400 car batteries wired together!!

0:00 This video is sponsored by AnyDesk.

0:02 Hey guys, it's Drake Anthony here, and today I am bringing you some

0:07 of the most extreme science experiments ever done on YouTube.

0:11 Behind me, I have 400 car batteries wired together.

0:14 With these batteries,

0:15 I can pull electrical currents far beyond the typical lightning strike,

0:18 and for much longer durations too.

0:20 I can guarantee you that this video will

0:23 be unlike anything you've ever seen in your life.

0:25 You may have watched the video I did with just a 100 car batteries.

0:29 I did manage to pull some big currents there, but honestly,

0:32 I did not utilize the full potential of those batteries.

0:35 That being said, the data I obtained from those experiments has

0:39 prepared me to get the most out of my new ones.

0:42 So, in short, even though I have four times as many batteries as last time,

0:46 I'm actually expecting this bank to be 10 times stronger.

0:49 Now, the other thing about the first video

0:51 is that made the YouTube overlords a bit uneasy.

0:54 Now, don't bring out the pitchforks.

0:55 That has all since been resolved.

0:57 But in the interest of avoiding issues with this video,

0:59 I feel like I should spend a bit more

1:01 time covering the scope and safety of this video.

1:03 So, let me be clear that this is not a stunt.

1:06 The purpose of this video is to explore the physics of extreme currents.

1:09 I'm talking scales like you'd find in the national lab,

1:13 but since this is all in my backyard, I get to have a bit more fun with it.

1:16 And to be honest, much of this is just going to be

1:19 me sticking random stuff in between the contacts to see what happens.

1:21 And yes, I know this is a bit of a chaotic approach,

1:24 but you know, this is really how a lot of scientific discovery happens.

1:28 I mean, you know, the scientific method is great and all, but often times,

1:32 innovation is a product of just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

1:36 So, why car batteries then?

1:38 Well, as it turns out, car batteries are actually a great way

1:42 of getting into electrical territory where footage doesn't exist.

1:45 When it comes to making huge currents, most people think of using capacitors.

1:51 But interestingly, car batteries don't fall

1:53 that far behind in terms of max currents.

1:55 The benefit with car batteries is that they can

1:58 dump those currents for far longer than a brief pulse.

2:01 That means that with a bank of say 400 car batteries,

2:05 not only can I produce the most currents ever shown on YouTube,

2:08 but I can do it for many thousands of times longer than the next contender.

2:12 And let me tell you, there are so many interesting and important aspects

2:16 of physics that show up at this scale.

2:18 And I truly believe that all of this is going

2:21 to offer an unprecedented look into the nature of extreme currents.

2:24 So much so that I really think it's going

2:27 to change the way that you look at electricity.

2:29 So yeah, that is the purpose of this video.

2:31 Now for a brief word on safety.

2:33 I mean it feels a bit silly for me to say don't try this at home considering,

2:37 you know, the sheer magnitude of this project.

2:40 I mean even a single car battery can mess you up if you screw up hard enough.

2:44 So yeah, you definitely shouldn't wire together 28,000

2:46 lbs of lead acid batteries in your yard,

2:48 at least if you're not familiar with this sort of thing.

2:51 But seriously, I think it's my safety that concerns people the most.

2:54 And yeah, what I do on my channel can

2:57 come off as pretty ridiculous and sketchy at times.

3:00 But I will say this, I've been posting

3:03 my mad science creations to YouTube since 2006.

3:05 And let me tell you, it takes more than luck to do this kind

3:09 of thing for 20 years without getting hurt.

3:11 And that is because I am not a risk taker.

3:14 And I realize that this must come off

3:16 as the most ironic thing that I've ever said.

3:18 But I never approach anything potentially dangerous without,

3:21 you know, fully understanding and mitigating the risks at hand.

3:25 And no, I'm not in some fancy lab constrained by OSHA.

3:28 I'm just a guy in my backyard with 400 car batteries.

3:32 But I've dedicated my whole life to mastering extreme science.

3:35 And I've slowly and carefully worked my way

3:37 to the level that I'm dealing with today.

3:40 So, be assured I know what I'm working with here.

3:43 So, now that that's out of the way,

3:45 I want to briefly cover the issues I had with the 100

3:48 battery bank before showing the changes I made with this new one.

3:50 I started by wiring them all in parallel,

3:53 but due to contact resistance of the connections,

3:56 I was limited to only 15,000 amps this way.

3:58 I then rewired the bank for parallel strings of five in series,

4:02 and the higher voltage allowed me to achieve

4:05 a peak current of about 48,000 amps.

4:07 In hindsight, I could have probably gotten more current

4:10 from parallel strings of just three or four in series.

4:13 But with this new bank of 400, I calculated that five in series,

4:17 giving 65 volts, is what will give me the most current.

4:21 So, this is the number I settled on.

4:23 Assembling the new bank took about 2 months,

4:26 and manually placing all 14 tons of batteries was the easy part.

4:29 Most of my time was spent digging in the plastic platforms,

4:33 cutting and crimping 500 cables,

4:35 and cleaning all 2,000 contact points immediately before joining them.

4:39 And this is where the real challenge begins.

4:42 How do you switch 400 car batteries?

4:44 I've already mentioned that the kinds of currents I plan

4:47 on dealing with are in a territory where footage doesn't exist.

4:51 Over 100,000 amps sustained.

4:53 This also means that the kind of switch

4:55 I need is in an uncharted territory as well.

4:57 I need something that can slam the full power of the batteries to the loads

5:01 as fast as possible while also having

5:02 the ability to disconnect power if necessary.

5:05 Well, this kind of thing doesn't exist for less than the cost of the batteries,

5:09 which means I have to come up with something myself.

5:12 For the 100 battery video, I used a modified log splitter as the switch.

5:16 And this worked pretty much flawlessly.

5:18 Since it miraculously still works after sitting in my yard for 2 years,

5:22 I figured I should just beef this thing up with a bunch more copper and steel.

5:26 Now, since I need so much copper for the switch,

5:28 I stopped by an unattended construction site and picked up a bunch of copper.

5:32 So, hopefully this will be enough to at least, you know, get the switch wired.

5:35 Then, of course, I might have to make

5:37 a few more trips to uh to wire the batteries.

5:40 Now, as far as I know,

5:41 this switch is going to be the biggest switch ever made for a YouTube video,

5:45 at least by current.

5:46 And let me tell you, when you're dealing with that kind of current,

5:50 you run into some really weird issues.

5:52 I'm expecting the switch to vaporize a lot of copper in operation.

5:55 So, that's why I'll be using the biggest blocks as the switch contacts.

5:59 Now, I've saved machining them for last because honestly,

6:02 it's not that often that I get to play with pieces of copper this big.

6:07 And actually, both of these uh blocks combined actually weigh more than I do.

6:12 So, yeah, there's there's a lot of copper here.

6:17 I just want to eat them.

6:18 So, what's something interesting that you can

6:20 do with two giant pieces of copper?

6:22 Well, let's try tossing a magnet down there.

6:26 No, I'm not slowing down this footage.

6:29 It's really just, you know, moving through there at a snail's pace.

6:34 Pretty weird, right?

6:36 There it goes.

6:37 I don't even need to drop it between the plates either.

6:39 Like, just bringing this magnet close without even touching it,

6:42 it's almost enough to knock over this 65lb plate.

6:44 If I go ahead and force it all the way to the plate,

6:48 it doesn't want to just fall off.

6:50 It's It's really slow down there.

6:52 It's like it's moving through syrup or something.

6:55 Yeah, it's a really neat effect.

6:59 Oh, heck.

7:00 Forgot that table's magnetic.

7:03 [laughter] So, what causes these effects?

7:07 Even though copper is not ferromagnetic, it is conductive,

7:11 so it can still exert magnetic forces.

7:14 Moving a magnet nearby induces currents in the copper and it's

7:17 these currents that pull on the magnet to slow it down.

7:21 Silver is even more conductive.

7:22 So these effects are even more pronounced in silver bars.

7:26 There's a reason I am showing you these demos.

7:30 Generally speaking, this intrinsic connection between electricity and magnetism

7:33 has profound implications about how the universe works.

7:36 More specifically, it foreshadows what's to come with the batteries.

7:40 The currents I'm expecting will produce incredibly strong magnetic forces.

7:45 This will make for experiments that look nothing short of witchcraft.

7:48 That is assuming I can even tame them in the first place.

7:52 When I started tearing down the switch to make my upgrades,

7:55 I noticed that steel shavings were sticking to it like a magnet.

7:59 So, I decided to investigate.

8:01 So, I got this compass here.

8:02 And if I put it next to this uh this steel stock,

8:05 it's a it's a little affected, but it's not like, you know, super strongly.

8:10 But if I come over here and I get just

8:13 in the vicinity of these of this old switch here,

8:16 you can see that the uh the steel on there

8:20 was very heavily magnetized by being close to such extreme currents.

8:25 That's really nifty.

8:26 This led me to a less nifty realization.

8:29 The original contacts mysteriously wore on one side only.

8:33 I assumed it was because of misalignment, although weirdly,

8:36 the contacts look straight when fired with no load.

8:39 I didn't think too much about it when

8:41 it happened because the switch still performed well.

8:44 I realized too late that this was a magnetic issue.

8:47 In the previous video, I showed you that currents going in the same

8:52 direction attract each other while opposite currents repel.

8:54 What happened with the switch is

8:56 that the opposing currents were magnetically repelling each other.

8:59 The one side burn through was due to asymmetry in the cable arrangement.

9:03 The daunting thing is that these forces scale with a square of current.

9:07 That means that if I triple the current compared to last time,

9:10 the magnetic forces will be nine times stronger.

9:12 This could cause some real issues.

9:14 I still went ahead with building the new switch and did my best

9:19 to keep opposing currents as short and as far from each other as possible.

9:23 I knew the magnetics could still be a problem,

9:25 but since the closing spring is so strong,

9:27 I figured it might simply just work as is.

9:30 And if not, well, I can cross that bridge when I get to it.

9:34 The finished setup looks straight out of sci-fi.

9:37 Over 1,000 lb of copper interconnect 28,000 lb of lead.

9:40 The work blocks are fed with two opposing loops of cable,

9:44 which is in contrast to the single loop I used last time.

9:47 This will cancel out the lateral magnetic forces that I

9:50 had so much trouble fighting in the first video.

9:54 I decided to start small with the initial experiments,

9:56 mostly to rule out major issues before the currents become terrifying.

10:00 For the first trial, I zapped a 3/8 in galvanized steel rod.

10:08 All right, here we go.

10:11 The effect was pretty much the same as when

10:13 I zapped one with a 100 car batteries.

10:15 Oh, yeah.

10:16 So, you can see it uh left a nice little splatter there.

10:20 Even blew up one of the threads, which is really strange.

10:23 I did more trials with these small rods to dial in my camera settings.

10:28 Although these don't look very impressive at normal speed,

10:31 the slow-mo camera I have set up tells a very different story.

