Vsauce, I’m Jake and my parents have left me…Home...Alone.
Which is scary because I’m only 8 years old but the silver lining is, that being 8, I
have an incredibly intuitive understanding of thermal dynamics, mechanical engineering,
and physics in general.
Which is good because there have been a lot of robberies in my neighborhood.
So to protect myself I've recreated some of the traps from the movie Home Alone.
Now, there have been videos and articles about this before, about how damaging the traps would be.
But nobody has recreated them, physically, and tested them on the human body…or in
our case, a ballistic dummy.
So we will be testing two traps that always stood out to me as being the most fascinating:
The red hot door handle, and paint can to the face.
As a bonus, even though it isn’t a trap, the crowbar to the chest because that just
has to be dangerous, that is if you even made it past those first two.
Oh…I think I hear the bandits coming towards the house, I’m gonna go get ready.
Hey, we’re the Threadbanger Bandits and we are robbing all these empty houses, right
Corinne?
That's right Rob. We're gonna knock off this little 8 year old kid cus it’s not like he has a bunch
of intricate traps set up that could seriously hurt us.
Exactly.
Corinne, you check the front door and I’ll try the back.
Now we need to heat up a door handle to such a, literal, degree that it glows red, becomes
incandescent, that is the emission of electromagnetic radiation from a hot body that makes it visible.
In the film they use an electric BBQ lighter placed on the interior side of the door, and
the heat then transfers from the brass knob, through the steel spindle into the exterior
knob.
One thing to consider before we test: the object that is holding this hot door handle.
The door is metal but the interior of it is wood and foam…so if I had to hypothesis
what’d happen, if we heat the knob close to 1000°F, the temperature at which it will
glow, then the metal door will start to warp and the foam and wood inside it will combust
into flame…which wouldn’t be good.
But there’s only one way to know for sure.
After 30 minutes the interior door handle got to around 900 degrees F. The exterior
door knob, only about 65 degrees F. It’s taking a very long time so to speed things
up we are going to use this map gas torch to get things a little bit hotter a little
bit more quickly.
The exterior door knob only got to about 115 degrees F which still wouldn’t be that pleasant
to touch but wouldn’t do that much damage.
The interior door knob we got to a total temperature of 1400 degrees F. Which is incredibly hot.
To test how badly it would burn instead of using a hand we used pork belly, which has
similar skin thickness.
And held it on the door handle for 3 seconds like in the film.
And the burn results were pretty similar to the movie and pretty severe.
But more importantly what did happen which i thought would, the interior of the door
lit on fire.
The wood, the foam burned.
The metal right here warped, we could actually see some fire coming out of the door knob.
Over hours you could probably get the exterior door knob to heat up not hot enough to glow,
to be incandescent.
But the interior door knob would get there over a long enough period of time.
Let’s move on.
And it should be noted that with this going for hours the door would most likely, totally
light on fire which defeats the purpose because the villains could just walk right in.
So...ya know.
The Hot Door Knob is very similar to the Blowtorch to the head trap from the film which my friend
Mark Rober and I tested over on his channel.
And speaking of heads and Mark Rober, let’s find out what happens when a full can of paint
hits you there.
To help explain, the star of my favorite B&W gangster film “Angles with Filthy Physics”,
mechanical engineer Mark Rober.
I’m gonna give you to the count of 10 to get your ugly, yella, no good - Oh, Vsauce!
It’s you.
Let’s talk paint can to the face physics.
A standard 1 gallon can of paint has a mass of about 13lbs. In the film the can is
dropped from the top of the stairs with the bandits roughly in the middle.
This means, as it falls, it gains speed because of the conversion of gravitation potential
energy to kinetic, which works out to 17 mph.
This is the speed of the can as if it were just released, but you add in a swing before
release meaning you have a 13lb paint can coming towards your head at 20mph.
Now if we assume your face crumples a bit and stops this paint can in about 3/4 of an
inch of travel, that puts the impact force at 12kN.
That is like getting bare knuckle punched by Mike Tyson twice at one time.
12kN is 6 times more force than is required to break your nose.
THEN, if we take that force and divide by the mass of your head that means your head
snaps back at 266g’s.
That means there is virtually a 100% chance you will be knocked out and a 42% chance your
skull would actually crack. Now where was I? Oh yeah! I'm gonna give you 10 seconds to get no good, yella belly, ugly, dirty rotten keester outta here.
As Mark was saying, your skull cracking is not good.
Also, because of the way the head is struck, the bandits are likely to suffer an unhealthy
dose of whiplash – causing even more damage to the brain.
After this trap, your burgling days are most likely over.
Hey!
He’s at the top of the stairs!
I think I need to go to the hospital, my hand is pretty burned.
Get him!
Time to test the trap!
So a paint can to the face would be incredibly devastating...which I feel is an understatement.
But luckily for us, Threadbanger Bandits are very, very tough so this brings
us to the last test: The crowbar to the chest.
I just need one thing...oh. Here it is!
Ahhhhhhhhh!
Why is this happening to me?
Rob...what are you doing?
Corinne…don’t move.
The crowbars weighs about 5lbs.
And is swinging through the air at around 35 mph
It will deliver a total force of 15,000N. About 4.5 times the amount of force needed to break an average human rib.
It broke through the skin, 7 ribs, and in this test actually punctured a lung and the heart.
Ok, so after doing this tests, what did we find out?
Well, the hot door handle would get very, very, very hot give enough time, a very long time.
You'd get 3rd degree burns on your hand and you would probably have to go to a hospital.
You wouldn't be able to use this baby for the rest of the night
Then we get to paint can to the head. Which is devastating, really cool, but really devastating.
That would be the end of your robbing career and you probably wouldn't walk away from it.
But you do, some how, and we get to crowbar to the chest. Which not only breaks your ribs but punctures your internal organs.
And that's not good and you should really go see a doctor at this point if this happens to you.
Please this is just a PSA from me to you.
So could you survive the Home Alone traps?
Most likely probably, pretty much, no you couldn't.
Which makes me think I should check on Rob and Corinne...
And, as always, thanks for watching.