hey everybody adam savage here surrounded by some of mythbusters history and it's for an excellent
reason the props behind me and in front of me traveled around the united states as part
of mythbusters the explosive exhibition for the last 10 years and that exhibit is over but don't
be sad because now the props from that show can go straight to your home that are being auctioned off
by prop store uh to benefit the grant imahara steam foundation and you can own your very own
piece of mythbusters history and i'm doing show and tell us about the pieces and today i want to
talk about golf ball car over the 13 years we made mythbusters jamie carrie grant tori and i
we loved to talk about the fact of how seat of the pants it was how how much we were sort of blank
slates when we began we didn't really realize we were making a science show at the beginning we
kind of fell into it and figured it out and there are a lot of of methodologies and experiments that
we conducted that are exceedingly primitive this one golf ball car this is a maquette
from the episode golf ball car this represents the other end of the spectrum of mythbusters
scientific excursions because i think of this as a myth that jamie and i did when we felt quite
mature about our ability to design and execute a reasonable scientific methodology so the myth
was a golf ball well so okay before i tell you the myth i have to give you one fact which is
that a golf ball has those detents 544 of them i can't quite remember but a golf ball has little
detents on it because they create a little bit of turbulent air that creates a slipstream around the
golf ball that allows it to fly farther i know that sounds weird but if you shot a smooth golf
ball that was the same weight as a dimpled golf ball the dimple golf ball flies far further so we
know this is an effect we know that it works for a golf ball the myth is that it could work for a car
and there are products out there that like cover your car with a wrap with little detents that are
supposed to be able to do this effect jamie and i wanted to find out if you could do it for real
so this is where we began uh we eventually covered an actual full-sized car in several
hundred pounds of wet clay and then carved eleven hundred detents in its surface using a bunch of
automotive prototypers from the academy of art college's automotive department yeah like this
was a sophisticated attempt at solving this myth but this was our first prototype for testing it
and what we did was we simply bought a vacuform shell for a remote control car filled it with uh
resin and then drilled these hemispherical holes all the way around it and we took this down to
the nasa ames wind tunnel facility which is one of my favorite places on earth and we put this
in their water tank which is one of my favorite machines on earth honestly the water tank is this
reciprocating pool of perfectly laminar flowing water that moves past whatever object you put
into it the the first time we put a car in there the windows were down and i started to notice this
in the water tank which uses fluorescent ink i noticed this ink pattern coming off
the car that we were using because the windows were down it was like doing this
and i said is that little turbulent thing is that the reason i hear the pop up when one of the
windows in my car is open and they were like yes and we were like really and they were like yeah
that's called a strudel wave because it looks like a strudel the water tank is just a place of wonder
anyway we put this car in our water tank and we witnessed what seemed to be the effect
that we were looking for which is that these detents did seem to each in and of themselves
create a little bit of a turbulence that created a slipstream over the car so the next step was
to do this in a real car and as i said we brought a bunch of automotive sculptures from the academy
of art we carved this in the car we ran it through our fuel efficiency tests which by the way if you
want to know precisely how much fuel you use in one mile to do a thing it is really difficult to
do and we did it so many times and it was always an ass kicker and i consider this to be our
finest execution of that experiment which is we took a car with no gasoline in it and put a one
gallon tank then we weighed that tank both before and after the experiment to know exactly how much
gas we had used and when we finished running both tests with the unmodified car and the
golf ball car we got i think a 14 improvement in fuel efficiency for the golf ball car this
is one of those cases where in the episode you see jamie and i open the trunk we take it out we weigh
it we check our results we laugh we're surprised we check the results again we realize it's right
we call it a day we shake hands we leave we were like there's no coverage that you could shoot of
that interaction with us that does that's going to equate or be better than what we just got so we
didn't shoot any coverage we literally just ended the episode with that because we were so surprised
there is one more story to go with golf ball car and that is about a year later we got an
email from someone who worked with one of the big three automakers that they were curious about this
and what you might not know is that big carb prototypes are actually made out of clay
yeah that's one of the key ways in which they prototype cart forms so they pulled this clay
suv frame they had out of storage and some poor guy carved a thousand detents in the
outside of this clay car and the this automaker put it in their wind tunnel
and then they wrote us to say that they did not come to the same results we did
and that didn't bother me at all one they were using a totally different kind of car so i don't
consider that it's valid it's apples and oranges not really a scientific methodological approach
that i would approve but secondly we wasted the time of a big three automaker for like a week
that is so cool that's like that's one of those ways in which mythbusters allowed
all of us to feel kind of like peers with all the scientists we were working with like we're asking
genuinely interesting questions and we're really trying to come up with robust ways to test them
anyway thanks for this walk down memory lane get yourself your own piece of mythbusters memorabilia
the address is propstory.com mythbusters this is all to benefit the grant yamaha steam foundation
the most excellent of causes and thank you guys i'll see you next time
you