10:35 The fact that this rod is galvanized is a critical detail here.

10:39 Since the boiling point of zinc is lower than the melting point of iron,

10:43 this means that the zinc plating boils off first,

10:46 which reacts with the air to form this striking green plasma.

10:49 When the iron finally melts, it gets magnetically ejected upwards,

10:54 which is not something I expected to happen.

10:58 For the next trial, I zapped a small aluminum bar.

11:03 Holy All right, pulled about 46,000 amps with that one.

11:07 Nothing to write home about, but uh like a pretty strong lightning strike.

11:12 The slow-mo turned out to be way overexposed,

11:15 which is funny because it's usually a lack

11:17 of light that's the challenge when filming at high speed.

11:20 I ended up doing a few more trials

11:25 in an attempt to get a better shot of the action.

11:31 Look at that.

11:32 It uh got pushed up and then resolidified in that hilarious configuration there.

11:37 That was the definitely a magnetic force that pushed it upwards like that.

11:42 It was difficult to get the exposure right

11:44 with aluminum since it burned so incredibly bright,

11:47 but at least I was able to make out some

11:50 of the finer details of the plasma fireballs in this one.

11:53 I zapped a similarly sized titanium bar for the next trial.

12:02 Kind of lame.

12:03 I did find the slow-mo in this one to be pretty funny since a random washer

12:08 got sucked in magnetically and a piece of titanium

12:10 was spun violently as it was launched out.

12:13 I stuck a small tungsten welding electrode on the blocks and the current

12:17 it drew was so low that it didn't even trigger my scope.

12:20 The peak was probably a few thousand amps or so.

12:23 Its white hot incandescent looked super neat

12:25 through the smoke of it oxidizing in air.

12:29 At this point, I was ready to increase the current.

12:31 So, I started zapping some big bolts

12:36 with the first one being a half inch in diameter.

12:42 I pulled a peak current of 54,000 amps there,

12:45 which is higher than anything I pulled in the last video,

12:49 but it's still far from what I wanted.

12:52 So, I moved on to 3/4 in bolts.

13:01 I could hear some sort of oscillation in that shot,

13:03 which was picked up on my oscilloscope as well.

13:06 The slow-mo showed some sort of bouncing around on the contact blocks,

13:10 but it wasn't clear what was causing this.

13:12 When I did another trial in daylight,

13:14 I could see that the oscillation might be originating in the switch.

13:22 Jeez.

13:22 Wow.

13:22 Look at that.

13:24 Think we had a full burn through there.

13:27 In order to find the source of these oscillations,

13:31 I zapped a bunch of copper cables of varying diameters as the loads.

13:35 I suspected that the switch was to blame.

13:37 So, I pointed my slow-mo camera at the switch for the first trials.

13:41 Going from two gauge cable all the way up to four aught,

13:44 I never saw issues with the switch.

13:47 There were sparks from the initial turn on, but the plate stayed closed.

13:53 Oh, beautiful smoke ring.

13:55 Next, I repeated the trials of increasing cable sizes,

14:00 but with the slow-mo camera pointed at the blocks this time.

14:04 What I found was super surprising.

14:06 It sounded like the cables were exploding.

14:08 But most of them weren't even burning through.

14:10 They were being magnetically ripped out of the clamps.

14:13 This force came as a surprise to me since I chose

14:16 a wiring arrangement that cancels out lateral magnetic forces on the loads.

14:21 Clearly, whatever mysterious upward force remained,

14:24 turned out to be incredibly strong.

14:26 When I made it to four cable,

14:29 which as a reminder is the biggest American wire gauge size,

14:33 this effect was quite dramatic.

14:34 It was violently bent upwards and managed

14:37 to suck in all of the ferromagnetic materials nearby.

14:40 It too did not actually burn through and instead was ejected from the blocks.

14:45 In this shot, I measured a peak of 76,000 amps.

14:48 The real-time view of this shot showcases some of the pros

14:51 and cons of the low voltage arrangement of the bank.

14:55 It cannot shock me, which is nice.

14:57 However, it also means it can't strike

14:59 an arc across more than the tiniest of gaps,

15:02 which leads to situations where the load is teetering off the block,

15:05 ready to go off again at any moment.

15:08 I have multiple ways to safely deal with these scenarios,

15:12 but the science machete is my favorite.

15:18 Where's my science machete?

15:22 Oh heck.

15:23 Not enough.

15:30 Yeah.

15:34 Yep.

15:34 It's blown through.

15:36 Yeah.

15:36 It's fine.

15:37 I should point out that my arc flash

15:39 suit is more than adequate against these little sparks.

15:42 And the magnetics make it impossible for me to fully short the bank this way.

15:47 Now that it's daylight, you can see that the uh the 76 kiloamp shot

15:52 just completely completely welded that cable to the plate there.

15:59 It just [laughter] Well, okay, it came off.

16:03 But it was uh yeah, that was really really stuck on there.

16:07 At this point, it was clear that the block mounts were an issue.

16:11 But that didn't mean that the switch wasn't an issue as well.

16:14 So, I decided to sidestep the block issue by c-clamping the copper cable loads.

16:19 Now, I need to bring up why I've been using spring clamps instead of C-clamps.

16:23 If you watched the last video, you saw that when I zapped bolts,

16:26 I had a lot of trouble holding them on the blocks.

16:29 The fact that I was using spring clamps to hold

16:32 them down and not C-clamps infuriated a lot of viewers.

16:36 So many people commented about this, many

16:38 of them calling me names for not using C-clamps,

16:42 vices, or some other threaded mechanism.

16:44 It's my fault for not explaining this the first time.

16:47 And I get it.

16:48 C-clamps are so much stronger, right?

16:50 Well, the fact of the matter is that you cannot

16:53 use C-clamps to hold a round rigid object on the blocks.

16:56 C-clamping a bolt onto the blocks will always

16:59 lead to the bolt being ejected before it melts.

17:01 It does not matter how hard you tighten them.

17:03 This will happen every single time.

17:06 There are a few reasons for this.

17:08 For one, the outer surface has an oxide layer,

17:11 which means that the contact regions have lower

17:14 conductivity and thus heat faster than the bulk metal.

17:17 Plus, in the case of round objects,

17:19 the current has to pass through a small area as it jumps from the blocks,

17:23 which also dramatically increases the heating near the contact points.

17:27 To make matters worse, hot metal is more resistive than cold metal,

17:31 meaning more energy is dumped into the hot areas, leading to thermal runaway.

17:36 All of this results in the contacts quickly exploding off,

17:39 shrinking the contacts to the point where they're no longer held by the clamps.

17:44 Spring clamps, however, follow through with the shrinking load,

17:48 holding contact with the block until the load finally melts.

17:51 Of course, this is unless the magnetic forces are stronger than the clamps.

17:56 That being said, C-clamps are still useful with flat objects

17:59 or loads that can be spread flat like stranded cable.

18:03 The reason is that this moves the part of the load

18:06 that melts to outside the grip of the clamps.

18:08 Thus, for these next trials,

18:09 I c-clamp stranded cable to the blocks in order to see

18:13 how the switch would behave with a well secured load.

18:16 The first test with zero gauge cable gave an interesting result.

18:22 It looked and sounded like a perfect shot.

18:26 Something to note is how fast the sparks shoot out from the exploding cable.

18:31 The slow-mo shows that the cable did indeed burn through.

18:35 And judging by the spacing between the blocks,

18:37 the cable end was thrown back at a speed of at least 190 mph.

18:43 However, the scope shows that this was actually a bad shot

18:46 since it was split into two pulses of about 76,000 amps.

18:49 Since the load was well secured, this implies that the switch bounced.

18:55 Zapping two zero gauge cables in parallel gave

18:59 unmistakable proof that the switch was indeed bouncing.

19:03 As violent as this looks in real time, the slow-mo is far scarier.

19:08 The switch managed to launch a toroidal

19:11 plasma vortex into midair before blowing open.

19:14 Honestly, I think I'm better off not knowing what kind of temperatures

19:18 are involved to allow an ionized copper plasma ring to exist in air.

19:22 Regardless, it's obvious that the plates

19:24 are getting completely blown apart here, which is most likely a magnetic issue.

19:29 For the sake of data, I zapped even thicker cables,

19:33 and the switch plates continued to get blown apart.

19:38 The C-clamp struggled to hold down the cable in a couple trials as well.

19:42 The scope showed that I was reaching peak currents of nearly 90,000 amps.

19:46 And although this is triple the current of a typical lightning strike,

19:49 it's still far less than what I had hoped for.

19:52 Clearly, I need to find a way to keep the switch closed.

19:55 The fact that there are opposing currents on opposite sides of the switch

19:59 means that there are tremendous magnetic forces that push the plates apart.

20:03 Some napkin math implies that these forces are on the order of a ton or more.

20:08 This is on top of whatever explosive forces exist

20:11 from the superheated plasma that forms in the switch.

20:14 How can I combat this?

20:15 The first idea that came to mind was to slap some huge springs on there

20:19 because at some point a brute force tactic like that has got to work.

20:23 But something about that just didn't feel right, though.

20:25 And then it hit me.

20:27 I shouldn't be fighting the magnetic forces.

20:29 No, I should be working with them.

20:31 I realized that the switch plates would attract each other if

20:35 I could manage to get like currents going along both plates.

20:38 The easiest way to do this, at least using what I had built already,

20:42 seemed to be by rearranging the switch cables

20:44 from an X-shaped configuration to a Z-shaped one.

20:47 That way, there would be a component

20:49 of current going along the length of the plates,

20:52 which would magnetically bring them together.

20:54 After thinking about potential issues of this arrangement for a while,

20:57 I decided to just try it out and see what happens.

21:01 Rewiring the switch took me four entire days since I

21:04 had to re-clean every contact point that I had exposed.

21:07 An unfortunate reality of this project is that any

21:10 changes to the circuit are very time consuming.

21:13 The initial tests with smaller loads like

21:16 steel rods and aluminum bar were promising.

21:18 So after these I went back to zapping four aught cable.

21:23 The first cable behaved in a strange way.

21:27 Both C-clamps were completely ripped off the blocks

21:30 and the cable basically exploded without melting.

21:33 I clocked a peak of 94,000 amps,

21:35 which was only a slight improvement from before.

21:38 I used four C clamps for the next shot,

21:41 but the cable was still ripped out of the clamps before fully melting.

21:46 The third shot finally gave a complete burnthrough.

21:51 However, the switch was still bouncing.

21:54 It sounded much more violent than before,

21:57 and the pulses were spaced closer together,

21:59 but the current hadn't gone up by that much.

22:02 I hadn't even hit a 100,000 amps.

22:04 When I did more testing the next day,

22:07 I struggled to hold the cables on the blocks

22:10 and made these silly oscillators as a result.

22:13 The mysterious magnetic ejection force had

22:15 become much stronger after rewiring the switch.

