Awesome Destruction

Have you ever left a sink or tub running to the point where it overflows? Hopefully, you caught it before it did what happens in this video from NRK. In what we can only imagine was the Norwegian equivalent of Mythbusters, they filled the upper level of a bathroom with water to see just how much it would take to make the floor collapse.

The guys from Australia’s How Ridiculous have made a business out of dropping stuff off of a 150-foot tower. In this clip, they got their hands on a massive sword built by Alec Steele and proceeded to put it to the test to see how deep it would plunge into things on the ground below. Perhaps most impressive is how durable the sword is.

The kinds of weapons used by modern militaries pack a wallop, but the cannons installed on ships hundreds of years ago weren’t exactly gentle. The Smithsonian Channel’s World of Weapons: War at Sea demonstrates a working replica of a 17th century cannon as it blasts a 9-pound metal cannonball into a ship’s hull.

People do some strange things when they run out of stuff to do. Take, for example, this annual festival which takes place in San Juan de la Vega, Mexico. The sole objective is for participants to hit things with a sledgehammer packed with explosives so it blows up. Todd Hata takes us inside this wild and loud celebration.

While it’s far from a comprehensive test, and they only tested for compressive strength, it’s still fun to see what happens to different types of tree trunks when they’re crushed in a powerful hydraulic press. Which kind of wood do you think will be the most durable?

A hydraulic press makes quick work of small metal nuts, smushing them handily with about 7000 lb of force. But can the mighty press defeat these giant, industrial-sized nuts that can barely fit in your hand? Hit Play and find out.

Magnetic Games loves to build complex sculptures out of magnetic spheres and rods. Not only are these fun to look at, but the sound they make when they click together is quite satisfying. It’s just as entertaining to watch them crumble, and the noises are equally ASMR, so put on your headphones and enjoy.

Model builder Crouzier Benjamin is back with another amazing work of wooden architecture. This time, he and two friends painstakingly arranged 22,000 Kapla planks to create a massive coliseum and an accompanying tower. Then in seconds, it all came tumbling down – on purpose.

Inspired by the time-bending antics of Christopher Nolan movies like Tenet, Gav of The Slow Mo Guys shows up in a room where a bunch of things have already been destroyed, and attempts to clean up the mess by doing everything in reverse. That elephant toothpaste stuff never gets old.

The Stretch Armstrong toy was engineered to be stretched as much as possible, though we’re pretty sure they never intended for it to do this. Watch as the guys from The King of Random cut off his head, then pump him with 25 gallons of water. On the second go-round, they removed the sticky goo inside to improve their results.

When they’re not smushing stuff with their hydraulic press, the guys from Beyond the Press are destroying things in other ways. In preparation for Halloween 2020, they decided to see if dynamite or gunpowder works better to blow up pumpkins. Naturally, they captured the delicious carnage in super-slow-motion.

Beyond Slow Motion teamed up with PhysicsGirl to demonstrate a vacuum-powered cannon that can fire ping pong balls at more than 800 mph. Using two high speed cameras, they captured footage of each ball as it launched and met its maker against various objects. Dive into the physics at work here.

Perhaps on a mission to one-up the MythBusters, the guys at Demolition Ranch customized the barrel of a rifle to see what would happen if it were bent all the way back towards the shooter. Will it shoot backwards? Will it destroy the gun? Or will the bullet get stuck? The answer starts around the 13:21 mark.

Opening up an ATM with a hand grenade seems like a bad idea, but we suppose if you own the machine, you can do whatever you want with it, right? Edwin Sarkissian decided to see what would happen when he tossed an M67 frag grenade into one of those convenience store ATMs, and the carnage is everything you could hoped for.

As NASA engineers work on the Space Launch System (SLS) it will use for its Artemis lunar missions, they must perform extreme tests to determine its structural limits. In this short video, they intentionally squeezed this liquid oxygen tank with millions of pounds of force until it burst, sending water everywhere.

The guys from The King of Random teamed up with Todd Robins from Kuma Films to capture slow-motion video footage of what happens when you burst a bunch of balloons that have been inflated inside of each other. It took an 11,000 fps camera to really show off the split-second explosions.

The guys from the Hydraulic Press Channel and Beyond the Press Channel keep their promise for bigger and more impressive videos by attempting to launch a crappy car into the sky using more than 150 pounds of dynamite. At the same time, they kicked off the first mission of the unofficial Finnish space program.

The guys from the Hydraulic Press Channel got their hands on a new machine for their workshop. It uses a pair of conveyor belts and a set of powerful rollers to flatten objects. They’re still working out the kinks, but it clearly has destructive potential. It’s also one of the more satisfying ways to pop large bubble wrap.

These days, if you want to destroy a city in a movie, you do it all with computer graphics. But back in the day, it was done with practical effects and miniatures. Check out this footage from the 1933 disaster movie Deluge, in which models of countless New York City buildings are demolished by a massive tidal wave.

(Loud) In what might be the dumbest stunt yet from the guys at How Ridiculous, they winched an old single-engine airplane to the top of a tower and dropped it nearly 150 feet onto the world’s strongest trampoline. You can sit through 14+ minutes of shouting and smaller drops, or just skip to the money shot.

In a scene that plays out like the end of Terminator 2, watch as these disused aluminum car rims are melted down in a hot furnace, so they can be reincarnated into other products. We kept waiting for some screaming heads to start bursting out of the molten metal.

Mark Rober typically uses his engineering skills to solve complex problems or to exact justice, but this time, he’s just having a good time making a mess. He teamed up with the guys from How Ridiculous to see what would happen when you drop a car onto the world’s strongest trampoline. Check out the aussies’ video here.

Perhaps it’s some deep-seated childhood disappointment, but there’s something about the sound of balloons popping that sets us on edge. But that’s all you’re gonna get in this video from performance artist Jan Hakon Erichsen, as he uses a variety of knife rigs to shamelessly destroy a bunch of the party inflatables.