- Car versus trampoline in 3, 2, 1.
Flip it. - Oh my gosh.
This is a car,
and this is a trampoline I designed specifically
to be strong enough to try and bounce a car,
or I guess technically even a boat.
Today we'll be conducting some experiments to
see what happens when you drop all sorts of stuff
on a steel trampoline weighing two tons
with a mat made out of Kevlar being held
by 144 garage door springs.
But to understand how we even got to this point,
we need to go back six months ago when the guys
from the How Ridiculous YouTube channel
issued a challenge.
- We need to get someone to help us engineer
just an epic trampoline that can bounce almost anything big.
And I've got Marky Rober on mind.
- And what you need to know about them,
is that besides having funny accents,
they do all sorts of crazy things usually
having to do with gravity in some form or another.
Their content is always mind-blowing
so you should subscribe to their channel
if you somehow haven't already.
At any rate, a lot of people seem to think
this was a worthy challenge, including myself.
And so I got together with my buddy Josh
and first brainstormed ideas,
then we did some math, then we designed it in CAD
and ran it through a dynamic analysis
and eventually settled on a design
and sent the build plans to one of their buddies
who lives near the tower.
And so a few months later,
all that was left to do was walk to Australia
to meet the guys and check in on the build.
Wow.
The mat is made from Kevlar,
which is the same stuff bulletproof vests are made of.
It's so tough, the only thing that could cut it
to the right shape was an angle grinder.
The garage door springs can support about
450 pounds a piece, and we have 144 of them.
It's like a thigh master.
- Do they have those in Australia?
(funky electronic music)
- And so after prepping at the shop,
we made our way to the tower to put it all together.
(funky electronic music continues)
Wohoo!
After seven hours, by 1:00 AM it was all put together.
So after a very short night's rest
and six months of planning, the moment had finally arrived.
The plan was to do 10 drops total,
five for their channel and five for mine.
They started with the single bowling ball,
but not to be outdone,
and to stay true to the tradition of my channel
(intense rock music)
I chose a single watermelon.
You're not going to drop it, right?
You're gonna have to coach me through this.
- I'll coach you through it.
- Mr. Rober, we are good down here, mate.
- Also, it turns out I don't really love heights.
Whoa. This is terrifying.
I don't know how you guys do this, man.
Ready?
- Okay, here we go.
- 3, 2, 1.
- Bingo.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, crap. (car alarm blaring)
- I'm just kidding.
(watermelon exploding) Whoa.
Oh, I'm going to faint.
(watermelon exploding in slow-mo)
- The slow-mo of that would've looked sensational though,
to be honest.
- That was dope.
Next step for them was 20 bowling balls,
which was insane and you'll have to watch it
on their channel after this.
But naturally, I had to answer in kind with 20 watermelons.
We just got a sack of melons right here.
We're talking 20 melons,
about 400 pounds. - 190.
- That's a lot.
So they have these tubes here for the kids to
drop water balloons down to line it up with a sand pit.
So I'm gonna try and film through it, see what I can see.
And let me just say it's never cool to waste food.
So we ate a good portion of the carnage
you're about to witness.
Plus, food is never wasted on quality scientific data.
- Oh, yes.
- Yes. Just the sound alone is just like terrifying.
(watermelons exploding)
Vick, that was good.
(watermelons exploding in slow-mo)
- Yeah.
Woo.
And just to give you a sense of scale
of the monster we created,
here you can see us standing next to a normal trampoline.
And not only do we have twice as many springs
as a trampoline, but here's a clean comparison
of the two sizes.
My primary design goal was to have the tramp survive,
but I also didn't wanna cheat
and use the ground to dissipate any of the energy.
The mat had to come back up cleanly
without touching anything below.
And now for the third drop out of five,
a 66 pound atlas stone
versus a tramp full of water balloons.
- In 3, 2, 1 big in the middle.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Just missed the frame.
That would've been a jarring noise.
Are you happy with that Mark?
- That will do it.
Come on, girl.
