Awesome Experiments

LEGO aircraft are designed for display and aren’t exactly known for their flightworthiness. Regardless, Riley from Brick Science wanted to see which off-the-shelf LEGO flyer would fly the furthest. He started by building a gravity-powered aircraft launcher, then assembled each aircraft before flinging them into a swimming pool.

Not long ago, Aboringday entertained us by sending too much voltage through some electromechanical toys. If that didn’t satisfy your appetite for destruction, he’s back to subject another bunch of toys to more power than they were designed to handle. We still can’t decide whether to laugh or cry for the toys.

If you place a vehicle on a slope without any brakes, it’s destined to roll downhill. But what if that slope was an upward-moving treadmill? Brick Technology’s latest experiment was to see if he could keep a LEGO car from rolling downhill by making various modifications to compensate for an increasingly steep slope.

It’s possible to make circular saw blades out of paper, wood, or plastic, but the glass saw blade the Waterjet Channel made could be the worst idea yet. Sure, glass is harder than those other materials, but it’s also more fragile, and the flying shards of glass coming off a spinning disc could cause serious injury. But hey, it’s the internet, so here you go.

You might think magnets aren’t particularly scary. But once you get a look at the attractive forces between two strong neodymium magnets, you’ll have a new respect for magnetic fields. The Slow Mo Guys show us how energetic they can be, capturing magnetic collisions at up to 187,500 FPS. You definitely wouldn’t want your hand in between those.

Inspired by a pair of Civil War-era bullets that collided and fused together, Destin from Smarter Every Day wanted to see if he could replicate the unlikely situation on camera. It took an impressive amount of planning and engineering to set up the shot and perform the experiment in a safe and precise way.

After building LEGO cars that can climb obstacles, the Brick Experiment Channel is back with another vehicular test. This time, the goal was to build LEGO cars that can cross a gap in the road. There are many variables at play in making the most capable vehicle, from wheel size and count to frame length and weight distribution.

One of the more entertaining LEGO bricks is the 1×4 spring shooter that fires tiny plastic projectiles. Brickstory Builds thought it might be fun to assemble a bunch of these bricks and make them fire together. After building a wonderfully satisfying train, he built a wall of 400 and attempted to trigger them all at once.

Mehdi from ElectroBOOM demonstrates the relationship between voltage and amperage by reducing the output voltage of a microwave transformer to the point that it produces massive amounts of current. Expect lots of buzzing noises, noxious smoke, math equations, and melted objects along the way.

It’s easy to float a ping pong ball above a diagonal stream of air thanks to the Coandă effect. Mark Rober of Crunchlabs wanted to see what could be lifted with a stronger wind source than a blow dryer, so he subjected various household items to a high-pressure jet of compressed air.

Magnets can be quite useful, but sometimes they’re just fun to play with. Magnetic Games is back with another series of setups that demonstrate how the vibrations caused by magnetic fields can make music, and how moving one magnet can set off a chain reaction between others.

Wearing a Kevlar bulletproof vest is a good idea if you’re in a place where bullets might be flying. But Ryan Kung wanted to see if you could provide a similar level of protection by curving bullets around a body with a vest made out of bent pipes. It holds up reasonably well to handgun fire, but bigger ammo is a bit more of a problem.

With the right equipment and a jet ski, it’s possible to fly thanks to pressurized water. After seeing some obviously faked videos of people flying with a pressure washer, I did a thing wanted to know how many it would take to really get you off the ground. But first, he needed to upgrade to industrial-strength machines.

A modern pinball machine needs computer circuits, electromechanical components, and a power supply to work. Magnet Tricks shows how it’s possible to build a playable mini pinball machine using only magnets and pyrolytic graphite. It takes advantage of the repulsive forces between the two to bounce a washer around its playfield.

Brick Technology has a keen interest in testing LEGO cars in all kinds of driving environments. This time they take a look at what it takes to give LEGO vehicles enough traction, mass, and stability to be able to traverse a sand-filled pit reliably. As you’ll see, it’s not just as simple as going with four-wheel drive.

What’s more fun than playing with powerful neodymium magnets? Adding high voltage electricity, that’s what! Magnetic Games shows us some of the fascinating kinds of plasma arcs that form as 20,000 volts are applied to different shapes, sizes, and arrangements of magnets.

LEGO machine builder Dr. Engine wanted to see how fast he could spin a Minifigure, so he rigged up multiple Technic motors and gears with a goal of spinning the little guy at up to 10,000 RPM. If Minifigs could lose their LEGO lunch, this here would do it.

Taking a break from chopping things in half with their giant axe, the guys from How Ridiculous dusted off another one of their machines of destruction for a follow-up video. This time, they used their spinning fly swatter of death to smack the life out of everything from Jello to eggs to the non-Newtonian fluid known as Oobleck.

The Backyard Scientist should change his name to “The Dangerous Scientist.” This time, he made his own rockets, then devised a way to attach kitchen knives to them and launched them into various objects. Before you say anything about the wonky aerodynamics, the rockets had to be attached to a steel guide cable.

For his latest experiment, rocket scientist and entertainer Mark Rober teamed up with Joe Barnard of BPS Space to launch an egg into space to see if they could catch it safely a mattress when it dropped back to earth. But the project proved far more challenging than they thought and required huge amounts of trial and error.

In this experiment from the Hydraulic Press Channel, they wanted to test how the thickness and number of threads on nuts affects their strength. So they placed different nuts on the same kind of bolt, then pressed down to measure the force required to move and bend each one.

Magnets have some very interesting physical properties. Magnetic Games previously showed us how they can make each other vibrate. They’re back with three more minutes of neodymium magnets interacting with each other’s fields. That separator machine that works like a paper cutter is a cool idea.

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.