Remember,
do not try anything you are about to see at home.
On this episode of Mythbusters,
Adam and Jamie get feisty with a bar fight fable.
What's the matter, old man?
Been too long since your last bar fight?
They want to know if an empty beer bottle
really does more damage than a full one.
Nasty.
Meanwhile
I have to massage the leather, makes a better cannon.
-- In a ballistic material mystery from history.
Is this where the legs were?
Kari, Grant and Tory
take on the mystery of the Irish cannons.
***
made from leather.
Who are the Mythbusters?
Adam Savage. Comes chaos. Bye bye.
And Jaimie Hyneman.
I call it "my little pop gun".
Between them, more than 30 years
of special effects and appearance.
Joining them,
Kari Byron,
explosives and electricity.. Uhh!
Tory belleci
there's your big chance...
And Grant Imahara.
Now, for something completely gratuitous.
They don't just tell the myths,
they put them to the test.
AmericasCardroom.com brings poker back Million Dollar Sunday Tournament every Sunday
We're not going to have to start drinking
in the middle of the day again, are we?
Luckily, no.
This is not a myth about getting drunk.
It's about after you've gotten drunk
and gotten into a bar fight.
The myth is that getting hit with an empty bottle
is worse for you than with a bottle that's full.
Allow me to demonstrate.
No silver screen bar fight scene
is complete without one.
However, unlike the movies, in real life,
a bottle bash is extremely dangerous.
How dangerous?
Well, award winning forensic scientists
list skull fractures,
concussions and scalp lacerations
among the possible injuries.
They also conclude that an empty bottle smash
will do more damage, but is this really possible?
Could a lighter, empty bottle
really harm you more than a heavier, full one?
So, how do you want to test this one?
Fake bottle. Don't do this at home.
Seriously.
How are you thinking we should test this?
Exactly like that, but with real bottles.
Except with head protection.
We'll have a closer look at
what kind of forces are involved.
Okay.
So, let the bar fight commence.
Even though after the few beers,
it might seem like a good idea
to hit somebody over the head with a beer bottle,
it's probably not.
Never the less, we feel inclined to get up close
and personal in our testing.
That's where this coming in.
This is a football helmeted equipped ***
with accelerometers, ***
plus, a nice excuse to hit Adam over the head.
With a bottle, which I regularly want to do.
You ready?
Before I put this on and take some hits to the head...
Let's put this on a non-human analog just to make sure it's safe,
to see what kind of forces are involved.
Okay.
Who's ready?
I'm ready.
We're ready.
Okay.
Safety systems, check.
That's not what happens in the movies.
It seems these are a lot harder to break than we thought.
I think because of a couple of reasons.
What's the matter, old man?
Been too long since your last bar fight?
In the movies, you always see people
smack each other over the heads with bottles,
and the bottles break really easily.
Those are fake bottles.
It's the movies.
Number two, who hasn't dropped and broken bottles. They seem quite fragile.
The fact is they're not. They're actually built to ship.
Built to last.
When you look at shots like this, this and this,
it's pretty clear these things are tougher than they look.
Adam however, is as tough as he looks.
Not very.
So, when our expert crunches the numbers,
that was kinda 107 gs.
The experiment takes a safer turn.
And about a hundred gs is the average concussion that we see in the field.
I don't think I'm going to be wearing the helmet today.
I don't blame you.
The helmet, doing what it was designed to do,
was flexing on impact,
absorbing energy
and making it difficult to break the bottle.
Queue our hard-headed stunt man
with his data collecting accelerometers.
***, go.
- Did you get a read yet? - Yeah.
It's about 54 gs.
Awesome.
Awesome, but one day *** to make.
So, in a frenzy of beer and broken glass --
33.
Hard man Hyneman smashes away
11 gs.
Until he's satisfied with a sample set of seven.
34.
Which yields an average of 28 gs.
Awesome.
Let's continue with an empty bottle.
Remember, the myth is that an empty bottle,
when smashed, is more damaging than the full.
-Are you peing? -No.Ok
it's the comparison that's the key.
Ok, here we go
empty beer bottle.
As the numbers come in,
it's clear that comparison does not favor is myth.
13 gs.
About 11 gs.
Less g force to the head
appears they do less damage han the full ones,
but Adam's got an issue with the experimental design.