22:18 After adding more C-clamps,

22:19 I eventually got to the point where I could melt a cable again.

22:24 The slow-mo of the switch showed more

22:26 toroidal plasma vortices and even angrier explosions.

22:30 What was blowing open the switch now?

22:34 The answer finally made itself clear.

22:37 Okay, so you can see the melted wire there, which which is interesting.

22:41 But the real interesting thing is this.

22:43 So here's the blown up, you know, switch plates.

22:46 And can you see that hole there?

22:48 So it's on both sides.

22:50 I've basically made a Z-pinch here.

22:52 I got goosebumps when I first saw those craters because

22:56 I realized I had encountered a phenomenon of astronomical proportions.

22:59 The switch was triggering a magnetic implosion via a Z pinch.

23:04 This is such an extreme phenomenon that it makes every project I've

23:08 worked on up to this point seem like a joke by comparison.

23:11 A Z-pinch is the effect where a current conducting

23:14 plasma is crushed inward by its own magnetic field.

23:17 Some less extreme examples of the Z-pinch occur in lightning and electric arcs.

23:21 It's what holds the plasma in a thin filament.

23:24 My best guess for the sequence of events in the switch goes like this.

23:28 When the plates first come together,

23:30 the high points explode off and ignite a plasma,

23:34 perhaps causing an initial bounce.

23:35 The huge magnetic field then causes the plasma to implode into a thin filament.

23:40 This leads to millions of watts of power being dumped into a tiny volume,

23:45 yielding temperatures beyond my comprehension.

23:47 A Z pinch is balanced when the magnetic pressure

23:50 inward is equal to the hot plasma pressure outward.

23:52 At 100,000 amps, these pressures are so extreme

23:56 that they can nearly induce DT nuclear fusion.

23:59 The thing is though, a Z pinch does not form a stable plasma.

24:03 I can only speculate which mechanism destabilizes the plasma in my switch,

24:08 but whatever it is, it goes off like a bomb.

24:11 I figured I had to either vent the plasma gases or disrupt

24:15 their formation early in order to get the switch to close.

24:19 The first thing that came to mind was to add some copper cable to the plates.

24:30 This didn't exactly work and managed to spray liquid copper everywhere,

24:33 but I felt like I was on to something.

24:36 I added much thicker copper cables along the switch plate for the next test.

24:51 What the heck?

24:53 It was so violent.

24:55 Whatever happened there was significant.

24:59 The bolts holding the copper blocks were ripped through the wooden

25:02 mount and the cable was magnetically crushed into a smaller diameter.

25:05 I have to go take a look at the current.

25:08 I think we had another uh 94 kilo shot there.

25:14 Kind of odd how flat top it is.

25:19 You know, that's interesting.

25:21 I might be getting far higher currents than I expected cuz the fuse

25:28 current equation that is very much in line with a 150 kiloamp shot.

25:37 Hm.

25:38 Interesting.

25:38 At this point, I realized the numbers were not checking out.

25:43 Now, I should bring up how I'm measuring current here.

25:46 In the first video, I just looked at the voltage drop across the cables,

25:51 which isn't very accurate and only gives meaningful

25:53 results when the current hits a steady state.

25:56 For this video, I bought the biggest hall

25:58 effect sensor I could find that listed a price,

26:00 which is this one rated for 20,000 amps.

26:03 I've been feeding the cables from one of the eight subbanks through

26:06 it and then multiplying the value by eight to get total current.

26:10 However, this seems to be measuring far too

26:13 low based on how fast this cable melted.

26:15 I had previously made this spreadsheet to predict

26:18 how fast cables would explode at a given current.

26:20 And it's based on the Onderdonk fuse equation.

26:23 It predicts that 150,000 amps are necessary

26:26 to pop a 4 aught cable in 70 milliseconds.

26:29 I suspected that the sensor was saturating,

26:32 so I removed four of the five cables going through it

26:35 and then added a factor of five to the scope readings.

26:38 I struggled to get a nice clean pulse in the subsequent shots,

26:41 but I eventually achieved one good enough

26:43 to confirm that this fixed the sensor issue,

26:49 and I was indeed achieving far higher currents.

26:54 That was 138,000 amps.

26:58 I am just in awe.

27:02 And it it can go higher.

27:07 There's more.

27:09 138,000 amps.

27:11 This is big progress.

27:12 Big progress.

27:13 Wow.

27:14 I need to I need to go eat and like just the obsession, man.

27:21 What a project this has been.

27:25 I kept adding more cables to the plates,

27:28 but I never got another clean shot this way.

27:30 So, for the next configuration,

27:32 I stuck one of the original switch plates in between the new ones.

27:36 I was hoping it would weld itself on there at a slight angle to vent the plasma.

27:47 So, the uh the C clamps actually failed on that shot,

27:52 but uh I did pull about 110,000 amps and the plate,

27:56 you know, somewhat welded on there.

27:58 It's funny how like poor of a weld

28:00 will still conduct really well and that's just

28:03 because the contact points will melt and then

28:05 there's very very little contact resistance when that happens.

28:09 So, yeah, let's blow up another cable.

28:12 This wasn't working, but I suspected that if I allowed the zaps to go on longer,

28:16 it might just finally close.

28:18 So, I stuck two four aught cables on the blocks,

28:21 which quadruples the amount of energy dump

28:23 in the shot compared to a single cable.

28:25 This led to the most violent display

28:32 of electromagnetism I've ever seen in my life.

28:42 Liquid copper was shot above the treetop level here.

28:45 I measured a peak current of 140,000 amps,

28:49 which gives a total circuit power of 9 megawatts.

28:52 Yeah.

28:52 Look how that uh that wire piece got blasted back there while it

28:56 was still like borderline molten and it

28:58 just wrapped around that that handle there.

29:01 It's incredible.

29:03 Actually exploded on both sides.

29:06 Over here we got copper just painting everything.

29:10 Even the ground is now copper plated.

29:13 Just all the boiling copper getting sprayed everywhere is unbelievable.

29:17 You know, I was about to attempt a new switch configuration,

29:22 but then I realized that that was actually really awesome.

29:25 You know, maybe I should try jamming some weird metals inside the switch itself,

29:29 at least before I attempt to fix the real problem here.

29:32 So, on this one, I'm going to try to weld

29:34 uh this copper plate onto the big plate here.

29:37 And I also have a piece of steel in there.

29:44 So, hopefully it makes a lot of sparks.

29:51 The current didn't get particularly crazy here,

29:53 but it still made a very nice shower of sparks.

29:56 There is not much left of that uh that steel plate there.

30:01 Feels really welded on there.

30:04 Yeah, that plate is a little hotter than I realized.

30:10 Yep.

30:10 Quite toasty.

30:12 I stuck a puck of zinc in the switch for the next shot.

30:21 Unfortunately, it was ejected from the switch nearly immediately.

30:25 Other than the initial explosion,

30:26 the sparks here are just from the copper switch plates hitting each other.

30:31 You know, I'm thinking that maybe aluminum

30:34 maybe aluminum would uh is the solution here.

30:39 Let's let's try putting this in the switch.

30:46 Holy What the What just happened?

31:01 What on earth just happened?

31:04 That was so violent.

31:07 Wow.

31:08 That was bonkers.

31:10 That was so violent.

31:13 The I mean the copper cables were completely launched.

31:19 Oh, interesting.

31:20 It ejected.

31:21 Uh, how did the ingot end up out here?

31:25 What?

31:26 I have I have no idea how that happened.

31:30 You know, that iron bar there got pulled off the ground magnetically.

31:34 I'm just trying to trying to notice all

31:37 the details on on what actually happened here.

31:39 But that that's ridiculous that the uh ingot was ejected.

31:42 I had placed a bunch of bolts on this little table before that shot

31:46 in order to see how they would be affected by the magnetic field.

31:57 Aluminum works well for illuminating slow-mo shots

31:59 since it burns so brightly in air.

32:02 As you can see, the bolts were quickly

32:04 sucked in by the magnetic field around the cables.

32:07 It's funny because I've lost a lot of tools this way

32:10 and that I've left them too close to the cables before firing the bank.

32:13 A detail I'd like to point out is how

32:16 the steel post and winch redirect some of the magnetic fields.

32:18 And that's why a few bolts get trapped in their vicinity.

32:21 The aluminum was violent enough that I did a few more trials with it.

32:26 In this one, a smoke ring was shot out sideways from the smoke plume.

32:33 I have no idea how that's even possible.

32:38 In this shot, it's the sound that stuck out to me the most.

32:52 I've noticed that so many of the sounds I've heard

32:55 from this project are unlike anything I've ever heard before.

32:58 These batteries are capable of some truly unique audio effects.

33:02 So, this is that aluminum block that uh didn't

33:05 quite all the way melt inside the switch contacts.

33:08 It got close, but uh not all the way.

33:11 So, I'm going to put it on the yeet blocks this time.

33:26 Even though I had yet to solve the switch issue,

33:29 I realized that the peak currents I was achieving might be

33:31 enough to pull off the most important demo of this video,

33:34 and that's magnetically crushing a pipe.

33:37 So, why is crushing a pipe the most important demo?

33:40 Well, I tried this in the last video and failed miserably.

33:43 Even when I let the pipes melt from the current,

33:46 they were still not crushed by the Z-pinch effect.

33:49 At the end of the experiments, I said this.

33:51 Since the pressure on the pipe is proportional

33:53 to the square of the current going through it,

33:56 that means I'm not even getting close to what's needed at 40 kiloamps.

33:59 Now, if I had a uh if I had a few hundred more car batteries,

34:02 well, then yeah, I could I could pull it off.

34:04 But for what that would cost,

34:05 I'd rather build a more accurate lightning machine.

34:07 Now, I bring this up because this car battery series was not my idea.

34:12 I was actually hired to make these videos by the company AnyDesk.

34:14 And no, they don't make car batteries.

34:16 I'll tell you more about them in a bit.

34:18 So, what I'm getting at is that these maniacs bought me 300 more car

34:22 batteries and another half ton of copper just to see me crush a pipe.

34:26 So, yeah, this one's pretty important.

34:27 I want to quickly add that if you have ideas

34:30 for ridiculous experiments that you'd like me or another YouTuber to try,

34:36 submit them at anydesk.com/science.

34:38 It only hit me when I set up for the first

34:40 pipe crush that this might be more difficult than I expected.

34:43 Although these batteries are capable of pipe crushing currents,

34:46 the circuit is slow to turn on.

34:49 The combination of a bad switch, low circuit voltage,

34:52 and cable inductance means that the pipe

34:54 might melt before the current reaches crushing levels.

34:57 A few attempts with various fuses did not manage to crush the pipe.

35:01 Next, I decided to stick the unfused pipe on the contacts

35:04 to see if it would at least crush while melting.

35:16 Oh, it it it blew off both sides.

35:20 Oh, that's crazy.

35:21 I don't even know where it went.

35:24 Now I got to Well, I did see something over here.

35:30 It's crushed.

35:31 It's crushed.

