Awesome Destruction

If you stick a plastic soda bottle under the force of a 150-ton hydraulic press, it will fail rapidly. But what happens if you reinforce the outside of the bottle with things like hose clamps, rubber bands, or zip ties? The Hydraulic Press Channel has the answer in their latest excuse for destruction in the name of physics.

It’s pretty easy to toss something into a spinning fan and watch it get smashed. But how feasible is it to send an object flying through multiple fan blades and have it emerge from the other end? Leave it to the guys from How Ridiculous to find out.

This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen Stretch Armstrong destroyed in horrible ways. But The Slow Mo Guys added their spin to the genre by capturing the carnage in slow motion. Like others, they filled the gooey kid’s toy with enough water to make it explode. Their high-speed footage also revealed Stretch’s true Achilles’ heel.

Duct tape is an incredibly strong and versatile mending tool. But can it help objects stand up to the force of the mighty 150-ton hydraulic press? HPC wrapped some everyday items in thick layers of the sticky silver stuff to see if it improves its ability to survive the press?

The guys from the Leftover Currency channel sent the Hydraulic Press Channel a bunch of nearly worthless cash for them to subject to the intense destructive force of their 150-ton press. Like other stacks of paper, the bills fail quite spectacularly, while the coins just get smooshed.

Recently, The Hacksmith and his team built what is likely the world’s largest Thor’s hammer. At the end of that video, he promised they would drop it from a crane to smash things, and now we can share that footage. Among 2-ton Mjolnir’s victims were watermelons, a washing machine, a piano, and a pickup truck.

The Slow-Mo Guys do their best How Ridiculous impression by testing how many panes of glass they can shoot through with a single bullet. But it’s not that answer that’s the most interesting thing in this video; it’s the amazing high-speed footage of each bullet’s path and the destruction left in its wake.

Domino queen Lily Hevesh spent the better part of a week setting up this enormous multi-tier bridge using 8,000 individual wood planks. She started with a small prototype of construction techniques, then carefully assembled the 8-foot-tall version. When it was all done, she knocked it all down for our enjoyment.

Over the years, Gav and Dan from The Slow Mo Guys have produced a number of videos which involve doing silly things with giant water balloons. This time, they sandwiched Dan between two of the heavy balloons and then popped them to capture a new perspective on the water-soaked action.

The Backyard Scientist conducts another ill-advised and dangerous experiment by loading himself and a bucket of molten aluminum into a cherry picker, then ascending to 50 feet before pouring the metal into an aquarium on the ground. We’d like to say this was for science, but it’s clearly just for the spectacle.

A normal tennis racket has gut, nylon, or polyester strings. But what if you replaced those strings with razor blades and then fired the ball at the racket with a powerful air cannon at 500+ MPH? Tyler Bell demonstrates exactly that, dicing up tennis balls in a fraction of a second with his deadly looking rig.

When Lauri from the Hydraulic Press Channel isn’t crushing things with a 150-ton press, he’s destroying things in other ways. In this video, he’s joined by his father Timo to blow a bunch of random stuff up with sticks of explosives, including mailboxes, a suitcase full of clothes, a toilet, a washing machine, and more.

You’ve gotta break some eggs to make a YouTube video. The Slow Mo Guys broke out the big guns with the Phantom TMX 7510 high-speed camera to capture footage of eggs being pierced with a bullet at as much as 1 million frames per second. While the slowest shots are amazing, the resolution drops off dramatically around 100,000 fps.

The guys at the Hydraulic Press Channel have been trying to get a hammer to explode under the crushing weight of their 150-ton press. Despite their best efforts, they couldn’t get it to happen. Will adding some liquid nitrogen help make their explosive dreams a reality? Hit play and find out.

Opening a coconut is best achieved with a machete or a hammer and chisel. But there are some people out there who can open a coconut bare-handed. Abheesh P. Dominic is an overachiever, and in 2017 he broke the Guinness World Record for most coconuts smashed in a minute by cracking 122 of the tough nuts using only his fist.

Those Newton’s Cradles are endless fun… if you’re a cat – but the novelty wears off pretty quickly for us humans. The Slow Mo Guys thought the desktop toy might be a bit more entertaining if they shot at it with ball bearings and bullets.

“I know this looks bad… but I’m doing it for the sake of science.” Mattias Krantz likes to do some crazy and borderline sacrilegious stuff to pianos. In this clip, he took an old piano, waterproofed it, then filled it with bucket after bucket of water to see what it would sound like when its strings and soundboard were submerged.

The Hydraulic Press Channel cuts right to the chase in this compilation video, showing off one of their sillier tools – a slicer tool that can cut things into eight (or sometimes more) pieces at once. It does pretty well slicing a stack of pizzas, but we think it would be more effective if they sharpened its blades.

How Ridiculous continues their quest to destroy as much stuff as possible with another one of their competition videos. This time, the guys challenged each other to see how hard they could throw objects at a line of light bulbs to see how many they could take out with a single throw.

After creating a vacuum inside of a glass jar using a microwave, the Hydraulic Press Channel submerged and crushed it with their 40-ton press. At first glance, it looks like any other glass being shattered, but you can really see the water being sucked into the vacuum during the implosion on the high-speed playback.

Once a car is no longer drivable, it heads to the junkyard. But before it ends up on the scrap heap, machines like the Powerhand VRS are used to rip apart the car to separate materials, maximizing recyclability of components. It looks like a great way to work out aggression too.

While it can’t keep up with the Hydraulic Press Channel’s 150-ton industrial press, we’re still quite impressed with this LEGO Technic machine which has enough power to juice an orange or flatten a carrot. GazR’s Extreme Brick Machines built this press using Eight Powered Up L motors, 24 actuators, and two Smart Hubs.

In this short video from the World Taekwondo Federation, one of their highly-skilled martial artists shows off an epic 720° spinning kick that takes out four individual wood boards, each held by a different partner. The height he gets at the top of the kick is insane.