The data seems to support the idea
that it's not looking very good for the myth,
but we're seeing huge variances
on the g load for this guy,
depending on how hard Jamie swings.
It's just very hard to control.
Clearly, moving forward,
we're going to need to remove the variance of the human arm
and go with the mechanical solution
to solving this problem.
All right, Kari,
what do these things have in common?
Okay, creamer, cheese, leather, chicken,
duct tape and a stale pipe?
Saturday night at Adam Savage's house?
Very close. No.
Saturday night at Jamie Hyneman's house?
No.
Ok, get everything but the leather.
Well that's the next myth.
We are going to try to build a cannon
out of nothing but leather.
Okay, really? Absolutely.
In the 17th century,
a man in Sweden came up with a idea.
A copper core with iron bands reenforcing it
massive silk fabric and finally the entire thing
was wrapped in leather.
That's not a leather cannon.
That's a cannon covered in leather.
But wait, there's more.
Later that century at the siege of *** castle,
Irish troops built a cannon using nothing but leather.
It's about 5 feet long and about 5 inches thick.
Leather cannon, I like it.
The Mythbusters and cannons have a long
and explosive history.
I think we killed Captain Kirk.
There was a cheese firing cannon.
A cannon made from duct tape
and not to mention, the famous cannon that fired chicken.
So, who better to get to the bottom of
this mystery of history.
Did the Swedes and Irish
really make a viable and effective cannon from cow skin?
So, my leather man, what's the plan?
Well, we definitely need to build both versions.
Swedish and Irish.
But before that, we need a benchmark. What do you mean?
We've built cannons before,
but those weren't weapons of war.
We need something to compete on the battlefield.
So, we need it to compare to a cast iron period cannon.
Exactly. We'll find out how much black powder they used
and how fast the projectiles come out.
Yeah. On those specks,
we'll be able to judge how well they're doing.
I like it.
First up, down to the bomb range to get the low down
on period accurate hardware from period accurate experts.
This is Bonnie blue.
The confederates tended to name their cannon.
We do that, too.
Get it off the track and fire it up.
We're at the alameda county bomb range
about to fire off the parrot gun.
The myth we're working on
says the Irish and Swedish created a leather cannon.
Now, this cannon is approximately the same size
and fires approximately the same size ammunition
as the leather cannon.
You know it's time when Grant's got his game face on.
It's go time.
So, we're going to fire this off,
check the muzzle velocity
and use that as a yardstick
against the ones we want to build.
Look at that. Perfect,
if this doesn't stop a cannon ball,
I don't know what will.
Have a stack at the union soldiers.
Meanwhile, Grant is getting set up
to measure what Bonnie blue can do.
As you know, we love to use the high-speed camera.
Cause it gives us all these juicy gorgeous shots
of things that happen in the blink of an eye.
Today, it's going to be a scientific tool.
Come on. Let me show you.
So, we aim the high speed camera at this scale,
which is set up next to the cannon.
It has one-foot inkrementes.
Given a known frame rate
we can count how many frames it takes for a cannon ball
to cross one of the increments.
That would give us a speed,
which will form the benchmark
for how well our Swedish and Irish cannons perform.
Ok, let's talk black powder.
Firing off the cheese cannon.
Maybe this much black powder.
Clear.
Duct tape cannon, maybe this much.
And when we blew off Buster's leg, maybe that much.
Done.
This is six ounces of black powder.
That is what we will be firing in our paired gun.
Gun is loaded,
alright, buzzle velocity test. On your go.
Three, two, one --
good shot!
That thing split it.
Look at that!
Bull's eye. It is.
Nice shot.
So, the whole point of today's experiment
is not to find out whether the cannon fires.
We know it does. Oh, there it is.
The point is to find out
how fast a real cannon could fire a cannon the same size
they were supposed to have fired.
Okay, I believe we have 389 miles per hour.
We have that answer.
389 miles per hour.
So, that's the benchmark.
If the team can get their mythical leather cannon
to fire that fast,
there could be some fact to this historical fable.
Next, on Mythbusters.
Adam packs a porky punch.
So where do we stand with the bottle bash?
Sadly, we weren't able to bash each other
over the heads with bottles.
We had to settle for this guy.
What did he tell us?
Yes. That the full bottles somehow imparted more force
than the empty bottle.
-Which contradicts the myth. -Right.
Which is somehow the empty bottle is worse for you.