35:32 There it is.

35:33 It was crushed.

35:34 Look at that.

35:36 Of course, it uh was brought to the melting point.

35:39 So, in in some way, it was kind of cheating, but but still,

35:42 this is like, you know, I could not do this with a 100 car battery.

35:46 So, I'm really happy to see this.

35:48 True.

35:48 It actually crushed the pipe.

35:50 Just it's amazing.

35:51 I'll have to take a look at the current.

35:54 Just want a better shot of that waveform.

35:58 It's really only like 90,000 at the peak, but um hey, it did it.

36:03 It did it.

36:04 So, I actually managed to find the uh the pipe that I tried,

36:08 you know, directly melting and crushing with my 100 car batteries.

36:11 And you can see how it's uh it didn't crush at all.

36:14 So, it's really cool to see that uh what the increased current does.

36:18 So, it you know, they both melted on both sides,

36:21 but clearly the uh the 400 car batteries really

36:24 uh it really made the more dramatic crush there.

36:27 I still wanted to crush a pipe without it melting though,

36:30 which meant I had to go back to using fuses.

36:33 When I tried zapping an annealed pipe,

36:35 I lucked out with a perfect shot of the switch.

36:38 However, it did not crush the pipe.

36:40 I clearly needed more time for the current to rise,

36:43 but using any bigger of a fuse would melt the pipe first.

36:46 That is unless maybe I could try water cooling it.

36:49 I found this aquarium in the woods years ago.

36:52 And since I haven't put any fish in it by now,

36:55 I figured I might as well use it for this experiment.

36:57 I really hope that this works because uh I I

37:00 don't know what I'm going to do if it doesn't.

37:02 I mean, I put a lot of stock into the uh into the idea

37:05 that I was going to easily crush a pipe with these batteries,

37:08 but yeah, it turned out to be harder than I uh than I expected.

37:12 So, yeah, I'm really crossing my fingers that this one works.

37:14 So, I'm going to use this uh this giant flashlight here at full power

37:18 to uh to illuminate this so my uh my slow motion camera can see it.

37:24 I'm going to need a lot of light.

37:27 Okay.

37:28 Okay.

37:29 Here we go.

37:33 Get ready to sprint.

37:38 So, explodes.

37:41 Then I hit the button.

37:47 There we go.

37:51 Okay.

37:52 What happened?

37:52 The slow-mo shows that the magnetic forces

37:55 broke the aquarium right off the get-go.

37:57 Then the pipe started to crush, but then it exploded.

38:02 Clearly, everything is happening way too fast here for the water to do anything.

38:07 The ends of the pipe were crushed when it exploded,

38:10 but this isn't much different from what

38:12 happened with the unfused pipe in open air.

38:15 Notably, the switch performed horribly in that shot,

38:17 and this was a good reminder that I

38:19 should go back to solving that glaring issue.

38:22 Zapping smaller load showed that the switch wouldn't bounce

38:25 until the current rose to around 100,000 amps or so.

38:28 Maybe all I need are some huge springs to hold the plates closed beyond that.

38:32 This seemed worth trying, but I was too impatient and zapped a few

38:38 more items before making modifications to the switch.

38:42 I was particularly excited to pop these magnesium anode rods.

38:48 Here we go.

39:04 What?

39:05 It blew up my fuses.

39:07 It uh as you can see, it you know blew up all those fuses and the magnesium one.

39:14 You know, I see that they all melted at the uh like at the lugs there.

39:21 It wasn't the wire that melted.

39:23 It could be that the fuse current

39:25 of those lugs is lower than the actual quadruple cable.

39:29 When upgrading the cable fuses,

39:31 I noticed that two of them had been untorqued from the magnetic forces,

39:35 allowing some corrosion to get between the contacts.

39:37 With bigger fuses and clean contacts,

39:39 I was able to achieve even higher peak currents.

39:44 I got a particularly impressive number when zapping the zinc plate.

39:52 Due to fresh fuses and hot weather improving the battery performance,

39:56 I achieved a peak current of 176,000 amps with this shot.

40:00 Now, something I wanted to point out is uh so I tossed this makeshift

40:05 this little wooden cover over this actuator

40:07 that pulls out the pin that fires the switch.

40:10 And as you can see, it's taken quite a beating.

40:12 It's just coated in in copper there.

40:15 Now, the funny thing is that I had these copper wires that held

40:19 it in place and those melted before the the wood gave way.

40:22 It just wood is like a surprisingly resilient material against plasma blast.

40:26 It's the same way with lasers, too.

40:29 So, it's uh it's funny how the uh the wood outlasted the copper there.

40:33 At this point, I realized I had to quit procrastinating and decided

40:37 to go ahead with welding some big springs to the switch.

40:46 Well, I will say one thing.

40:48 These batteries, they don't scare me.

40:50 What does scare me are these uh springs here.

40:52 I have to load them up with the uh ATV winch.

40:56 So, uh yeah, these these are less predictable.

40:59 I don't know what these want to do.

41:01 My welds could rip off, bolts could snap.

41:03 Who knows?

41:04 These batteries, I feel like I have a good good idea of what they're capable of.

41:09 Okay, got these springs mounted on here.

41:11 That way the uh internal spring as well

41:14 as these new springs make a nice little triangle there.

41:16 And I'm going to finally test it to see how it works.

41:20 I really hope this keeps the switch closed.

41:26 Scopes ready.

41:28 All right, here we go.

41:32 No, your video player didn't lock up.

41:34 I just wanted to take this moment to admire

41:37 the incredible light output of these copper plasmas.

41:50 Anyway, I can't tell what happened.

41:54 It seemed oscillatory, unfortunately.

41:56 Unfortunately, the switch was still bouncing.

41:59 The new springs added so much tension that it maxed

42:02 out the 1,600lb hand winch I used to load them up.

42:06 And yet, they barely hindered the bouncing in the switch.

42:09 Shorting one car battery may be easy,

42:11 but shorting 400 takes a feat of engineering.

42:15 I initially discounted the idea of using solid state switching,

42:19 but out of desperation, I revisited the idea.

42:21 Much to my surprise,

42:23 I found that big SCRs were more than capable of switching the batteries.

42:28 However, I couldn't find a single distributor that had big ones in stock,

42:31 so I had to resort to brute force tactics.

42:33 I bought another log splitter.

42:35 I should point out that I've been using the hydraulic part

42:39 of the log splitter to open the switch, not close it.

42:42 The idea is that the tough hydraulics can rip apart the plates when they weld,

42:46 and it's functioned perfectly for this purpose.

42:49 However, its big internal spring I've been using

42:51 to close the switch is clearly not enough.

42:54 Adding a second log splitter makes the closing action hydraulic as well,

42:57 but it comes at the cost of moving much slower than the spring.

43:01 In addition, I added some rails and reinforced

43:04 the entire structure with a bunch of steel posts.

43:06 The reasoning is that the slow-mo shots had

43:09 shown the plate sliding sideways from magnetic forces.

43:11 So, I wanted to lock everything to one axis to prevent that.

43:15 I had a little mishap when I tested the return springs I added.

43:22 Oh, shoot.

43:23 That was what I was worried about.

43:27 Oh, it just it just straight up sheared off the uh the hook.

43:35 See, that's a that's what I mean when I say springs are actually scary.

43:41 Electricity doesn't scare me.

43:42 Springs scare me.

43:43 I ended up just forgoing the return

43:45 spring since the internal one seemed adequate.

43:48 All right, for the first test with the uh with the two log splitters here,

43:52 I'm going to zap two more of those quadruple aught

43:55 cables just because they have a very predictable uh fusing properties.

44:00 So, yeah, I really really hope that this works.

44:10 All right, there we go.

44:16 That was good.

44:17 That was very good.

44:19 I liked that.

44:20 The scope showed that the switch bounced at first,

44:24 but it did eventually completely close

44:26 when 160,000 amps were passing through it.

44:29 The slow-mo confirms this as well,

44:31 as the switch quits making sparks before the cables explode.

44:34 The drop in current at the end was

44:37 from the cables getting magnetically ripped from the blocks.

44:40 Further testing gave the same results.

44:42 The switch would initially bounce, but it would still close afterwards.

44:46 I had to concede that this was going to have to do.

44:49 I needed to continue on to the main

44:52 experiments before autumn temperatures got too cold

44:54 and put too much of a hinder on the currents I could pull from my batteries.

44:58 It took me months, but now I finally reached the point

45:01 where I can hold sustained currents of over 150,000 amps.

45:04 You're about to see what this kind of current can do to small objects,

45:07 but I still think it's worth giving you a sense

45:10 of scale and just how incredible this number really is.

45:13 So, how big is 150,000 amps?

45:15 Well, this is fusion reactor levels of current.

45:18 And this is enough to ignite DT nuclear fusion in a Z-pinch fusor.

45:23 This level of current exceeds the entirety of the auroral

45:27 birkeland currents that surround the planet on a typical day.

45:30 It also far exceeds even the top 1% of lightning strikes.

45:34 And in fact, the charge transfer during a single shot from these batteries

45:38 is more comparable to an entire thunderstorm's worth of lightning bolts.

45:42 Now I get to screw around with these baffling levels of current.

45:46 A 1-in bolt was the finale of my 100 battery video,

45:51 so I'm curious to see if it's much different with 400 batteries.

46:11 [laughter] Wow, that was a lot of sparks.

46:16 That was really cool.

46:18 Wow.

46:19 So, in the previous video, I made a crowbar circuit.

46:22 So, of course, I want to try it with the 400 car batteries this time.

46:25 Now, as a review, a crowbar circuit is a real thing.

46:28 It just uh usually doesn't mean using a a literal crowbar for it.

46:32 Just means to have something short the power

46:34 supply rails to protect the rest of the circuit.

46:36 So, yeah, let's see how long this thing will hold up to the car batteries.

46:44 All righty.

46:45 And here we go.

46:47 Whoa.

46:53 Whoa.

46:54 Everything's on fire.

46:56 [laughter] Oh, that's beautiful, dude.

46:59 Every That's insane.

47:00 Look at all that hot metal.

47:02 Look at all that hot metal.

47:04 It's like burning the dirt.

47:06 Look at that.

47:07 All that just incredible.

47:08 It It blew it up into a bunch of chunks.

47:11 That's really crazy.

47:13 It didn't do that last time.

47:15 My friend James brought over his dad's old

47:18 wrench to see it zapped by the car batteries.

47:21 Where's the leak, ma'am?

47:30 Wow, that was faster than I expected.

47:34 Whoa.

47:34 What?

47:35 Wow.

47:35 That is Wait, that broke like Yeah, it it it broke in a bunch of spots.

47:41 Just like what happened to the crowbar.

47:43 The magnetic forces on the wrench broke it

47:45 up into several pieces when it melted through.

47:48 I still hadn't figured out where this upward force was coming from.

47:52 But when I zapped brass bars, I had an epiphany.

