I Struck A Match With a Bullet (380,117 frames per second SlowMo) - Smarter Every Day 294

Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. Goggle up because science is about to happen. This is my buddy John Henry. Hey, how's it going? Way back before, Smarter Every Day was Smarter Every Day; it was just a couple dudes hanging out in the garage. Just a couple of guys having fun. That's what we're going to do today.

A long time ago, we made this video, and it's still on Smarter Every Day. If you want to find it, it's on the channel here. But it doesn't have a Smarter Every Day episode number. We figured out how to strike a match with a bullet. Three, two, one. Yeah!!!! Yeah!!!! YES!!! [J] We have done it. We have done it! That was such a big deal. Do you remember that? [J] That was epic. [D] For us, that was the biggest thing that had ever happened.

So things have changed since then. Smarter Every Day has become a thing. We've got new tools. Like, for example, this is a Phantom V 20 511. I really want to see a bullet fly by here on a video and strike a match with a bullet. I think that would be amazing. And there's a couple of things that have happened since that video. Number one, you can't get strike anywhere matches like you used to in the original video. We did it with red strike anywhere matches. And here, you want to try one? [J] Yeah. [D] So I got these at an antique store, and see, they don't work. I tried to find some other ones on eBay called Ohio Blue tip matches. I thought the blue would be cool, though. Ohio blue tip don't work. But the green tip, the Diamond brand strike anywhere matches, this is the only type of strike anywhere match you can buy right now that works.

It's made by Diamond. And I think the reason they don't make as many, there's not a lot of companies doing this is because of Department of Transportation regulations. Now you can see on the end of a strike anywhere match, there's a little white dab of something and then the green dab of something. If I figure it out, I'll put the names on the screen here. We have to get the bullet to fly in and just nick the top of the match to light it off. What worked? Do you remember, John? [J] We used subsonic bullets, that was one thing. I think we used the short rifle bullets instead of the 22 long rifle. [D] So the short rifle is what we ended up getting to work, right?

[J] Yes. [D] We've got this little holder that we made on the CNC mill over there. And this is what it looks like when we made that; it was really funny. [J] I don't think we've used this rifle in ten years. It's still set up the exact same, though. [D] This was our left and right. [J] Yep. [D] That was how we did elevation. [J] I don't know if we're missing a pin or something or what. [D] Yeah, we're missing a pin. That pin right there. You know what would work well there? A drill bit. [J] Redneck ingenuity. [Destin laughs] [D] That's right.

It's time. I've got our specified diameter pins here. There we go. [J] That's it. [D] I would tell you what to do, but you know, the beautiful thing about working with an old friend like John is so much goes unspoken. He just knows what to do. And he's a doer. Like, I turn around and he's already got the laser set up. And he's lining it in on the matches so that we can aim the gun perfectly. John just gets stuff done, and it's fun to work with him. You'll notice that there's flickering because of this fluorescent light. We have this light right here. It's called a Nanlux light. I'm very excited they sent this to me. And so this is a non-flickering light source. Thank you, John.

And you can see that everything is rock solid there. So we're going to get the shot framed, get everything figured out, and we're going to do some science. I'm so excited. [J] I'm pumped. [D] Let's do it. This will be fun. [J] Our piggies are a little fatter, aren't they? [D] I think they are. [J] I'll let you know when I'm hot. [D] Okay. [J] All right, we're hot. [D] Ready for the count?

[J] Ready for the count. You ready? [D] Three, two, one, fire. Okay, tell me when it's clear. [J] Clear. [D] Weapon clear. [J] We're clear. [D] All right, so we're too far to the left and too low, I would say. Would you say too low? [J] Too low. [D] I think we need a calibrated bump, is what I think. Ready? [J] Yes. Watch it. Tell me. [J] You good.

[D] Is that it? [J] That's it. [D] We could stick one in the middle, too, couldn't we? [J] Yeah. [D] Should I just do that? [J] Go for it. I'm ready when you are. [D] Three, two, one, fire. I forgot to put my left earplug in. [Destin and John both laugh] So we're still low, I bet. Okay. I saw a spark. You see that? [J] Yeah, about last match. [D] So the fire was there, but then it immediately gets put out. [J] Right. I'm so happy. [Laughter]

[J] What do you think about this, none of these matches are straight. Leaving our stand where it sits and then adjusting the match. [D] Oh, clever Henry. So, you're saying you can push them down out of the way and then you can pull them up as you need them. [J] Exactly. [D] My theory is that the blast from the rifle is putting out the fire. I think we put a piece of cardboard up and strip the smoke, or at least divert the smoke. [J] So punch about a quarter size hole in it. [D] The bullet goes through, and then all that blast doesn't go directly at the match.