And given that I can't control ***
how hard I hit, it's impossible to know
if it's the bottle or my hit causing the result.
What we need is some kind of mechanical bottle bashing brig.
And the setup that helps us compare the injuries.
It's like a bar fight robot.
Ok. You get started on that
and I'll talk to the neuro guy and
I'll see what kind of injuries
we're looking for on heads.
Ok.
So, while Adam builds a rig to bash brains
are rigorous regularity,
Jamie talks to a bash brain expert.
What happens in a concussion?
The concussion is when you transfer a force
external through the skull and the brain.
Think of the skull as a box
and you have to brain inside
with the consistency of jell-o.
This is your brain.
I'm about to turn it into a jell-o bowl.
Here weo.
There we go.
One gelatin brain mold.
When a concussion occurs,
the force is delivered to the skull.
The skull moves relative to the brain.
Brain stays in one place.
The skull moves against it.
That can bruise the brain as it's hitting the skull
and damage the brain opposite that.
Oh, what am I doing?
I'm making gelatin brains.
What are you doing?
It's all a function of force, Jamie.
It's how much energy is transmitted
to the skull and to the brain.
That determines
how severe a concussion is
or how much injury there is to the brain.
There we go.
That's what I'm thinking.
Sounds like a bottom line is that whatever kind of
blow moves the head more violently is
what's going to cause more of a concussion, right?
Absolutely
alright, the whole purpose of this rig is to precisely
and to the same speed every time
to swing a beer bottle into our model head
to see if we get a concussion or...
How bad a concussion we get.
First, the arm is held in tension by this spring.
The vice grip holds on to the beer
until it swings into the head.
We release it.
The arm swings around all the way to the head.
Here's the head on the neck weighing roughly
the same as a human head.
Hold on, let me add the piece of resistance...
A nice gelatin brain.
Now, we'll watch this on high speed.
We'll see the brain bounce around
and if you can see a difference in
how much the head moves and brain bounces around,
we might be able to tell something
about the kind of concussion you'll get.
When someone breaks a bottle over your head,
but before the brain bashing begins,
Adam needs to know how fast to swing his bottles.
To ensure they break,
for that,
he's got a smaller version of the rig and the pig.
Here's the experiment to set up.
I'm going take these bottles
and whack this pig in the brain until they shatter.
The high speed camera above it will tell me
the exact speed at which
these bottles shattered both full and empty.
This is gross science in action in
three, two, one
awesome.
Gross. But awesome.
It's a horror movie all right,
but throughout the violence of the hams --
this is for the money right here, all right?
Adam gets enough hits --
that has to hurt.
With full and empty bottles --
success.
To get a good idea of the speed
they need for a guaranteed smash.
And that turns out to be about 50 feet per second
or 34 miles per hour.
So now that this can calibrate the swing speed,
jell-o head is ready to take one for the team.
Kari, Grant and Tory
are delving deep into ballistics history
to uncover two cannons made in a tannery.
We're trying to replicate two historical cannons.
Both referred to as leather cannons,
the first is a Swedish cannon.
It's got copper core tube
and is wrapped in some iron bands and some other stuff
basically, it has a leather veneer.
The second is the Irish cannon.
This came from the early 1700s
this is more authentic leather cannon, if you ask me.
This one's entirely made out of the leather.
With the Hyde soaked, to make it more malleable,
it's time to focus on the first of the builds.
Guess which one it is?
The new Grant is called directing traffic.
So, here's how you build an authentic,
17th century, all-leather cannon.
Paint on the glue,
insert a one-inch thick plug at the back end.
Roll the Hyde around a steel form.
Hopefullythis is going to be strong enough
to with stand exploding black powder.
Laminate enough layers to ensure a one-inch barrel.
With a 5 inch diametre.
Is it just me or it's our badass cannon look more like a hotdog?
Tie it off and wait for it to dry.
It's a not the prettiest thing,
but I think it will work.
That's what they said when they hired me.
With the Irish cannon wrapped up and ready to blow,
Grant in a more cultural sensitive fashion than Tory,
is going to give us the background on the Swedish cannon.
In the 1600s in Europe,
everybody had pretty much a same design for a cannon.
Giant, cast iron.
Unfortunately, these were incredibly heavy
and it took several men and horses
just to move them into position.
Along came the king of Sweden,
king gustavul adolphus the 2nd.
Who had a new idea for an army.