47:54 The big bar suffered the same fate as many of the cables I had blown up,

47:58 and that it was magnetically ejected before it could burn through.

48:02 It still made an impressive display of sparks, though.

48:06 It was the small bar that gave me the revelation.

48:13 It got launched, didn't it?

48:15 The bar melted on both ends and was ejected perfectly upwards,

48:18 being sent into a fast spin as it was launched.

48:22 The bar solidified into this bent shape,

48:24 which I figured approximated the equilibrium state of forces

48:26 on the bar when it's on the blocks.

48:29 I've already mentioned that the forces

48:31 from the opposing loops of cable cancel out,

48:33 which meant that the upward force must have been coming

48:35 from the fields of the nearby path of current feeding the loads.

48:38 I realized that an object off the axis of the main current would

48:42 be exposed to much stronger fields than an object in line with the current.

48:46 The fact that the current had to make the small bend

48:49 off the blocks was the origin of this super strong force.

48:52 The funny thing is that this explanation is actually wrong,

48:56 but it still gives the right result.

48:58 Mounting objects closer to the center

49:00 of the block ends would reduce these forces.

49:02 When I zapped a kilogram ingot of bismuth,

49:07 I was able to jam it in the middle well enough to minimize these forces.

49:20 This was one of the most impressive burnthroughs I achieved with the batteries,

49:23 and there was very little left of the bar afterwards.

49:26 The slow-mo shows that much of the metal likely boiled off,

49:30 giving these incredible plasma fireballs as the metal

49:33 vapor reacted with the oxygen in the air.

49:35 The yellow color of the smoke is due

49:37 to the bismouth triioxide that was formed in the reaction.

49:40 I zapped a big block of zinc and although it wasn't particularly noteworthy,

49:46 it did lead to something funny.

49:54 So, look at this ridiculous thing.

49:56 So, these blocks were sitting on the ground

49:58 and got magnetically sucked in there.

50:00 Then they shorted and welded themselves together.

50:03 Zinc gives far more beautiful effects when it's plated onto steel,

50:08 like on this galvanized pipe here.

50:10 It's funny because I zapped all sorts of weird and exotic metals for this video,

50:15 and humble old zinc stole the show from all but a few of them.

50:18 Zinc's fairly high reactivity paired with its unusually low boiling point gives

50:23 unique effects unlike any other metal I've zapped other than maybe bismuth.

50:27 The fact that zinc burns green at a modest light level is

50:31 what really takes the cake when it comes to slow-mo filming though.

50:34 I zapped a couple titanium bars.

50:36 And although they were cool,

50:38 they were so bright that I failed to get good slow-mo footage of them.

50:42 The most notable effect from this trial was that the two

50:45 bars magnetically attracted each other and welded themselves together.

50:48 I zapped some pieces of zirconium,

50:52 which is among the hottest and brightest burning metals.

51:00 There we go.

51:02 That was so bright.

51:04 Much like titanium, zirconium was so bright

51:06 that it too was challenging to capture on camera.

51:10 It feels weird for me to complain about something being too bright,

51:13 but the enormous contrast and light levels is difficult

51:16 to squeeze within the dynamic range of even a nice camera.

51:19 I substantially dialed back the exposure

51:21 on the slow-mo shots compared to most other metals,

51:24 and they still ended up on the overexposed side.

51:27 Now, that being said, I love how well the little popping pieces

51:31 of burning zirconium show up in these scenes.

51:34 I revisited titanium in the form of little

51:37 chunks to make another attempt at slow-mo.

51:39 I cranked back the exposure, but it still wasn't as much as I should have.

51:44 Now, that being said,

51:45 it still showcased similar popping sparks to what I got with the zirconium.

51:50 As a bonus, this shot made a perfect smoke ring as well.

51:56 I was curious how this configuration would

51:58 work with a bunch of Abe Zincoln pennies.

52:02 I'm pouring one out for the US penny.

52:06 Ha.

52:08 This one I see I shot with a laser at some point.

52:25 Funny.

52:26 So, there's one really, really big spike there,

52:29 like uh about 140,000 amps for a short bit.

52:33 So, that's [laughter] Wow, that that was actually more than I expected.

52:38 But of course, it was very brief.

52:41 That's hilarious.

52:41 I was surprised how violently the pennies

52:44 were ejected from the center like this.

52:47 But then again, weirder things have happened at 140,000 amps.

52:51 Yet again, zinc showed off its beautiful pyrotechnic colors in this shot,

52:56 which were likely complimented by the copper

52:58 shells that surround the zinc cores.

53:00 The thick and delicious zinc oxide smoke

53:03 seems to make filming the burning metal so

53:05 much easier as the smoke diffuses the light

53:08 and limits such stark contrast in light levels.

53:11 I tried the same configuration with a bunch of bolts

53:18 and nuts to see if ferromagnetic effects would change anything.

53:27 Wow, look how much different that was.

53:29 So, they didn't even get ejected.

53:30 They all just stayed there for the most part.

53:33 I guess they were magnetically sucked in there.

53:35 That's really interesting.

53:36 Wow.

53:37 Yeah.

53:38 Look at that.

53:39 Just one giant mass that all melted together.

53:44 Now, that is an abstract art piece there.

53:48 Beautiful.

53:49 I revisited aluminum and had a few notable shots.

53:53 In one trial, it made a really cool sounding oscillator.

53:59 The lens on my tree camera was hit in another shot as well.

54:03 Since aluminum burns so brightly in air, I wondered,

54:06 would it burn in the same way if I zap some underwater?

54:09 When I tried crushing a copper pipe underwater,

54:11 it ended up just exploding, but it made for really cool high-speed footage.

54:16 I found another aquarium in the woods to attempt this setup with aluminum cable.

54:21 All right.

54:25 So, camera flashlight camera flashlight.

54:35 Okay.

54:37 I think I'm ready.

54:44 Glass went absolutely everywhere on that shot.

54:50 I mean, everywhere.

54:51 Water went everywhere.

54:53 My cameras are soaked.

54:55 My uh that was that was ridiculous.

54:59 That that thing blew up so violently.

55:04 Okay.

55:05 I really hope that was good.

55:09 Whoa.

55:10 Oh my goodness.

55:11 Oh, that was a cool shot.

55:15 Wow.

55:15 That was beautiful.

55:17 Okay.

55:17 Yes, that's what I wanted.

55:19 Only the Lord decides how the switch will perform in a given shot,

55:23 and this was its slowest turn on of the entire video.

55:26 Now, this gradual ramp up of the current

55:28 actually made for some interesting slow motion effects.

55:31 Once the aluminum was heated well beyond the boiling point of water,

55:35 the leidenfrost effect became apparent through these neat oscillating bubbles.

55:38 The switch managed to close about a millisecond before the cable melted,

55:43 pushing the current to around 70,000 amps as it exploded.

55:47 You can actually see the aluminum melt here.

55:49 And notice how it gets magnetically

55:52 crushed inwards the moment before it explodes.

55:54 This explosion was so much more violent than the copper

55:57 pipe that I suspect that chemical effects played a role.

56:01 The reaction of aluminum and water is extremely energetic,

56:04 exceeding even thermite by mass.

56:07 However, this reaction is incredibly difficult to initiate,

56:11 but I figure a 70,000 amp plasma would do it.

56:14 I wanted a better shot of the explosion itself,

56:17 so I obtained another aquarium and crimped another aluminum cable.

56:21 I used a smaller lug that better fit the cable

56:26 in order to push the explosion to the center.

56:32 All right, here we go.

56:42 Okay, that sounded good.

56:45 Unfortunately, the copper lugs exploded before the aluminum here.

56:50 I managed to push a 100,000 amps through this one,

56:54 but the explosion was less violent than the previous shot,

56:58 which implies the shot earlier was indeed chemically enhanced.

57:02 I substantially dialed back the exposure

57:04 on the slow-mo compared to the last shot.

57:06 And even though it was the copper that exploded here,

57:10 the details of the plasma bubble are much more apparent this time.

57:17 The last element on my list to zap is tungsten,

57:19 which is the metal with the highest melting point.

57:22 This quarter inch thick rod may not seem like much,

57:26 but this is tungsten after all, so there's a sizable mass here.

57:30 Here goes nothing.

57:42 Did it Did it just burn through instantly?

57:46 What?

57:46 All right.

57:47 This is really strange here.

57:49 So, uh, it actually just burned and melted the steel around that.

57:52 There was a steel holding it down and it just melted right through that.

57:57 I I think the tungsten did burn a bit,

57:59 but uh yeah, I just melted everything else around it.

58:02 I guess I I shouldn't be so surprised, but that's pretty funny.

58:06 Well, I I smacked it to unweld it and uh it just broke it.

58:11 Of course, tungsten is pretty brittle,

58:12 so I'm going to have to get a bigger piece of tungsten here to zap.

58:17 All right, I've got this long tungsten rod here.

58:20 So, it's 1/4 in in diameter.

58:22 And the thing is, I I know that electrically

58:24 this isn't a big challenge for these batteries here.

58:27 This is really more of a a materials challenge.

58:30 All right.

58:30 So, the idea here is that I' I've added

58:33 some copper under the uh this tungsten rod here.

58:35 And then I'm going to use these graphite

58:38 blocks to to hold it down with the clamps.

58:40 So, yeah, hopefully this works.

58:42 I'm starting to worry that I'm not going to be able to pull this off,

58:46 but uh this should at least make a lot of sparks.

58:56 So, let's try this.

59:00 All right, here we go.

59:05 Oh yeah, it completely detonated.

59:08 Oh yes, it completely detonated in there.

59:12 Wow.

59:12 Completely obliterated it.

59:14 So, let's see what what the remnants look like here.

59:19 Look at that.

59:20 That's true melting.

59:21 Happened so fast that it definitely wasn't burning.

59:24 It actually straight melted the tungsten.

59:26 The slow-mo of this shot is one of my favorites from the entire video.

59:31 The white hot rod gets magnetically shattered into pieces as it melts,

59:35 sending a shower of burning fragments upward in a scene

59:39 that resembles something from the Hubble Space Telescope.

59:42 All right.

59:43 So, you can clearly see that that definitely melted there.

59:47 So, I mean, and it happened so fast

59:49 that this couldn't possibly just be from burning.

59:52 You can see how it liquefied there.

59:55 I might I might try zapping these pieces in parallel

1:00:01 to see uh maybe get a better slow-mo shot.

1:00:19 Holy heck.

1:00:19 I dialed back the exposure a bit compared to the first shot.

1:00:24 And yet, this one ended up even more overexposed than the first.

1:00:28 I really should have expected this with twice the metal, though.

1:00:32 Not only did it melt, it was splashed upwards there.

1:00:35 Man, I wish I wish tungsten wasn't so expensive because

1:00:39 I'd love to throw just a huge chunk on here.

1:00:42 I ended up splurging on this half inch thick rod of tungsten.

1:00:45 Once again, this may not look like that much, but it weighs nearly a kilogram.