And while we struggled to hoist up my second to last drop
of a yoga ball filled up completely with water,
I'll take this opportunity to say
that my review of Australia was five out of five stars.
They have cooler signs, they've got better snacks,
their moon is upside down, and their ticks are worse,
but their snakes are smaller than advertised.
- All right, boys.
- Flipping. Here we go.
- Ready? Should we just ease it up?
Okay. 3, 2, 1.
- 3, 2, 1.
Whoa, big speed.
(both yelling)
- It didn't pop.
(yelling replays)
- Yes. Yes.
(yelling replays)
- Yes.
Yes.
- It's not meant to bounce.
- But it did.
- That was so epic.
(serene music)
(springs rattling)
(ball popping) (water splashing)
- I feel like we did really well. The lift.
- Oh, that felt good.
This time I had the balls,
the intestinal fortitude, to look over the edge.
And so finally after a bit of
precautionary lightweighting on the car,
the big moment had arrived.
- Have you decided you're doing the car before the boat?
Because it seems to be that's what's happening.
- Yeah. - It's going up.
- I've made that decision.
So in case you know the trampoline gets busted,
at least I've got a dope video.
(all laughing)
You gotta look out for number one, you know what I mean?
- The thing is- - You guys know that much.
First of all, this is a hundred kilograms heavier
than we analyzed and it's 10 meters higher.
I could see it hitting, flipping over
and impaling itself on the fence,
or hitting, flipping over, and landing right on the boat.
- It would be sad, but also hilarious.
- That's content baby.
This is legitimately the most nervous I've ever been
in 10 years of making videos.
- I mean, it's fair enough.
- Car versus trampoline in 3, 2, 1.
But before we drop the car, I want to quickly explain
why I was so stoked to receive this challenge.
Usually for my builds, I have an idea and a design.
And while there's always testing,
I've never had the need to actually analyze something
using a computer.
(water spraying) (people screaming)
A lot of you guys know I worked for NASA for nine years,
but up until about six months ago,
I also worked at Apple for four years
in their special projects group.
And in both cases, what we did for this video
is the best example of what I did on a daily basis
as a mechanical engineer.
It's this loop of designing something in CAD,
and then analyzing it to see if it's good enough,
and then you test it to check your answers.
Using computers to analyze a design allows us to
build much more complicated systems than before
when computers weren't as powerful.
This giant ice block was from one of their drops,
and you could see how close our analyzed prediction was
to what happened in real life.
This means that we could be confident the trampoline
would be strong enough before we even built it.
And this idea that we can understand and predict the world
around us using math and equations
is what first made me fall in love with science
when I took high school physics.
By doing math I can tell you it will take exactly
0.83 seconds for this egg to hit the ground.
There could be opposing philosophies
and governments and opinions around the world,
and we'll never get agreement on who is most right.
But if all the scientists and engineers
on the planet were to get together and hang out,
they'd all be friends and they'd be like,
yeah, we solved it too.
And 0.83 seconds is exactly what we also came up with.
(egg cracking)
And I find that to just kind of be simple and beautiful.
- Car versus trampoline in 3, 2, 1.
- Oh my gosh. (car slamming)
- Oh. - Wohoo.
(car continues slamming)
- Yes.
- Oh.
- Gosh. - Oh.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- What the freaking heck.
- It's finished wheels down.
- 10 for the dismount.
- We flipping bounced the car.
- Oh, so tramp, that's the only bit of damage.
- Yeah, this is where it plastically deforms
and it won't go back to its original shape.
- Okay.
- So we got a few of those that did that-
Oh, look at this. We just bent this.
- Oh.
- That's freaking one inch steel man.
Car must have come down and hit right here on this spot.
We didn't want the car to hit the fence
'cause that would be expensive to repair.
Inches, centimeters, nay millimeters of clearance.
The perfect landing.
All right, so you thought the car was crazy.
Now, we're doing a boat.
- We're doing the boat.
Oh, it's wide-
(electronic music)