An army that was incredibly mobile
that could deploy quickly.
He threw out this idea of a cannon
and came up with something that was lighter
and more affordable.
Now, in truth, there wasn't much leather in the Swedish leather cannon.
In fact, it had a thin wall copper tube for its barrel.
Which basic sought off the leather cannon.
With the brass plug on the end.
That was covered with several layers
of canvas soaked in mastic.
What the heck is mastic?
It's a type of resin.
Now we don't have mastic.
But what we do have is a two part epoxy resin.
On top of that, four iron bands to reenforce it.
Then, more canvas and mastic,
then we paint another layer.
Cause that way, it gets embedded,
when it hardens, it's going to be very strong.
Finally, on the top, was leather.
Now, it was called the leather cannon,
but in fact, it was a hybrid.
It had a metal barrel.
The important thing is that
it was lightweight and mobile.
Mobile, you say,
well, with these wheels,
they can roll on down to the bomb range
where we'll find out if these mythical cannons
built to speck,
could have really worked.
After the break,
jell-o head is left dazed, confused.
And lobotomized.
A delicious memory.
It's a counterintuitive problem.
Scientists tell us an empty beer bottle
broken on your brain box
will cause more damage
than a heavier, full one.
Looking for answers,
Jamie and Adam are lining up jell-o head
for a comparative concussion test.
Okay, here we go.
One full beer bottle concussion test
in three, two, one
it looks great.
Seems to work.
Except it doesn't.
Look at the high speed.
Confirms the beer isn't clear.
The problem is that the beer is obstructing our ability to see the brain.
Isn't that always the way?
So, the way to go is carbonated h20.
All ready. Let's do it.
Full bottle, concussion test,
three, two, one
didn't break.
High speed. High speed.
That's a lot of force.
You see how the skull moves
and then the brain's in one place. Yeah.
Hits the side of the skull on the front side,
then look at that,
the brain's going completely to the opposite.
Oh, wow.
Look at the waves inside the jell-o.
That's what happens in real life.
The full bottle hit clearly falls
into the not good category.
Another wasted beer.
Cue the empty bottle comparison.
Somewhere, kittens are crying.
What do you think's going to happen, buddy?
Really?
No, I never saw it that way before.
Okay. You ready for the empty bottle?
Ready. All right, empty bottle
concussion test.
Three, two, one --
I don't even need to see the high speed.
I can tell my looking at the guy's face that he's messed up.
Sure, he's not a pretty sight,
but he's better off than after the last test.
The lateral movement of the skull is significantly reduced
after the empty bottle.
Where there is nowhere near the amount of head movement relative to brain.
So, it is moving around,
but not near as much as after the full bottle.
Yeah, you're delivering less force with an empty bottle.
No question.
Awesome.
That's like a result.
Let's put the two up next to each other,
just like that, okay, now, play.
Look at that. Couldn't be clearer.
The full bottle is far worse.
That's another headache for this forensic- science inspired myth.
So far, Adam and Jamie have yet to see a sign
that an empty bottle,
when smashed, can cause more damage,
but they're not done yet.
The additional mass in a full bottle
does seem to impart more energy over a skull
when it's broken over it
and that can lead to a concussion,
but we're talking about head injury here.
That could be skull fractures,
skin lacerations.
We're going to have a close look at those, too.
Remember that time I built a machine
to swing bottles of beer at your head?
No, you don't.
It's a delicious memory.
Coming up, on Mythbusters,
can you really build a leather cannon that works?
Don't try anything you see on this show at home.
We're what you call experts.
All right, so here's where we're at.
So far, we've tested out the parrot rifle.
Which is an all-metal barrel cannon.
We found out how fast that can fire a cannon ball.
389 miles per hour.
Now, we're going to test out the Swedish cannon,
in which most of the leather barrel has been replaced
by other materials to make it lighter.
Let's go to battle!
Then, we'll move on to the Irish leather cannon.
Which is all leather.
I have six ounces of black powder.
This is what we're gonna be using to propel our cannon ball.
When we fired the parrot gun,
it was traveling at 389 miles per hour.
That is fast.
The same amount of energy hitting a baseball
going 1200 miles per hour.
Folks, this is something you don't want to play with.
So, with a firm grip on the potential explosive involved,
with all the technical jargon,
ok, where's the pokey stick?
The team lock and load.
Venting.
All right, loaded.
Okay, going to go.
