Awesome The Backyard Scientist

A few years back, Darren from Beyond Slow Motion teamed up with Kevin from The Backyard Scientist to check out an interesting phenomenon. When you toss an object at a wet section of a mesh screen, it creates a star-shaped shockwave. It’s barely visible to the naked eye, but when you slow it down with a high-speed camera, fascinating details emerge.

The Backyard Scientist adds to his arsenal of giant-sized traps with the biggest bear trap we’ve ever seen. After investigating how spring-loaded animal traps work, he took what he learned to supersize the killer contraption. Powered by four coil springs from a Jeep, its ability to cut things in half is terrifying.

The Backyard Scientist continues his trend of playing with stupidly dangerous things. After getting his hands on a 2000-watt industrial laser, he put it through its paces to set things on fire, weld metal, clean rusty surfaces, and cut down a tree like a laser chainsaw. At least he had the good sense to wear eye protection.

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.

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 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.

After a failed attempt to create a squirtgun that fires elephant’s toothpaste, The Backyard Scientist realized the reaction was too slow to make it work. So he set out to reverse engineering Mark Rober’s much more reactive and dangerous devil’s toothpaste, and loaded up his weapon. Definitely don’t try this at home.

Inspired by LockPickingLawyers‘ videos showing how to use a gunpowder-loaded nail gun to break padlocks, The Backyard Scientist wanted to build something a bit more powerful. His goal? Build a weapon that can punch and smash through bricks. It’s also way better at breaking locks, and works as a demolition tool.

After playing around with a gasoline-powered pogo stick you could buy in the 1970s, The Backyard Scientist wanted to see what other kinds of things you could add a gas engine to that don’t need one. So he took a tiny nitromethane-powered engine and revved up a desk fan, a USB charger, and a toothbrush.

Not long ago, The Backyard Scientist and his pals built a series of dangerous toys. This time, he’s replicated a few toys kids could actually buy, including ones that could strangle you, scramble your brains, and break bones. The highlight: a gas-powered pogo stick that got banned after one year on the market.

Capacitors are capable of storing large amounts of energy and releasing it quickly. The Backyard Scientist teamed up with Peter Sripol and William Osman to show just how dangerous capacitors can be by subjecting a variety of objects to the power stored in a 20,000-volt bank of capacitors. Don’t even think of trying this at home.

Kids who grew up in the 1980s and before could almost certainly count on their toys to offer some risk of injury. But thanks to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the fear of lawsuits, they’re far tamer these days. The Backyard Scientist teamed up with William Osman and Peter Sripol to Make Toys Dangerous Again.

The Backyard Scientist has a penchant for dangerous, yet impressive experiments. In this clip, he takes to his swimming pool with a contraption that’s designed to blow perfect bubble rings, but instead of just filling them with oxygen, he introduces some propane, so when hit with an electric charge, they explode.

There are thousands of videos out there showing how to make a potato cannon. But this clip from The Backyard Scientist shows how to use one to launch a glider. Working with his pal Joe – with a nod to the guys at FliteTest – they work out the most balanced and airworthy glider design.

The Backyard Scientist continues to bring the danger with his latest build, an oversized weapon inspired by Maester Qyburn’s dragon-stopping Scorpion from Game of Thrones. This version is drawn with a motorized winch, and doesn’t seem nearly as powerful, but it still is deadly.

The Backyard Scientist doesn’t have a volcano around his house, but still wanted to play around with some molten lava. So he got to simulating the stuff by melting down some lava rock and then poured it into his parent’s swimming pool to see how it would behave.