1:00:50 To put that in perspective, this thing weighs more than a typical fox squirrel,

1:00:55 which is North America's largest species of tree squirrel.

1:00:58 The thing is though,

1:01:00 melting this rod in air felt like it wouldn't even be a challenge.

1:01:04 Of course, the batteries could do it.

1:01:06 I wanted to melt this rod underwater.

1:01:08 This meant I had to come up with some clever mounts.

1:01:11 Even though copper melts at a far lower temperature than tungsten,

1:01:15 I figured that with enough contact area and a big enough current,

1:01:18 the tungsten would still melt even if

1:01:20 the full contact area of the copper melted first.

1:01:23 The only issue with a full liquid metal conduction interface is

1:01:26 that nothing would stop magnetic forces

1:01:28 from blasting the copper plates outwards.

1:01:30 So, I loosely bolted the plates to a block of phenolic.

1:01:35 That way, as the copper melts,

1:01:37 the magnetic forces will twist the plates in a way

1:01:39 that exposes the tungsten to more solid copper.

1:01:42 I couldn't find any more aquariums in the woods,

1:01:45 so I had to start buying them at Walmart.

1:01:48 The setup of this took so long.

1:01:50 I I will be very disappointed if this does not work.

1:01:55 All right.

1:01:56 Oh, man.

1:01:57 I'm nervous.

1:01:58 Okay.

1:01:59 All right.

1:02:00 Here we go.

1:02:19 What happened?

1:02:21 I don't even know what happened.

1:02:26 Oh, it's totally gone.

1:02:28 What happened here?

1:02:29 I didn't hear like this big explosion, but I just heard like this boiling.

1:02:35 The scope makes it look like it melted instantly.

1:02:38 I I don't see I don't see the tungsten rod.

1:02:42 I don't know what happened to it.

1:02:44 And it clearly exploded.

1:02:45 So yeah, that's we'll find out once once this is done saving.

1:02:49 That's really strange.

1:02:51 There's a lot to unravel in this footage.

1:02:53 So I'm going to start with the real time views.

1:03:06 Let's start with the obvious.

1:03:08 The tungsten was blown to pieces as well as the aquarium.

1:03:12 However, did you notice that crazy blue smoke?

1:03:15 The submerged piece of white hot tungsten reacted

1:03:18 with water to make this ridiculous mixed sub oxide.

1:03:21 I had no idea tungsten could make a blue compound like this.

1:03:24 When the water drained and this piece was exposed to air,

1:03:28 it then burned with a typical yellowish smoke associated with this triioxide.

1:03:33 Another important detail is that the cables feeding

1:03:36 the aquarium z-pinched so violently that they nearly uncrimped themselves.

1:03:40 Now for the slow-mo, the current in this shot quickly rose to 100,000 amps,

1:03:47 producing tremendous magnetic forces on the cable loop feeding the rod.

1:03:51 And it was these forces that shattered the aquarium.

1:03:54 It took a full tenth of a second

1:03:56 for the tungsten to melt after the aquarium first broke.

1:03:59 And since the view is so obscured by water at this point,

1:04:02 I can't say for sure whether it actually melted underwater.

1:04:05 Chances are better than not that some part of it was exposed to air, though.

1:04:09 Yeah, the Lorentz forces were too strong.

1:04:12 It looks like it just it's so hard to avoid those huge forces just

1:04:16 because I have to the cable has to bend when it goes in there.

1:04:20 You know, if I were to uh if I had time to redo this again,

1:04:23 I would replace two of the edges on the aquarium

1:04:25 so I could uh with like on a wood or something.

1:04:28 That way I could I could pass the cable straight through it.

1:04:31 That would that would save a lot of the forces.

1:04:34 But uh I guess for now, I'm going to have to call it quits.

1:04:37 At this point, I decided to revisit the magnetic pipe crushing experiments.

1:04:41 Even though I had already managed a hot pipe crush earlier,

1:04:45 I wanted a better slow-mo shot of that happening.

1:04:51 So, I repeated the trial with another unfused pipe.

1:04:58 However, it failed to crush.

1:05:00 The new switch was way too slow to crush even a melting half-in pipe.

1:05:04 With the switch before this, the current

1:05:07 would quickly ramp up to a 100,000 amps, even if it bounced afterwards.

1:05:11 While this new switch can actually close,

1:05:13 it can take a full tenth of a second to reach full current.

1:05:18 That's way too slow.

1:05:19 I moved up to bigger size pipes for the next trials.

1:05:22 I didn't have any cable that would conveniently crimp to this size of pipe,

1:05:26 so I just smash the pipe ends flat with a hammer.

1:05:29 The idea with the bigger pipe is that it would allow

1:05:32 the current to rise to a higher value before the pipe melts.

1:05:36 Although it comes at the cost of requiring

1:05:38 even higher current to achieve a given magnetic pressure.

1:05:41 Unfortunately, even this did not lead to the pipe crushing.

1:05:44 Then one day I had some friends over and I stuck a pipe

1:05:49 on the contacts just with the intention of making a loud bang for them.

1:05:55 The switch decided to turn on quickly for once.

1:05:59 What was the second one?

1:06:01 So usually this cuz the switch is slow.

1:06:03 So you heard the switch go and the but something was magnetically ejected.

1:06:09 I don't know what something got thrown.

1:06:12 Got thrown.

1:06:17 Woo!

1:06:17 Yeah, look at that.

1:06:19 Completely totally crushed.

1:06:21 The pipe was crushed so violently that it folded twice.

1:06:25 It's too bad I didn't set up external lighting for the slow-mo

1:06:28 camera since I would have liked to have seen more detail here.

1:06:32 The magnetic field managed to suck in some

1:06:35 nearby steel plates and toss them into the yard.

1:06:41 This sent me on a wild goose chase of catching this effect in better lighting.

1:06:46 Naturally, the effect turned out to be super difficult to repeat

1:06:49 as the switch returned to misbehaving and turning on too slowly.

1:06:52 I was determined to get this to show up on camera, though,

1:06:55 and blew up more pipes than I'd like to admit in pursuit.

1:06:59 The switch wasn't always the failure mode in every shot, though.

1:07:02 Sometimes the C clamps would give way and other times steel

1:07:06 objects nearby would get sucked in magnetically and photobomb the shot.

1:07:10 Crushing the pipe flat did turn out to be somewhat repeatable.

1:07:13 If I hadn't seen the cool double fold earlier,

1:07:16 I would have been quite content with this.

1:07:18 However, I figured that with enough trials,

1:07:20 the odds would be in my favor for the double fold to happen again.

1:07:25 After countless trials, I finally got the lucky shot I was waiting for.

1:07:39 In hindsight, I think the trick was placing the pipe on the edge of the blocks,

1:07:44 as this intersects a stronger external magnetic

1:07:46 field than zigzagging the pipe through the middle.

1:07:49 This adds additional lateral forces along the full

1:07:53 length of the pipe that help initiate folding.

1:07:57 I didn't stop there, though.

1:07:59 I still wanted to crush a pipe without melting it

1:08:01 and came up with an elaborate plan to do so.

1:08:05 For starters, I suspected I could bypass the log splitter

1:08:08 switch by using an SCR to slam on the circuit.

1:08:11 Of course, I didn't expect the SCR to survive

1:08:15 this, but if it worked for a single shot, that would be good enough.

1:08:18 I also upgraded the pipe from the hardware

1:08:20 store variety to oxygen-free high conductivity copper.

1:08:23 The reason being is that at liquid nitrogen temperatures,

1:08:27 it's 10 times more conductive than copper at room temperature.

1:08:31 This allows for significantly more time

1:08:34 for the current to rise before the pipe melts.

1:08:38 Now I close the main switch and it's not touching.

1:08:47 Okay, now I hit this.

1:08:53 Go.

1:09:06 No, I missed it on my camera.

1:09:13 Heck.

1:09:14 No.

1:09:17 [screaming] I had been struggling with my slow-mo camera getting EMPed,

1:09:21 so I removed the trigger cable prior to this.

1:09:24 I forgot that this changed the trigger rules on the camera,

1:09:28 and pressing the record button didn't actually start the recording.

1:09:32 Okay, so man, it's too bad I don't have data from this shot,

1:09:36 but it actually it did pinch a little bit,

1:09:39 but I think the most intriguing part is that it uncrimped itself.

1:09:44 So, this cable probably got, you know,

1:09:47 crushed and then it pulled itself out there.

1:09:50 So, it pulled out the crimp.

1:09:51 That's pretty wild cuz I I I really crushed it down with a hydraulic crimp.

1:09:56 So, there was some pinching and there's a little bit of crushing.

1:09:59 A little bit of crushing, but man, I I just wish I had the data from that shot.

1:10:04 That's a real shame.

1:10:05 I decided to give this setup another

1:10:07 try with a much more aggressively crimped pipe.

1:10:15 I'm going to hit the camera to detonate it.

1:10:26 Right.

1:10:28 Okay.

1:10:29 Okay.

1:10:29 What happened?

1:10:30 Didn't even see any of this.

1:10:32 Let's go look at the slow-mo.

1:10:34 I did actually manage to capture slow-mo of this one.

1:10:38 It's interesting how the SCR in this shot exploded,

1:10:41 even though the one prior to this did not.

1:10:44 Of course, the first one was still destroyed, though.

1:10:46 Well, looks like it's the SCR that failed there.

1:10:52 So, yeah, didn't uh didn't quite work.

1:10:56 That fuse is still totally intact.

1:10:58 They had a peak of a little under 100,000 amps,

1:11:01 but yeah, I couldn't make it any any higher than that.

1:11:05 I wonder how much of that was the SCR's fault.

1:11:08 versus other heating in the circuit.

1:11:10 But yep, disappointing.

1:11:12 At this point, I had to admit defeat with the cold pipe

1:11:16 crush because there are still so many more experiments left to do.

1:11:19 The cold pipe crush could probably be done with a pulse forming inductor,

1:11:23 though, or maybe just another 400 car batteries.

1:11:26 I want to do a brief section on zapping

1:11:29 auto parts since this was a popular request for me.

1:11:32 An ignition coil seemed like a good place to start.

1:11:35 In the past, I've abused ignition coils

1:11:37 to pull off some cool high voltage tricks.

1:11:40 With the batteries, though,

1:11:42 the internal coil melted too fast for anything interesting to happen.

1:11:46 I figured that a starter motor would be more durable than the ignition

1:11:50 coil since it's designed to draw a significant amount of current in operation.

1:11:54 Something tells me it isn't quite rated for the full 400 car batteries, though.

1:12:00 All right, here we go.

1:12:10 That was a lame.

1:12:11 Slow-mo shows that the motor did start to spin,

1:12:14 but it still only managed to survive for mere milliseconds before burning up.

1:12:18 Now, I'm just going to try shorting it through the case.

1:12:22 I feel like this should be uh should make more sparks this way at least.

1:12:35 Ah, yes.

1:12:35 Much better.