You ready? I'm ready.
Fire in the hole!
This is Swedish cannon
in three, two, one
-- yeah! Look at that.
It worked. Sweet.
Or did it.
Now, when we came out here, some of us
thought this was going to shoot off like a cannon.
Some thought it was going to explode.
Pretty much did both.
Look at that.
It just completely blew out the back end.
Well -- one shot wonder.
We actually had the cannon ball
shoot out of one end
while the end bits shot out the other.
It's not looking too good,
but a quick look at the assessments
and the team are more positive.
Hey, it did the job. Come on.
Give it up for the Swedish cannon.
It did make it through the sandbags,
and it did make it through the second barrel
and once the numbers are crunched,
it gets even more interesting.
We tested it with the same
size and weight cannon ball,
the same amount of black powder
getting 667 feet per second,
over 450 miles per hour.
That's faster than our parrot gun.
What?
I've got to say, it's performance was equal to
or a little bit better than the all metal cannon.
It had a muzzle velocity that was higher
maybe it was a tighter pack
so that way it shot the ball faster.
Who knows.
We only missed the x by that much.
Minor problem, we blew out the breach,
but bear in mind,
this was our first attempt to make this type of cannon.
I'm sure the Swedish didn't get it right the first time,
so as far as a battlefield weapon,
it had good maneuverability.
Unfortunately, longevity can be a problem.
And as it turns out historically, it was.
So, in the context of the parrot rifle performance benchmark,
the lightweight hybrid cannon matched up,
which just lves the Irish question.
Wheels came off. It's mine.
We've got six ounces of black powder.
Alright, ready to load? Black powder...
A three-pound cannon ball.
That's nice and tight.
And a barrel that's one-inch thick of leather.
You add all that up, I think you're gonna get a boom.
Everybody clear muzzle from now on.
This whole idea of building a cannon out of leather,
it's absurd.
No way. Loaded.
I mean, if you're desperate and
that's the only material you have available to you,
sure, why not try it.
We know how powerful exploding black powder is.
One Irish leather cannon.
Alright, this is Irish leather cannon, ready?
The forces involved,
a one-inch wall of leather going to be enough to contain it.
In order to launch this cannon ball.
Fire in the hole.
I'm very curious to find out.
Three,
my feeling is it's probably not going to work.
Two, one --
nice.
Look what happened.
Look where the cannon ball is.
It's like 2 feet from it.
It was more dangerous to be behind than in front.
Yep, it's pretty clear
the Irish cannon failed on all counts.
The back end blew out and even with modern blue,
the barrel unravelled,
so the guys can't even try again.
What we were looking for, for this myth to be confirmed,
it was very simple, lethality.
Say the Irish were fighting the leprechauns. It might be lethal.
Look how far the cannon ball is.
We tested the parrot rifle
and the Swedish leather cannon.
With the same amount of gunfire,
they were able to launch the ball
at 150 to 350 miles per hour.
Now, as far as the Irish leather cannon goes,
I can't call that lethal. No.
With the best available information
built to those specifications,
this one is busted.
But that does not mean we're going to end here.
We are going to see
what it would take to build a working cannon
out of nothing but leather.
Might not be possible,
but we're going to try.
Coming up, Jamie brings meat head to life
before bashed his brain with a beer bottle.
Adam and Jamie have already seen that
as far as concussions go,
contrary to the myth,
a full-bottle smash is worse for you than an empty.
But what about other types of head trauma?
What about a skull fracture?
To find out, Jamie --
that's what I'm talking about.
Is taking a piece of pig skull --
seven millimeters. Same thickness as the human skull.
To calibrate an manufacture polley urthane plastic.
That fracture is in exactly the same way
as a human skull.
Pulled from the pen while pliable,
it forms it into shape before it hardens.
We've got the base and insert
that goes over this cavity and
when we hit it like so,
if we get a fracture,
we know that we would have fractured a real skull.
To get a realistic mass,
Jamie adds a brain's weight of ground beef.
Six pounds.
Meanwhile, Adam has built a bar.
For the soon the break out bar fight.
Welcome to the Mythbusters bar.
Can I interest you in an empty beer?
Which means meat head, with his inability to duck,
was about to get a headache.
It's time to bash some heads
in and choose some gum.*****
take it away.
Okay, skull fracture rate in
three, two, one --
all hell broke loose.
