hey everybody Adam Savage here surrounded by Mythbuster props to tell you about an awesome
opportunity you have to add a piece of Mythbusters history to your house your collection um
all of these props behind me have been part of the science museum exhibit Mythbusters the explosive
exhibition and have been traveling around the united states for the past decade it was
a groundbreaking exhibition that jamie and i in discovery are all very proud of and i hope you got
a chance to see it because it is no longer but now all of those props have been collected and we are
auctioning them off through prop store to benefit the Grant Imahara steam foundation i'm doing show
and tells of some of the key pieces and i have here some of the most key of the key pieces if
it looks like body parts that's because it is and yeah you're right these are body parts of buster
i think these are some of the rarest pieces in mythbusters history because i have like
a couple of chunks of buster uh at the end of mythbusters production run in 2015 we had a party
in which every cast member got a burnt camera and some chunks of buster uh but these are some
sizable pieces and we're gonna auction them off in two lots we've got here a calf and we've got here
a foot and a foot skeleton i believe how did these come to be what are they these are the rubber and
steel parts from what is called a hybrid 2 crash test dummy crash test dummies have been used for
decades they've undergone several different design iterations in their desire to replicate
the movement and responsiveness of a human body under the restrictions of a car accident and way
back in the beginning of mythbusters we filmed the mythbuster pilots in the summer of 2002.
uh the footage went back we filmed three episodes nine stories actually i think we shot 10 stories
wow 10 stories in something like six weeks yeah at any rate we filmed the pilots or mythbusters
in the summer of o2 the footage went back to australia they spent six months six months
cutting it into the first uh three episodes of mythbusters and discovery immediately picked up
the show so in january of o3 is when i learned we're going to be making this television show
and i had been talking to beyond productions the production company and i said i think we should
get a crash test dummy if we're going to be like doing what we did in the pilots like testing the
limits of the human body we should get a machine dedicated to testing the limits of the human body
these things survive car accidents there's no more robust human analog we could possibly get
the problem is they are crazy expensive like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars expensive
so i started to think like a producer and i started to think okay they're crazy expensive
nobody's gonna give us a hundred thousand dollars to buy something just so we can blow it up not yet
but what i learned when i did a little more research is that the entire industry of crash
testing was currently using what was called a hybrid three dummy and that made me think well if
there's a hybrid three clearly there is a hybrid two that no one cares about anymore so i called a
government agency now i'm going to be circumspect about which government agency i called for reasons
that will become obvious and i said hey i'm working on this new television show for the
discovery channel the pilots just aired um we are trying to procure a crash test dummy and they said
what uh what were you hoping to achieve and i said i was hoping to get a hybrid to crash this dummy
and the person i was speaking to said well you've said the magic words because that is absolutely
something i think we can make happen and then they explained to me that they were a government agency
and it was not necessarily in their charter to be able to give stuff away that was government
property so he would like to lend me a uh hybrid ii crash test dummy uh so that maybe in the future
i could return some of the burnt parts and they could cross an item off their checklist and i
do believe that we eventually finally sent as a thank you some burnt buster parts i agreed never
to disclose the agency um and i will tell you that six or seven years after the reception of
this hybrid two dummy i ended up sitting next to the guy on the plane that authorized the
release of this dummy and he denied ever hearing about us so we'll all just keep mum about this
these are chunks of the original buster this is the 03 03 season one buster and the other
thing that was really worth talking about about this is at the beginning of this video i said
if we're going to be testing the limits of the human body we got to get ourselves one of these
machines devoted to testing the limits of the human body we can do anything we want to this and
the very first myth that we wanted to test was hammer drop if you're falling from a great
height could you throw a hammer ahead of you into the water to somehow break the surface tension
i know when i say it really fast like that it sounds surpassingly stupid
but it is a thing that some people believe and we wanted to test it so we got this crane
that could go 180 feet above the water and we dropped this buster from it and we had we had
accelerometers in him to see the kind of force that he was going to take when he hit the water
here's the thing that you don't know about water or maybe you do water resists impact in direct
proportion to the speed of the impact that means the higher you are above water when you hit it
the harder the water is and that means that from a height like 180 feet dropping onto water can be
like landing onto a concrete runway like i'm not joking at all sure people have survived
falling from great heights almost every single occasion it's because they fell
feet first at a slight angle and thus limited the amount of deceleration they were undergoing
when we dropped this crash test dummy from 185 feet he sustained your average car accident
somewhere between 40 and 80 in your average car accident buster from 185 feet 575
g's in fact i think on a second drop the force of hitting the water tore his leg off at the hip
and we didn't find it for weeks we actually even called up that government agency and said
can we have another leg and they're like yeah but it's going to cost you like 60 grand and
we're like ah we can't do it so jamie went back to the location with like a modified
clamming hook and he found buster's original leg and i just believe that this is that leg yeah so
a crazy amount of myth buster's history it's not too much to say that like the story of this crash
this dummy is inextricably linked to the entire story of mythbusters so i'm just going to say that
it's inextricably linked to the entire history of mythbusters and you have two chances to add this
to your collection the url is propstore.com mythbusters all proceeds go to benefit the
grant yamaha steam foundation get yourself some chunks of buster i will see you guys next time
you