Awesome Explosions

Burn, baby, burn. The guys from What’s Inside usually like to just cut things apart for their series. But this time, they teamed up with a Hollywood explosives expert to blow up a mirror-covered disco ball, Death Star style. We think they should have filled it with paint first.

(Loud) The Slow Mo Guys channel the Mythbusters with this extended clip, featuring a series of four wonderfully-satisfying explosions captured before the lenses of fancy Phantom high-speed cameras – at speeds up to 207,000 frames per second. Det cord FTW.

(PG-13: Language) Ryan & David made a NERF-themed rocket launcher that can do some serious damage. For ammo, they made gigantic Nerf darts out of PVC fittings and pool noodles. Watch them wreck stuff with this dangerous and almost certainly illegal toy.

Engineer Allison Murray from the Purdue University Mechanical Engineering department shows us how their team used a customized inkjet printer to lay down a thin sheet of thermite, resulting in designs which explode into shapes when ignited. Learn more here.

To make way for new buildings along the waterfront in Aalborg, Denmark, this old silo had to be demolished. They first removed the roof, using a series of timed explosions. The resulting explosion was wonderfully satisfying. Video by Dronefoto Nord.

Warped Perception aimed his high-speed camera at a bottle lined with alcohol, then lit it so we could enjoy the fire inside in glorious slow motion. Then, he stepped things up to nitromethane – the same highly-explosive stuff used in dragsters. Kids, don’t try this at home.

It’s kind of amazing to think that a small explosive charge is sitting in front of your face when you drive, but airbags are a critical part of making cars safer than ever before. Giaco Whatever decided to take apart some airbags so we can seen how they work in slow motion.

David Windestal has been entertaining us for a while with his rocket knife-powered destructive antics for a while. This time he and his pals pulled out all the stops, with a nighttime run with LEDs, sparklers, spray paints, and an enormous fireball… all to create modern art.

Tim Vandergrift shared this footage from California’s Duke’s Folly Wines, showing what happens when you pop open a sealed barrel of wine while it’s filled with gas from the fermentation process. It’s one of those rare cases where a vertical video makes sense.

It took quite a bit of trial and error for The Slow Mo Guys to get two paintballs to hit each other in mid-air, but the final result was more than worth it. After all, explosions of paint always look sweet in slow-motion.

Because owning a rocket-powered bicycle wasn’t enough, Colin Furze decided to build a bike that launches rockets instead. He built, and then pedaled this insane ride to celebrate reaching 5 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. Build video here.

If you see a lit cigarette on the floor, it’s probably a good idea to stomp it out before sucking it up with a vacuum cleaner – especially one that’s filled with gunpowder like the one Norwegian TV series Ikke Gjør Dette Hjemme (“Do Not Do This at Home”) used.

The Hydraulic Press Channel first crushes a tablet playing their hilarious mobile game, then things get really explosive as they turn their attention to a large lithium ion battery pack, one of the last things you should ever put under extreme pressure.

Because he hasn’t made enough dangerous things, Giaco Whatever teamed up with builder Kevin Lizotte to create a tiny cannon that’s ridiculously powerful for its size. The audio and slow-mo add to the drama, but we wouldn’t want to be on the business end of this thing.

A crew working in Long Beach, California stumbled onto a couple of mylar balloons entwined in the power lines. Before the lines could be shut off, they caused a spectacular short circuit, blowing up a transformer, and knocking out the neighborhood’s power.

(PG-13: Language) The Beyond the Press channel teamed up with Sons of Explosions to make a big mess. They took a vat full of cornstarch and water – also known as the non-newtonian goo called “oobleck,” and blew it up real good to see how it behaved. Skip to 3:28.

(PG-13: Language) While it’s not quite as satisfying as the PC LOAD LETTER scene in Office Space, we still can appreciate the way thehypnoguy1 and his pals fixed their broken laser printer once and for all.

If you thought that lighting 10,000 sparklers at the same time was spectacular, get a load of this video from JoyBlend, in which 20 times as much of the incediary mixture they put on the end of sparklers gets set ablaze. They cheated a bit, but the explosion is still awesome.

The latest from video maestros OK Go starts off with a bang, making a destructive mess in its first 4.2 seconds. The rest of the video is simply those same 4.2 seconds shown in super slow-motion, revealing numerous details you surely missed the first time around. BTS here.

The Slow Mo Guys played with waterproof fireworks in a small tank to see how they would react with the water underneath and at the surface. At 120,000 frames per second, the world turns into CGI. A world that takes up 24GB per second.

With all of the concerns about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 having the potential to spontaneously burst into flames, one enterprising modder decided the transform the exploding phones into a weapon for Grand Theft Auto V – in the form of a sticky bomb.

Grant “The King of Random” Thompson came across some brilliantly sparkling fireworks and decided to see what would happen if he combined six of them into one giant ball of flame and sparks. The resulting explosion is quite spectacular – especially in slow-mo.

If we were ballsy enough to toss live ammo into a pot filled with flesh-melting molten aluminum, we’d do it wearing a firesuit from behind a blast shield. Not so for the Backyard Scientist, who turned up in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt for this ridiculously dangerous “experiment.”