We got broken bottles, we got broken head,
ä» meat spilling out all over the place.
Adam's not doctor,
but broken head and meat spilling out
that's a fairly accurate diagnosis.
Oh, man.
It's clearly shattered the skull.
Totally shattered the skull.
Meat head did us proud.
All we need now is to try this with an empty bottle.
Yeah. More data.
More data with a side of sampling
and a comparative observation salad coming right up.
Empty bottle of beer coming right up.
Buddy, we're going to do this at least one more time
and it's going to hurt you a lot
more than it's going to hurt me.
When you're ready.
Empty bottle into skull fracture rig.
Three, two, one
that's what I'm talking about.
One --
now you broke it.
That's why we can't have nice things.
No fracture on the skull.
The whole purpose of this
experiment is to figure out
if it's worse to have a full
or empty bottle broken over your head.
Personally, I want neither.
If I had to choose
especially, when it comes to skull fractures, like this test here.
The full bottle delivers more force than the empty bottle.
But upon close examination,
Jamie and I note many lacerations in the skull
of this meat head.
And we wonder,
perhaps in the area of lacerations,
an empty bottle might be worse than a full bottle.
We don't know.
We're going to start to skin the heads
and start hitting that with broken bottles.
Down at the bomb range,
the myth of the Irish all-leather cannon tooa hiding.
I just can't call that lethal.
No, I mean, that's pathetic.
But our team of tenors aren't done yet.
They set themselves the challenge of building
an effective viable cannon
from nothing but cow Hyde.
I have to massage the leather.
It makes a better cannon.
Actually, what makes a better leather cannon,
his attention to detail
and this time around,
the team is going all out to iron out the issues
from its last outing.
One thing we figured out the other day,
we fired out pure leather cannon, when the ball came out,
it actually delaminated the inside of the cannon,
so I'm scraping up this leather,
enough so that the glue will bite down on this leather,
enough so that it will stay together
when we fire the next cannon.
So just like everything else on this cannon,
we're baking it up, so to speak.
This is our super breach plug.
Made out of 42 layers of leather.
It's going to get rolled into the cannon.
Charge goes here, cannon ball goes here.
When we set it off, hopefully it goes like
-- and that like --
now, I'm working on the breach section.
What I've done is take the same cow hide,
cut it down to two-inch strips
I'm putting down the contact cement on both sides
then laying those strips lengthwise
around the back of the cannon.
This is gonna straighten up our breach area.
That way, it is strong enough to
withstand the explosion of black powder
to get our cannon to launch.
With the
end glued into submission,
the team is optimistic about their chances of success.
This is the blast chamber
we're talking about a 12-inch diameter.
Not only that, but the breach was reinforced with so many straps
we have about that much holding up the back end.
I think there might be a possibility
that we've made ourselves a working leather cannon.
Now, I have a few finishing touches.
Just to give it a little bit of beauty.
So, under a veil of secrecy,
our material girl applies her fashionable finishing touches.
Then, it's back down to the bomb range.
Drumroll please.
The big reveal.
I was getting bored with the plain old leather cannon,
since we did so many.
I thought, why not jazz it up a little.
It's a designer cannon.
That is crazy. That is funny.
You just pimped this cannon up.
It looks the business,
but can it pack the punch?
A six-ounce black powder punch.
It's going expand to 355 gallons of gas.
That is a lot of energy.
What's going to fire the ball out of the cannon.
Or ***
either way, it's gonna be cool.
Next, violence of the hands may be over,
but Jamie puts the lotion on the skin.
And finally ... Kari has disguised our cannon as a purse.
Will the luggage leather be lethal?
As far as having a bottle smashed over your head,
at this point, we've looked at concussions.
So, it is moving around,
but not as much as with a full bottle. Yeah.
We've looked at skull fractures.
No skull fracture. No skull fracture,
but check out how nasty the lacerations are.
We also need to look at last lacerations.
Cause, after all, it's broken glass, skin,
we're going to get cut.
If I'm going to test what happens to someone's scalp
when hit over the head with a bottle,
I need a suitable scalp.
And to find it, Dr. frankenheim
figures out some skull attributes he wants to emulate.
That's moving about the same as the skin over my skull.
*** through it, 2.43 pounds.
This is sort of fibrous.
Next, he finds is artificial materials
with those attributes.
The veinal epidermus, absorbent
subcutaneous layers and of course, blood.
