydraulic jack and pointy metal teeth. Let the crushing begin!

The guys from How Ridiculous usually spend their time dropping things from a tower. This time around, they took their destructive tendencies indoors, where they overinflated a variety of balloons to the point of breaking. The explosions culminate with an absolutely massive balloon that stands more than 40 feet tall.

The guys at the Hydraulic Press Channel are always on the lookout for things that hold onto so much energy before failing that they explode catastrophically. Paper does the trick quite well, and now we see that solid glass spheres have similar explosive potential.

If you really wanted to turn a Subway sandwich into a smoothie, you just need a blender and a little bit of water. But the Hydraulic Press Channel marches to the beat of a different drummer and prefers to mush up their footlongs with a 150-ton press and their Smoothie Maker 1,000,000, which might need a little work.

Industrial hydraulic presses are designed to compress metals, so we’re not surprised that HPC’s 150-ton press was able to make quick work of these steel axes. Place your bets now as to how much pressure will be needed to bend or break these normally sturdy hand tools.

It’s always fun to watch stuff tossed into an industrial shredder. In this clip by Gojzer, they load up a machine with all kinds of satisfying stuff, including walnuts, tubes of toothpaste, alarm clocks, old cell phones, and gooey blobs of slime.

The last time we checked in with Colin Furze, he was performing initial tests on his giant steel trebuchet. There were still a few kinks to be worked out, but now that those issues are sorted, it’s ready to start dishing out some destruction. Among the victims are an old mobile home, a couple of cars, and the trebuchet itself.

After showing what it took to build his massive trebuchet, maker Colin Furze finally got to take it outside and put it to the test. Enjoy as the house-sized contraption flings its payloads hundreds of feet, including washing machines, a bicycle, and a patio heater. We’re hoping to see a car go flying next time.

The Beyond the Press channel covered an old beater with 70 blasting caps, then detonated them remotely. With the help of their Matrix-style ring Chronos 1.4 cameras, they recorded the sparkly light show in 360º slow-motion. For safety purposes, they couldn’t load the car with explosives, but it’s still fun to watch.

With just the right amount of compressed air, it’s possible to spin an apple in the air. But there’s only so many RPMs a fruit can take, and eventually, the apple gives up. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys put this physics experiment to the test in front of a high-speed camera so we can see exactly what happens when it disintegrates.

Because we can never get enough explosions around here, sit back and enjoy the fiery destruction as this tricked-out diesel truck experiences a catastrophic failure on the dynamometer, the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Thankfully nobody was injured in the big kaboom.

Bridges can vary wildly in terms of strength depending on their structural design. The guys from the Hydraulic Press Channel welded together several miniature bridges from steel, then measured the force applied to each one to see which style is the strongest.

The guys at the Hydraulic Press Channel have been causing paper to explode under pressure for quite some time now. In this clip they attempt to measure just how much force a stack of paper can endure before failing spectacularly.