Awesome Bowling Balls

The gang from How Ridiculous has been launching bowling balls out of a cannon to see how much destruction they can cause. In this video, they wanted to test what would happen if they attached stuff to those projectiles and fired them. After attempting to pull-start a lawnmower with a bowling ball, they moved on to piercing things with giant arrows.

Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys met up with Brett and Scott from How Ridiculous to see what kind of damage a bowling ball cannon can do. Their subject: ballistic gel heads filled with fake skulls. For something a little less gruesome, enjoy some bowling balls vs. trampolines.

When The Slow Mo Guys and How Ridiculous got together, they didn’t just crush some heads. After all, if you’ve got a cannon that fires bowling balls at 500 MPH, you want to destroy all the things. With the help of the cannon’s maker, BealsScience, they tested the strength of bulletproof glass and polycarbonate along with a fiberglass-lined safety door.

Normally, bowling balls are made from a mix of chemicals. But The Q shows us how it’s possible to make one by cutting out 60 identical plywood triangles, gluing them into a sphere, filling it with foam and a weight, then sanding the structure smoothly. We’d like to play with that low-poly bowling ball before he sanded it.

We’ve seen what the insides of a bowling ball look like. Now see those balls get that way in this clip from How It’s Made, starting out with a soupy goo for its core, wrapped in polymer and polyurethane layers, and then sanded. We were most surprised by the odd shape of the core.

We’ve seen how it’s possible to turn a bowling ball into a bowl. Carpenter Carl Jacobson was kind enough to send some of the scraps to jewelry artist Patrick Adair, who managed to transform the leftovers into some really cool and colorful rings, complete with a finger hole design.

Woodworker Carl Jacobsen made quite the mess in his shop for this experiment, in which he decided to turn a bowling ball on his lathe, chiseling away the ball’s outer surface and inner core to produce a surprisingly pleasing bowl. Carl says the biggest issue was the smell its core made.