1:12:36 I have this long dead car battery here

1:12:39 that measures 0 volts and will not take a charge.

1:12:42 I'm curious what will happen by zapping it with the batteries.

1:12:46 You know, I feel like containing this one wouldn't be such a bad idea.

1:12:51 I'll uh play it safe with this microwave casing.

1:12:56 Uh here we go.

1:13:08 Oh jeez.

1:13:11 Can't tell what happened.

1:13:16 This was one of my most surprising experiments.

1:13:18 It looked as if nothing happened.

1:13:20 But instead of exploding, this battery was actually revived somewhat.

1:13:24 It seems the plates were desulfated because

1:13:27 the battery can now take and hold a charge.

1:13:30 That's wild.

1:13:31 You know, jumper cables work pretty well with one car battery.

1:13:34 So, of course, I wonder how well they'll work with 400.

1:13:36 I wonder if uh I wonder if they'll

1:13:39 melt first or if they'll magnetically rip apart.

1:13:42 So, I guess they're just one way to find out.

1:13:46 Oh.

1:13:46 Oh, hey.

1:13:47 I was not expecting this.

1:13:49 Oh, are you going to be a problem?

1:13:51 because um I can't blow things up if you're here.

1:13:55 Are you going to interfere with my uh with my car batteries?

1:13:59 My squirrel friend Ophelia decided to visit,

1:14:02 so I had to wait to test out the jumper cables.

1:14:04 She's used to all the explosions at this point, but I figured I'd let her chew

1:14:09 on these antlers in peace before blowing anything up.

1:14:12 After a subsequent splooting session,

1:14:14 she ran off and I was able to continue with the jumper cable test.

1:14:19 Here's the uh jig for the uh jumper cables.

1:14:21 So, I'm just going to I just have them short

1:14:24 of there just to just just to see what happens there.

1:14:29 So, we'll see what breaks off first.

1:14:33 Here I go.

1:14:34 What?

1:14:35 What?

1:14:36 The switch is closed.

1:14:38 Oh, well, there's the culprit.

1:14:42 It just it melted through the uh I

1:14:45 guess where it was crimped to the clamp there.

1:14:48 Well, if these clamps are just going to melt off,

1:14:50 I at least want to see what the what the actual cable does.

1:14:56 So, now I just have the bare cable against the blocks.

1:15:05 All right.

1:15:06 So, this is kind of sus.

1:15:07 Get that in focus.

1:15:08 Look how Look, it's silver colored.

1:15:10 Is this like copper plated aluminum or something?

1:15:13 The the box said it was pure copper.

1:15:15 Well, that is that that's not pure copper.

1:15:17 I don't like that.

1:15:19 I think this is just garbage.

1:15:20 Uh garbage jumper cable.

1:15:22 I ended up making some much nicer jumper cables using four aught copper cable.

1:15:28 All right.

1:15:29 This is what I have for the new jumper cable setup.

1:15:33 So, have them actually bolted together there.

1:15:35 But you can see you can see how that is glued together there.

1:15:41 So, that's that's really what I wanted to show.

1:15:52 All right.

1:15:55 Am I ready?

1:15:59 Yes.

1:16:00 Oh yeah, they got obliterated.

1:16:02 [laughter] They got obliterated.

1:16:04 Nice.

1:16:04 This was exactly what I was hoping to see.

1:16:08 The huge currents traveling in opposite directions through

1:16:10 the cables caused tremendous magnetic forces that ripped them apart.

1:16:14 I couldn't get this to happen with the garbage cables

1:16:17 I zapped earlier because they melted before passing enough current.

1:16:21 The final auto part to zap is the suspension spring here.

1:16:25 And I did this one with an audience.

1:16:29 Are you guys ready?

1:16:32 Yep.

1:16:32 All right, here we go.

1:16:46 Heck, this suspension spring ended up as one

1:16:48 of my favorite shots of the whole project.

1:16:50 And for such an ironic reason, too.

1:16:53 The long length of steel acted

1:16:55 as a resistor and substantially limited the current,

1:16:58 starting at only 8,000 amps and dropping to less

1:17:00 than a thousand by the time it melted through.

1:17:03 It's usually all or nothing with these batteries.

1:17:07 Either the items are obliterated in milliseconds or nothing interesting happens.

1:17:11 It was cool to see something that fell

1:17:14 in the middle ground between these two categories.

1:17:16 Later on, I zapped a length of chain that gave a similar middle ground result.

1:17:21 In this case, the chain reached a steady state

1:17:24 where it got red hot but never melted through.

1:17:26 Other than this chain and the suspension spring, though,

1:17:30 everything else I zapped either instantly exploded or had no visible reaction.

1:17:36 Whoa.

1:17:36 For the next experiment,

1:17:39 I've hooked the output of the car batteries up to this metal stick here,

1:17:42 mainly because I want to try cutting stuff with it.

1:17:44 Now, I did some experiments like this in the last video, but with this one,

1:17:48 I'm most interested in testing different electrode materials cuz I can already

1:17:51 tell you that the steel electrode here is not going to last long.

1:17:55 So yeah, let's get to experimenting.

1:17:57 Now, I'm going to have to step up the PPE for this section.

1:18:00 In particular, I have this arc flash hood.

1:18:02 Now, this was actually given to me by Greg Leyh.

1:18:04 And if you don't know who he is, he uh he recently had a lot of notoriety

1:18:08 for his Lorentz Cannon video that he posted.

1:18:10 Now, I actually find it hilarious that this is the video that got

1:18:14 him so much notoriety because that's really like a a tame project for him.

1:18:17 He's currently building the biggest Tesla coils ever operated

1:18:20 right now to do some just ridiculous uh lightning experiments.

1:18:23 So yeah, that guy is the man when it comes to electricity.

1:18:27 So if you don't know who he is, you should definitely check him out.

1:18:30 And yes, a big thank you to him for giving me this arc flash hood.

1:18:34 I'm going to keep this section short

1:18:36 because between my respirator and arc flash hood,

1:18:39 it sounded like I was speaking through a wet sock on my microphone.

1:18:43 I would like to take a moment to appreciate the sparks that iron makes,

1:18:47 not only here, but throughout this whole project.

1:18:50 Iron sparks aren't nearly as bright as many other metals.

1:18:53 But this fairly subtle effect pairs nicely

1:18:56 with the extreme powers I have available.

1:18:58 Plus, when it comes to filming these effects,

1:19:01 it's much easier to capture something like iron

1:19:03 sparking compared to a bright metal like magnesium.

1:19:06 Honestly, iron is an underappreciated element overall.

1:19:10 You know, I think of those memes where it says,

1:19:14 "This is why women live longer than men." Yeah, that was fun.

1:19:19 Now, I want you to notice those curved paths there.

1:19:22 I felt this, you know,

1:19:23 force off to the side when I was uh when I was trying to cut there.

1:19:27 I think that was being magnetically deflected.

1:19:29 It was uh it was really strong, too.

1:19:31 All right.

1:19:32 Now, I've upgraded to a magnesium electrode this time.

1:19:36 Now, magnesium doesn't have a very high melting point,

1:19:38 but it is surprisingly conductive.

1:19:40 And most importantly, it's very pyrotechnic.

1:19:42 So, I'm curious to see what happens when I try

1:19:44 cutting iron with this uh with this magnesium electrode here.

1:19:48 Oh dear.

1:19:49 Right off the bat, it was clear that magnesium was an entirely different animal.

1:19:56 Since magnesium burns so readily and energetically in air,

1:20:00 these chemical effects greatly enhanced the heat produced in the ark.

1:20:03 It didn't take long to ignite a good

1:20:06 portion of my yard on fire with these scenes.

1:20:09 The most dramatic difference compared to iron was

1:20:11 how hard it was to hold the magnesium electrode.

1:20:14 It was extremely difficult to make more than a brief contact since

1:20:17 the electrode would get forcefully ejected from the object I was zapping.

1:20:21 The magnesium was obviously drawing more current here.

1:20:24 Now, one interesting thing I do want to note

1:20:27 is that the the magnesium here didn't get that warm.

1:20:30 So, even though, you know,

1:20:32 it just produced just incredible temperatures there, what happened here,

1:20:35 I just because it's so conductive,

1:20:37 it really didn't get that hot, it wasn't on fire.

1:20:40 So, I I dumped some water on it, and it even like sizzle.

1:20:43 Now, this is the one I'm most excited for.

1:20:45 It's a big rod of titanium.

1:20:47 Now, titanium has a uh it's a it's

1:20:49 more resistive than the uh than the magnesium is,

1:20:52 which honestly is probably going to be a good thing,

1:20:54 but also has a very high melting point,

1:20:57 and more importantly, it's still very pyrotechnic.

1:20:59 So, yeah, I'm going to hook it up

1:21:04 to that stick over there and and and try it out.

1:21:12 This is another one.

1:21:14 I would say that titanium was my favorite of the three metals I tested.

1:21:18 It was far easier to hold the titanium electrode compared to the magnesium one,

1:21:22 likely due to its much lower conductivity limiting the current.

1:21:26 Even with a lower current, I'd bet that the average power was still

1:21:30 higher simply because I could actually hold the electrode

1:21:33 in place and get a faster train

1:21:35 of pulses compared to what I could with magnesium.

1:21:38 Titanium's high melting point also meant

1:21:40 that this electrode lasted much longer than the others.

1:21:44 Look at that titanium rod.

1:21:45 I didn't even realize it was it was getting so hot.

1:21:51 Yeah, it's clearly more resistive there.

1:21:55 But uh [laughter] I can't believe that.

1:21:59 But wow, that one is fun.

1:22:01 That is very fun.

1:22:03 There's an old saying that says that anything will act

1:22:05 as a fuse if you put enough current through it.

1:22:07 I feel like most of the experiments in this video will fall under that.

1:22:11 However, I do want to try popping

1:22:13 some like actual legit fuses with these batteries.

1:22:16 In most other scenarios, a 500 amp fuse would seem pretty huge,

1:22:20 but in this context, it's pretty tiny.

1:22:23 What happens when I zap it with the batteries?

1:22:29 All right, here we go.

1:22:33 If you thought that was boring, well, it's designed to be boring.

1:22:36 A fuse is supposed to break the circuit in the least exciting way possible.

1:22:40 I cut open the fuse to see what's inside.

1:22:43 As you can see, it's filled with sand,

1:22:46 which prevents it from getting spicy when it blows.

1:22:49 Some of the sand actually melted to the fuse element there.

1:22:52 Here I have a 1,000 amp fuse, and I'm actually going to cut it open first.

1:22:57 That way, we can at least see some sparks when it pops.

1:23:00 This fuse looks to have parallel elements inside.

1:23:03 I hope this one is more exciting than the last one.

1:23:15 Nothing to write home about, but that vivid green flash was pretty neat.

1:23:19 I can see the burn through there was a lot

1:23:22 more a lot more complete compared to the last one.

1:23:25 That's probably just because I got rid of all the sand inside.