Okay, so our problem solving was at full swing. This little cardboard smoke stripper technique was something I had done years ago for a school project. Three, two, one, fire. Yes!! [J] All right! [D] Boom! Okay, we're in business. [J] All right, man. We've got fire. [D] We've made fire! [In a caveman voice] All right, let's look at the slow-mo. [J] Man, that's awesome. [D] Okay, so the stripper worked. [J] It worked. [D] Did you feel that? [J] I did. [D] I guess so, I don't know what.

[J] That ignited the fire in me. [Both laughing] [J] As soon as we put up the cardboard, all the air pressure from the rifle stopped here. [D] Oh, you can actually see it. It's a bunch of soot and smoke. We have to make it beautiful. [J] We have to. [D] So the first shots, we had the four matches spread out like this. Right? Where should we go from here? We have a macro lens, and we want to get a much tighter shot. So that means we're not going to have the full field of view. So what do you think we should do?

I mean, I think the obvious thing is we should cram all the matches down here on one side. And we should try to engage just fewer matches so we can get a tighter shot. We had a laser over here, and we used the John Henry method. And we just raised up these matches until the very tip of the match was touching this laser. You would think that would work, right? Let's see what happens. Test number five in three, two, one, fire. I gotta put hearing protection on the checklist. [Destin laughing] Okay, this will be shot six in three, two, one, fire.

Too low. [J] All right, let's try again. [D] All right. Three, two, one, fire. [J] That was real high. [D] Very high. One, fire. Fire. High again. Go. Too much. What? Ooh. So as you can see, sometimes we would just blow the matches away because we were firing too low, and sometimes we were firing too high, and we wouldn't even touch them. When we finally did make fire, we had a completely different problem. It had to do with the alignment of the matches. Shot 14. Three, two, one, fire.

[J] Got it! [D] Boom. Got it. Got two of them. The question is, did it light the second one and the second one light the first? You know what I mean? [J] Yeah. So on that shot, a match lit an adjacent match. But on the next shot, we started to see what the problem is. See if you can figure it out. Three, two, one, fire. All right. So, obviously, we have the match lighting adjacent matches issue. But this was also the moment where we started to understand this requires a level of precision we're just not operating at.

When we line in the matches with the laser beam, we have to be within the radius of the laser beam itself, which seems like it'd be good enough. But if you look at the image on the side with a macro lens, you can just draw a line. You can see that these matches are not collinear.

Okay, life lesson time. Have you ever been trying to do something, and you're like, well, I did my best. And somebody else, in my case, physics says, well, your best isn't good enough. Sometimes our best isn't actually our best. We just kind of automatically go for the bare minimum required to get by to accomplish the task. When we know that we can go full send, we can just go all the way, and we can get it right. We thought we were getting it right, and we clearly weren't. This bullet was not consistently flying on the flight path of the laser, and the matches weren't collinear enough.

So we had two issues going on, and we had to figure out what's happening. We eventually called it a night and decided to sleep on it and see if we could figure it out. And when we came in in the morning, we agreed that the barrel was wobbling when we were loading the bullets, and that's what was killing our consistency. Our solution to this was to get a vise and a two, four, six block from the machinist toolbox, and we rested the barrel of the gun on that block to eliminate any vibration.

We also decided to tighten up the camera view to one match and increase the frame rate. And that was it. Now the bullet flight path was our datum, and we could slowly raise the matches up into the line of fire. Okay, now we're getting serious. We have a height indicator, and we're going to control the height of the match. 42.5. Know what's getting real? When you add a new column to your spreadsheet, the match is 42.55 mm high. Three, two, one, fire.

All right, see what we got. Dude. Okay, so that's 42.55 mm high on the match. I guess we go 42. 43 mm? [J] We can do 43. 43 mm high. Three, two, one, fire. Dude, man, that's crazy. I feel like we're being more scientific now. [J] I think so. [D] 43.43 mm in three, two, one, fire. Fire!! [J] There we go. [D] Fire.

[J] We got it. [D] Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. We were trying to get the most beautiful shot possible, so we changed out the background colors to try to figure out what would give us the most contrast. After we took this shot, we figured out that the bullet was flying too far to the right, so we made the adjustments, and then we started really honing in on everything. We shot several times to figure out the correct match height.

And you can actually see the gunpowder that's flying out before the bullets strike the matches. We captured this video at 180,000 frames per second. So we finally dialed it in, and we got the shot at 180,000 frames per second. But I wanted to go faster. This next shot, 380,000 frames per second. And then if you look in the bottom right of the picture here, you'll see the frame rate. You'll see where we moved the camera around, and we got some really interesting shots. Check this out.

And as beautiful as all these videos are, I think my favorite frame is this. It's a very tight shot of a bullet striking a match. And you can just see the fire starting to happen between the bullet and the match. I think this shot is awesome. I want to do something weird. [J] What's that? Can we shoot a match out of the rifle? [J] Of course. [D] We can. Let's just do it. [J] So stick it in the hole and put the bullet in behind it? [D] Yeah. Let's see. [J] Think you light a match off of a match? [D] We give it one go.