It all comes together
into disturbingly accurate analog of human skin.
The epidermis goes on it like so and when I cut it,
with any luck, it's going to bleed.
And with that -- there you go.
Our fake skin meat head is ready
to take one for the team.
Let the lacerations begin.
In the laceration test, with the full bear bottle,
three, two --
nasty.
One --
there's definitely some cuts there.
Yep.
It bleeds. Nasty.
Nasty and if it was needed,
a further graphic illustration of
how dangerous it is to use a bottle as a weapon.
Just put the other one there
and the other there.
That's our full bottle
compared to the empty one.
Okay.
Okay, here we go.
Laceration test,
empty beer bottle into our meat Buster.
Three, two, one--
a successful smash and as with the full bottle,
it's immediately obvious damage was done.
I like my fake skin. It's a nice fake skin.
And an up-close comparison sees
little difference in the damage
to that skin between the two tests.
I don't know about you, but I look at these
and they look pretty much equivalent to me.
You know, give or take a neck or two,
it's the same. Yeah.
The original myth is that having an empty bottle broken over your head
is worse for you than a full bottle?
From our testing, it's not true.
You get a much worse concussion
from a full bottle than empty one.
And also, from our testing,
on bones, the full bottle is also worse.
It's more likely to cause a skull fracture.
Now, the skin laceration test,
actually, for the first time,
they're about even.
But that still doesn't make the statement
that the empty bottle is supportable.
So, still not looking very good.
I'd almost say it's busted.
Okay. The myth that it's worse to have an empty bottle
over a full bottle,
let's recap from the standpoint of your brain?
Busted.
From the standpoint of your skull bone,
also busted.
From the standpoint of your skin,
no difference.
-That leaves this myth. - Busted.
Totally busted.
Kari, Grant and Tory
are about to find out if
leather can be a lethal cannon.
This is our target. We have a barrier of milk pack by triangulation
of three water barrels.
Why milk?
Because it's going look really cool on high speed
when your cannon ball crashes into it.
And speaking of high speed,
with the aid of the high speed and this scale here,
we're going to be able to catch the velocity of the ball
and see if it matches our parrot gun.
And here,
we have a designer-inspired ultimately completely reinforced
100% genuine leather cannon.
If only the Irish had something this stylish.
The siege of *** castle,
well, who knows if the cannon would have exploded
but, at least they'd be... Fighting in style.
However, it's not style,
but performance substance that ultimately matters.
Remember, the benchmark we're using
is the parrot rifles muzzle velocity
of 389 miles per hour, plus,
it has to be capable of multiple, successful firing.
Oh, man, this is the prettiest cannon I've ever seen.
Kari has described her cannon as a purse.
All it needs now is that favorite, slippery solution.
I saw that on dirty jobs once. Really? - Yeah.
Except it was a cow, right? Yeah, whatever.
Don't worry, Betsy.
So, why we lubing up our barrel? Well...
The last time we tried the Irish leather cannon,
built to historical specifications,
the cannon had a hard time of getting out of the barrel,
*** delaminate the inner most layer.
We don't want that to happen this time.
So we're adding lube and hopefully,
it will go shooting right out the end.
You in? Yep.
That's it.
Let's do it.
I think we have a very good chance.
80% at at least.
20% if it explodes.
So, it's time to find out if the bling leather cannon can.
Here we go, designer-inspired cannon,
three, two, one
we did it!
We made a leather cannon!
Is reaction says it all.
We've made a leather cannon and it worked.
The test looks to be a success,
but up close,
the evidence begins to contradict their initial reaction.
Punched through the carton, no problem.
Unlike the parrot rifle,
which easily punched through two water barrels,
the leather cannon only just pierced the milk carton.
You're going to give somebody a bruise with that.
The assessment is backed up from the numbers.
I've got 52.5 miles per hour.
You could drive faster than that.
But it was entirely made out of the leather.
I think that's awesome. That's right.
It is awesome.
The less than lethal velocity
was caused by what is the final nail in the leather cannon coffin.
Deformation of the combustion chamber
and that can only mean one thing.
It looked like it was going to be plausible,
but you can only get one shot out of it,
I think this one's busted.
Busted.
But man, what a way to go out.
Looking cool.
At least we got one good shot out of it.
Sync by l3ob@yyets www.Addic7ed.Com
leather, it's good for
not good for artilery.
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