Awesome Explosions

You might think that those PVC pipe potato cannons were fairly innocuous, but they can deal out some serious damage if overpressurized or built with the wrong kind of pipe or glue. The Backyard Scientist performed a series of experiments to figure out just how dangerous they can be, and tests some supposed safety measures.

The Slow-Mo Guys captured some of their most amazing explosion footage with the help of the Colorado School of Mines and a special high-speed camera from Shimadzu that can shoot up to 5 million frames per second – though only in a 256 frame burst. It’s not as colorful as the faster footage but it reveals never-before-seen details.

Toyota vehicles are known for their durability and reliability. But even a Land Cruiser can’t stand up to explosions without the help of some armor. Vehicle security company Inkas shows how their armor systems can help protect occupants of the SUV by hitting it with ammunition, grenades, land mines, and dynamite.

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.

When you pump too much voltage into a capacitor, it will eventually fail by exploding like a tiny bomb. Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys pushed too much power through some of these ubiquitous energy storage devices to see what they looked like as they failed. The footage tops out at an incredible 187,500 fps.

Superman and Homelander both have heat vision. Whether they use their laser eyes for good or evil, it’s quite the spectacle. Hacksmith Industries replicated heat vision in real life by building a wearable rig with high-power lasers and eye-tracking. Of course, they couldn’t resist the urge to use them to burn stuff.

A little while back, Mr. Michal showed off a sweet mini artillery truck he built that fires ball bearings. Now watch the chaos that ensues as that truck does battle alongside a similarly-equipped tank on a field filled with plastic army men and toy tanks in his action short film “Battlefield 2022.”

After learning that replacing the dead battery in his 2013 Tesla Model S would cost more than $20,000, its owner decided that it would be more fun to blow up the car than to repair it. So he donated his ride to the Beyond the Press and a team of explosive experts who loaded it up with dynamite and blew it to smithereens.

The Hydraulic Press Channel keeps things simple this time around, with a series of crushes pitting their 150-ton press against various hand and power tools. Even something as innocuous as a tape measure results in a pretty impressive explosion.

The S loves to build all kinds of things out of matchsticks, then light them on fire. In this clip, he built a cardboard model of a disc-shaped UFO, filled it up with 25,000 of the incendiary devices, then set them ablaze with awesome results. The spinning part of the lift-off was a nice touch.

Inspired by one of the possible scrapyard weapons you can build in Far Cry 6, Colin Furze created a real-world version of a backpack called the “Exterminador.” Rather than firing deadly mortars like in the game, when Colin pushes the button, his pack shoots off a barrage of fireworks. Adding the metal hood was a very good idea.

The Hydraulic Press Channel loves to subject things to the force of its 150-ton press. Here’s a compilation of some of the strongest, most dangerous, and most satisfying crushes over the years. It’s also a great demonstration of the varying strengths of different metals.

Pouring boiling water into liquid nitrogen will result in a highly energetic reaction. YouTuber Nick Uhas and his pals put together an experiment where they poured 55 gallons of hot H2O into 200 liters of LN2 and added some soap and washable paint for color. The resulting explosion of bright blue vapor and foam is quite spectacular.

If you’ve never seen one, a plasma popper is an awesome-looking device that directs a ball of propane gas through a series of twisted tubes. Charles over at Hacksmith Industries was asked to build a plasma popper, then leveled up the challenge with bigger and bigger versions, culminating with a massive fireball maker.

Back in the 19th century in Wales, one of the common ways of celebrating was with something called a rock cannon. Tom Scott reminisces about these forgotten gunpowder displays and works with a professional pyrotechnician to reproduce their explosive effect.

The Beyond the Press channel present a simple but dangerous experiment that you definitely DO NOT want to try to replicate at home. They took an ordinary car tire and wheel, submerged it beneath about 8 inches of frozen lake ice, then overinflated it until it burst. The anticipation of the boom was quite nerve-wracking.

The guys from the Beyond the Press channel teamed up with the fabrication experts at Speweld to create a cube out of 2″ thick steel, then took it to a safe place to see what would happen if they set off a homemade grenade inside of it. We’re incredibly impressed by construction of the steel box.

Blowing up a real submarine would be costly and impractical, so Gav from The Slow Mo Guys did the next best thing. He took a scale model of a sub, placed it inside a fish tank, and set off mini depth charges. The exterior shots were done with Phantom cameras, but the underwater shots were done with a GoPro Hero9 Black.

Just watch any Michael Bay movie, and you know that movie explosions can be quite spectacular. While real-world explosions can be powerful and downright terrifying, they don’t look as cool. Tom Scott teamed up with pyrotechnician Stephen Miller to explain the differences between military explosives and movie magic.

The guys from How Ridiculous usually spend their time dropping things from a tower. This time around, they took their destructive tendencies indoors, where they overinflated a variety of balloons to the point of breaking. The explosions culminate with an absolutely massive balloon that stands more than 40 feet tall.

Does your day not have enough explosions in it? Then tune in to Edwin Sarkissian’s YouTube channel for your daily dose of destruction. Here, he and his buddy Mark Serbu take aim at a stack of fully-loaded propane canisters and lay waste to them with some serious firepower. Yep, don’t try this one at home.