[J] One go, sounds good to me. [D] One go. All right, here we go. Our one and only attempt at lighting a match with a match. [J] Lighting a match with a match. [D] It's free, and it's rad. Those are the two reasons why you should consider the sponsor, which is Anydesk, which is remote control software, so that you can control any computer from any other computer or even device from your phone, even. This is my editing machine. It's a 4k processing capable computer. That's awesome.

But I have 120 slow motion files that I have to process in order to upload this video that you're watching. And I know it just looks like I upload a YouTube video, but I'm often chained to this desk in this, like, 5 square feet because I have to process the video, and I have to make sure it doesn't crash and all kinds of stuff. Anydesk changed my life because now I can go somewhere else and make sure that everything is rendering out correctly. And it's huge. For me, it's great. If you want to control a computer from another location, you can do it with Anydesk.

Go to anydesk.com/smarter. I'm going to show you what this looks like. My family went to a lake house for Christmas. All the families went in together, and we rented a lake house so that we could spend time together as a family. And I was able to go. I wasn't chained here to the desk editing video. And I want to share with you what that feels like. My son's out there on a paddle board, way out there, and I'm monitoring to see what's going on.

Almost 10 hours of rendering left. I can check things out while I'm actually spending time with the family. What's up, dweebuses? I found a rock that I can't break. Watch. Show me. It didn't break. Yours broke. It's so weird. Like this one... Yeah, this one breaks, [D] but that one doesn't break. Watch. I'm going to roll it off a cliff! [D] So now I get to know about rocks instead of just sitting there staring at a screen. The controls are pretty sweet. You just swipe in from the side with your phone like that. You can go to multiple monitors, if that's the thing. You can go to keyboard or you can just exit the session.

Anydesk.com/smarter if you want to try it, and it's free, just try it for free. Their business model is if you use it for free, you'll recognize the power. And if you have a business, you'll buy a business license. So they're just really cool. Like, it's free. It's awesome. And it helps me learn which rocks break and which ones don't, meaning I get to spend more time with my family, and that's priceless to me. So go check it out. Anydesk.com/smarter. I'd be grateful if you would do that. That helps Anydesk know that you like Smarter Every Day and you want more Smarter Every Day to happen.

So check it out, I'd be grateful. All right, let's go see what happened on that last shot. [J] Match in the barrel, bullet in the barrel. [D] Alright. [J] All right, we're ready. Three, two... Oh, wait, wait, wait, three, two, one. Fire. Shut up!! [J] Are you kidding?!? [D] Shut up!! There's no way. There's no way. [J] I've gotta see that. Got to see that. [D] There's no way this happened. [General atmosphere of disbelief] NUH uh! Shut up, John Henry. [J] {Exclaiming in Redneck Jubilation} THERE'S THE MATCH!! Are you kidding?

[D] {Screaming} WHAT IS HAPPENING!?!? What is happening?!?! [J] The bullet pushed the match all the way through; that is wild. [J] Look at that. [Destin laughing] [J] There's no way. [D] And then it lit it, dude!! [J] That's incredible. [D] What? I forgot how to engineer. Okay. A bullet, carrying a match, striking a match. This match is just like "Hey Man." [J] Gah!... that's insane. [D] All right, so this is going to actually, the side view is going to get the... [J] Look at that! [Belly laughter]

[D] [Brain leaves body] What?!?!? [J] That is crazy! I never would have thought that the match would have been followed by the bullet. So I thought about how to end this video, and I guess I'll say it like this. The fact that we were lighting matches with bullets, that doesn't really matter. It's not about what we were doing. That doesn't matter at all. It's the fact that we were doing it together that does matter. If you have a friend in your life and you're kind of on the fence whether to call them and tell them, like, "Hey, do you want to go do this weird errand with me?" Do it; like, invest in the friendship, because that's how friendships work.

My heart is full because this was a blast. I know this kind of sounds dumb, but I want to thank you for hanging out with me in the garage all these years. I don't know you, you don't know me, but we're enjoying the same stuff together. And we've been doing it for years, so I'm grateful that you want to just goof off in the garage with me. So thanks for watching this video. If you want to be notified next time we goof off in the garage, there's an email list. You can go check it out at smartereveryday.com, and I'll send you an email next time it's time for us to goof off in the garage together.

I have a list of things I found in the slow motion while editing this. That's crazy. If you want to check that out, I'll put it all in a video on the second channel. We'll go through that frame by frame. I saw some weird stuff and I want to show you, so go check that out. Also, a big thanks to everybody for supporting the sponsor, Anydesk. When you do that, that supports Smarter Every Day, and I'm grateful. That's it. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.

Three, two, one, fire. [J] That's it. Yes. I hurt my hand when I hit my hand. [Both laughing] It hurts a lot. I tried to hit there and I hit there. [J] I broke my own hand.