hello everybody adam savage and i am talking to you from my cave in san francisco where it is
currently early december and the days keep getting shorter and shorter keep getting shorter and
shorter and i got to tell you it's bumming me out i don't like these short days man december 22nd
one of my favorite days of the year because after that all gets longer june 22nd not happy
about june 22nd that's where it starts to get shorter i'm just saying this because i looked
up the skylight and it's dimming and you know i'll be going home in the dark and i don't like doing
but what am i doing here why why are you watching me it is because i am taking
questions from tested patrons specifically about mythbusters and answering them in this format
and so the question today comes from mike r mike r wants to know what was the biggest i did not see
that result coming moment over the years thanks for writing a sentence that was difficult to say
mike r wants to know what was the i didn't see oh
yeah the most surprising result i think jamie would have the same answer
golf ball car the most surprising result yeah absolutely okay the myth was
actually before i even tell you the myth i have to tell you some pre-history a
golf ball has is it 488 dimples it might be some number of a golf ball has dimples
and if you fired a golf ball without dimples it would not go nearly as far as a golf ball with
dimples why because each little dimple creates a little uh air current eddy and together the
combination of all those create a kind of a a i'm i'm gonna say oily but what i mean is slippery air
around the golf ball so a non-dimpled golf ball is itself flying through the air and the air is
resisting against the the outer surface of that ball but a dimpled golf ball is actually you have
to consider it it is coated with an with sort of an almost sticky air and the air against air
means it slips streams much faster don't take my word for it it's just a simple fact that
undimpled golf balls go farther because of their aerodynamics and i submit i might be getting their
aerodynamic slightly wrong but the fact remains and so the myth was that if you covered a car
in golf ball like detents it would also increase its fuel efficiency because uh
i can't remember if this figure is true it's one i read when i was a kid but above 20 25 miles
an hour a car is expending like 70 percent of its energy just pushing through the air
so aerodynamics is where a huge amount of fuel savings should come from and the myth is that
golf ball detents is one of the ways you could do it and there were even companies selling
vinyl wraps that had detents in them and saying this was making your car more fuel efficient so
jamie and i it turned out that one of the one of the gentlemen who managed the
beautiful wind tunnels at nasa ames center where we filmed many many times and specifically their
water tunnel which was so great for beautiful footage was also a a high level amateur golfer
whose particular baileywick was golf ball detents and their aerodynamics so he was
delighted to work with us i'm so sorry i don't remember his name at this moment
uh and we ended up covering a car in golf ball detents we got the automotive department at
the academy of art college where they were making clay cars all day long as part of their education
and we got them to come to to mythbusters we coated an entire car in clay in like an inch
thick of clay and then we carved i think 1500 detents on the outside of that car
the other thing you should know about this story is calculating precise fuel usage of an engine
is a really really difficult task and one that kicked our butt almost every time we had to do it
when you want to know a really exact number how much fuel did you use for this run flow meters
are really difficult extrapolating the math from the engine diagnostics is really difficult and
by the time we did this story golf ball car jamie and i redounded to a simple fuel cell where we had
a primed fuel pump going to an engine that ran and that pump got exactly one gallon of gas and
then we drove that car on a one mile course at 30 miles an hour and at the end of that course
we measured how much gas was left that was and i still feel like this is one of the most precise
just lock it in methodologies for obtaining a precise number for uh how much fuel was used
and we did that a couple times and then uh we got a number and that was the number to beat oh also
knowing that the weight of the clay was going to be a factor we actually took all the clay we were
going to cover the right so we did a control with a non-clay covered car we put all that clay in the
trunk i think or we didn't carve the detents and we ran at any rate the car weighed the same for
all the tests i can't remember the exact specifics of whether we put the clay in the trunk or we just
covered it ran it then carved the detents could have been one or the other both are reasonable
but we carved the detents in the car we ran it on its course and then in the episode you see jamie
and i open the trunk pull out the fuel cell and we look and hell's bell's margaret it's 14 more fuel
in the fuel cell than there was for the previous control test 14
you should know that your mood your mood on any given day can affect your fuel efficiency plus or
minus 10 easy your mood is the greatest factor for the fuel efficiency you get
i'm here to tell you it's you so 14 from covering this car with detents
was an impossible result unbelievable but we really walked through the whole methodology and
jamie and i still stand by that result and we didn't shoot any coverage we didn't shoot
normally when you do something like that you open the trunk you then once you've gotten the sequence
you film all that in one take and then you go in and you button in and at that point i think
saza or benny was our camera and they would go in and get shots of the trunk open and get
shots of the paper and you know all of those little things that tell the story we were like
we are never going to have more energy than at this moment in which we're like holy hell
i cannot believe this worked oh my god both of us laughing laughing astonished astounded amazed
that we got this incredible result that was by far one of the most surprising and wonderful days
and i love that shot in the episode coda six months after that episode aired jamie and i got
an email from one of the big three automakers uh and they have lots of clay cars in the auto
industry because that's where that's one of the uh ways in which they make car prototypes out of clay
and they had taken one of their clay cars out of storage and carved a whole
bunch of detents in it and did a wind tunnel test
and they were writing them to us to tell us that they think our results were wrong which is fine
they were using a totally different car they were doing it with a much more suv minivan type of car
we were using like a suppository sedan you know like a mid 90s tercel or something like that
um i say suppository because there's this whole all all those cars in the late 90s and early odds
all had like all soft edges no don't like those cars at any rate the this automaker was using a
totally different kind of car for their test so i submit that i i don't accept that they
i don't accept that we got our methodology wrong but my favorite part about that
is that one of these multi-billion dollar corporations went through the effort and
took the time to look at our episode and then say we should try that ourselves like
we caused that to happen we wasted their time i love that i we wasted their time i mean you
know these are engineers they want to know the answers to questions they saw something they
were surprised by and they thought they tested themselves that is a completely rational
uh response to something that is surprising i just loved that it happened to us
yeah without a doubt that was my favorite whoa a surprise moment um yeah that is a terrific
terrific question mike um and that's it that's my mythbusters question today thank you guys so
much tested patrons i love your questions uh and i will continue to keep answering them in this
forum thank you guys so much have a great day or see you next time that's how i usually say