Awesome Matches

Over a decade ago, Destin from Smarter Every Day and his pal John Henry tested the idea that you could light a match with a bullet. Now that he’s got a much better high-speed camera, he and John wanted to revisit the experiment. Once they dialed in the aim, they captured some incredible slow-motion macro footage at speeds up to 380,117 FPS.

This 2″ cast iron desktop object offers an elegant and practical place to store and strike matches. Its shape is reminiscent of a giant match head and has a deep knurled pattern on its outside, providing the friction needed to start strike anywhere matches. (Matches not included.)

This palm-sized titanium box from CountyComm holds up to 25 standard wooden matches and has striking surfaces on two of its sides. A sliding lid on top has been laser-engraved with a topographic map pattern and has a spring-loaded ball-bearing to keep it from sliding off. It has a built-in keychain loop and includes two spare strike plates.

Just Perfect set up a fun competition in which flaming matchsticks race toward a finish line. We’re not sure if the chemicals in different color match heads affect how quickly they burn or if other variables like the patterns and wood cause the lines to burn at different rates. Can you guess which color will win?

A matchstick seems like a simple little thing – a piece of wood dipped in flammable chemicals. But this video from Wow Things shows just how many steps it takes to turn timber into thousands of tiny sticks. Pakistan’s Kite Safety Match factory in uses a mix of humans and machines to produce matches and their packaging.

The S has a thing for building matchstick-powered rocket engines. This time, their goal was to create two flame-shooting vehicles out of cardboard, then crash them head-on into each other to view the fiery wreckage. It took a few attempts to get them to launch at the same time, but the money shot was worth it.

Animator Tomohiro Okazaki of Swimming Design offers up a series of soundless stop motion scenes, each of which features matchsticks as its central focus. Okazaki’s fastidious and precise animation work is simply out of this world, and the motion is some of the smoothest we’ve ever seen in a frame-by-frame animation.

The Q decided that ordinary matches weren’t big enough for him, so he went ahead and made five giant-sized matches out of wood, rope, and a homemade mix of incendiary chemicals like the ones on a real match head. To complete the set, he built a wooden matchbox with a sandpaper striker on its side.

Artist Chet Phillips created this awesome deck of playing cards featuring hand-drawn illustrations inspired by vintage matchbook covers. The subjects of each image are drawn from pop culture subjects, from Alien to Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

The Q shows off a goopy compound they made from wood glue, nail varnish, and match sulfur that lets homemade matches burn even when fully submerged in water. This is definitely one you shouldn’t try at home, given the risks of both fire and the unknown consequences of breathing the vapors the chemicals produce.

(PG-13: Language) Maker Simone Giertz took a page of the old improv handbook, and asked viewers to toss out ideas of things for her to make out of other things. Her first challenge: make a piece of furniture out of 20,000 matches. Since she built it out of metal, the table still remains after setting it ablaze.

YouTuber The S loves to make stuff from cardboard, and often incorporates matchsticks into his designs. In this clip, he compiles four builds which incorporate jet engines powered by numerous lit matches. While they don’t travel that fast, the fiery launches are quite the spectacle.

“Caution! Do not try it in the house.” The warning message from YouTuber The S is quite the understatement, as he shows us just what happens when you build a cannon entirely out of matches, fill its chamber with thousands of match heads, then light its fuse.

It must have taken Ben Ahles an ungodly amount of time to glue together 42,000 matches into a sphere, yet it took only seconds for the ball to burst into flames, and about a minute to come to rest as a blackened hull. Still, his efforts were well worth the visual payoff.

It seems like such a simple concept, but getting a match to stay lit in the rain or wind isn’t easy. These incredible sticks from REI not can hold up to just about anything you can throw at ’em.