1:23:28 I refilled the fuse with Indium metal to see

1:23:32 if anything cooler would happen when it zapped.

1:23:43 Probably should have done the math on that one

1:23:44 because the indium didn't melt at all.

1:23:46 So, I think there's just way too much cross-sectional area of indium.

1:23:49 But look, that the magnetic forces actually bent those tabs there.

1:23:53 Those are thick tabs.

1:23:55 So, that was uh that's pretty silly.

1:23:57 The slow-mo shows that the extreme currents may have

1:24:00 magnetically ejected the fuse before the indium could melt.

1:24:03 Regardless, I doubled up the cable feeding the fuse

1:24:12 for the next shot to play it safe.

1:24:20 All right, there we go.

1:24:23 Yeah, I don't think there is a drop of indium left in that fuse.

1:24:29 That just completely exploded.

1:24:30 That's really, really funny.

1:24:32 Oh, and there's a bolt there that I did not put I did not put that there.

1:24:38 That just of course got magnetically sucked in as everything does.

1:24:42 And let's go take a look at the current.

1:24:47 120 130 130,000 amps.

1:24:50 Not bad.

1:24:51 The slow-mo on this one turned out awesome.

1:24:53 Even though the clamps barely held up for the shot,

1:24:57 most of the indium was ejected as it liquefied,

1:25:00 mainly via magnetic forces at first.

1:25:02 And then when the fuse finally popped, it made an impressive explosion.

1:25:05 All right, now it's time for the real inspiration of this section.

1:25:10 Some years back, the electricity legend

1:25:12 PhotonicInduction popped a 5,000 amp fuse.

1:25:14 As far as I know, this is still the biggest fuse that's been popped on video.

1:25:19 Well, I'm going to try popping a 6,000 amp fuse.

1:25:23 This monster weighs something like 45 lbs.

1:25:26 It's the biggest fuse that I could find online.

1:25:28 Now, it's not often that I can beat photonicinduction at anything,

1:25:31 so I felt like this was a good use of my batteries.

1:25:35 This monster has silver plated copper contacts

1:25:37 and has an impressive 200,000 amp interruption rating.

1:25:40 That's one heck of a fuse.

1:25:43 Now, of course, being a 6,000 amp fuse means

1:25:46 that it's meant to conduct 6,000 amps without popping.

1:25:48 So, something like this car battery here, I mean,

1:25:52 it could short this car battery all day and it's not going to pop.

1:25:56 I mean, it's going to kill the car battery first.

1:25:58 So, this is where the 400 car batteries come in.

1:26:01 So, how much current does it take to pop this thing?

1:26:04 Well, that depends on the duration of the impulse.

1:26:07 My 6,000 amp fuse is the top line on this curve here.

1:26:11 So, based on this, at 10,000 amps,

1:26:13 the fuse will last about 17 minutes before popping.

1:26:16 If you go up to 20,000 amps, it'll last about a little less than a minute.

1:26:20 But, of course, I'm most interested in this end of the curve.

1:26:24 At 100,000 amps, it'll only last 10 milliseconds.

1:26:26 Now, of course, the uh the actual peak current that this gets to before

1:26:30 it pops is going to depend on how my switch wants to behave,

1:26:34 but regardless, this shouldn't be very hard for my batteries.

1:26:37 In the interest of making more sparks,

1:26:39 I opened it up and emptied out all the sand inside.

1:26:43 This does change its fusing characteristics,

1:26:45 but I would argue that due to the nature

1:26:48 of the continuous extreme DC currents I'll be feeding it,

1:26:50 the fuse will now take an even higher impulse before breaking the circuit.

1:26:54 The reason being is that without the sand, it's going to make some angry plasma.

1:27:00 That's hilarious.

1:27:00 It's just bunch of smaller fuses in parallel.

1:27:05 So, like that all the way down, isn't it?

1:27:11 Fuselets all the way down.

1:27:15 I'm not even going to bother cleaning the contacts

1:27:17 here because it'll melt straight through all that, you know,

1:27:22 char and stuff on there.

1:27:25 All right, there it is.

1:27:28 All the camera's going.

1:27:30 Here we go.

1:27:32 Let's pop it.

1:27:34 Let's see.

1:27:35 All right.

1:27:35 I think I'm ready for this.

1:27:37 I think I'm ready.

1:27:39 Let me get my slow-mo camera set up here.

1:27:45 All the camera's good.

1:27:50 Think so.

1:27:52 All righty.

1:27:55 Here we go.

1:28:04 Jeez, I think I popped it.

1:28:06 Wow.

1:28:07 I can't wait to see what the uh what it pulled in the scope there.

1:28:13 Oh, yeah.

1:28:14 Big pulse.

1:28:15 Big pulse there.

1:28:17 Oh, it's What happened?

1:28:20 What?

1:28:20 It's not dead.

1:28:22 No.

1:28:23 No way.

1:28:24 It It It melted the contact block.

1:28:27 It didn't blow up the fuse.

1:28:30 That's crazy.

1:28:31 What?

1:28:31 It didn't pop it.

1:28:33 What?

1:28:34 Look at that.

1:28:35 It melted the block first and it ripped up that C-clamp.

1:28:40 There's only That's insane.

1:28:42 I'll just have to resituate that cuz yeah, the fuse is completely intact.

1:28:47 Wow.

1:28:48 I was so confident that that was going to work in one shot, too.

1:28:52 It's crazy.

1:28:53 Sure enough, the close-ups show that the fuse

1:28:56 itself was completely untouched by this.

1:28:57 The sparks were simply from the contacts below burning up

1:29:01 and causing the C-clamps to give way as a result.

1:29:04 If you wonder why I didn't bolt the fuse to the blocks,

1:29:07 it's because the blocks are too uneven from previous experiments,

1:29:11 meaning bolts would lead to the same results as the C-clamps.

1:29:14 This isn't something I can buff out.

1:29:16 A suitable clamp, however, will allow the high points to melt,

1:29:20 giving a conduction path with very low resistance.

1:29:22 Okay, so I've I've changed this side to spring clamps.

1:29:26 That way, it can like follow through as any variations uh burn out there.

1:29:31 So, yeah, let's let's give that another go.

1:29:34 I can't I can't believe that this is taking me two tries.

1:29:40 This is silly.

1:29:42 All right, here we go.

1:29:53 Okay.

1:29:53 Yes, that one finally popped it.

1:29:56 Thank goodness.

1:29:57 There we go.

1:29:59 I'm surprised how clean of a burn through that was.

1:30:02 It just completely vaporized those pieces in there.

1:30:04 Kind of surprised just considering the voltage I'm dealing with is low.

1:30:08 But that that definitely did it.

1:30:10 That was a full pop.

1:30:12 The switch had a few hiccups there,

1:30:14 but once it finally closed, the fuse pulled 150,000 amps.

1:30:18 So, that is why that was so violent there.

1:30:22 Nice.

1:30:22 The slow-mo shows that the fuse made

1:30:25 an incredibly violent plasma jet when it burned through.

1:30:29 Impressive.

1:30:29 One thing I have to mention is that when photonicinduction popped his fuse,

1:30:33 he used a capacitor bank that gave a short but intense impulse.

1:30:37 Now, he claims a peak current of 200,000 amps.

1:30:41 Now, even though he doesn't provide waveforms,

1:30:43 he likely achieved at least that number.

1:30:45 Now, when I set out to make this video,

1:30:48 I really thought I was going to show you the highest current on YouTube,

1:30:51 but that's because I I didn't consider his video,

1:30:53 and I popped a bigger fuse than him,

1:30:56 but as far as the the highest peak current on YouTube, he still has me beat.

1:31:00 I will say this, though, his capacitor bank is very impressive.

1:31:03 And although I don't have a capacitor bank like he does,

1:31:07 I do actually have a more energetic pulsed electrical device.

1:31:10 No, I'm not talking about the batteries.

1:31:13 I'm talking about the cables feeding the batteries,

1:31:15 specifically in their inductance.

1:31:17 When the bank fires, there's actually more energy stored in the magnetic field

1:31:22 around the cables than photonicinductions capacitor bank at full charge.

1:31:26 This inductive energy plays a role

1:31:28 in the explosions I get when objects burn through.

1:31:34 Now, even though I popped this fuse,

1:31:36 I still have one experiment in mind left for it.

1:31:39 I want to see how it acts when filled with metallic sodium.

1:31:43 Interestingly, when I was considering sacrificial

1:31:45 fuses for the pipe crushing experiments,

1:31:47 sodium metal stuck out to me as a promising material since

1:31:52 it has a very high conductivity along with a low melting point.

1:32:08 Yeah, just sort of smash it all in the middle like that.

1:32:12 Maybe I can shove it back in.

1:32:14 There was a lot of leftover sodium from that shot,

1:32:17 so I smashed it up against the contacts in order to give it another zap.

1:32:24 Ready, we go.

1:32:38 Honestly, these shots were kind of mid.

1:32:41 I think sodium's high conductivity actually made

1:32:43 it hard to heat up with the batteries.

1:32:46 Spraying everything down with a hose afterwards showed

1:32:48 that little droplets of sodium had been splattered everywhere,

1:32:51 which I thought was pretty funny.

1:32:54 Now, it's time for my favorite experiments of this whole project,

1:32:58 the magnetic experiments.

1:32:59 As you've seen countless times by now, the currents I can pull

1:33:03 from my batteries produce incredibly strong magnetic fields.

1:33:05 Now, these fields were a nightmare when I was trying to build my switch.

1:33:09 But now that I have that somewhat solved,

1:33:11 now I can actually have fun with the magnetic field.

1:33:14 A typical electromagnet involves a coil of wire wrapped around an iron core.

1:33:18 At the currents I'm dealing with though, an iron core will just saturate,

1:33:22 which means I'm better off not using anything as a core material.

1:33:26 Now, the problem is that making even a bare

1:33:29 coil is an engineering challenge at these currents.

1:33:31 It takes an enormous amount of metal to not melt just instantly.

1:33:34 And that's on top of how magnetic forces will try to shred any coil arrangement.

1:33:39 As an example, I wound this coil here with stiff aluminum cable.

1:33:44 Its resistance is high enough that it will only pass around 50,000 amps or so.

1:33:53 Even at these limited currents, the coil windings are strongly attracted to each

1:33:57 other and cause the coil to scrunch up.

1:34:00 At 150,000 amps, these forces would be far stronger.

1:34:03 I spent a lot of time considering how I was

1:34:06 going to make suitable coils without spending a fortune on metal.

1:34:09 But after witnessing how anything becomes

1:34:11 a magnetic black hole at these currents,

1:34:13 I realized that even straight pieces of copper

1:34:15 would be more than adequate for these experiments.

1:34:18 Sure enough, by sticking a couple cables on the blocks

1:34:21 and tossing a bunch of nuts and bolts around them,

1:34:30 the magnetic effects are super obvious.

1:34:36 Wow, look at that.

1:34:38 Look at the exploded cable there.

1:34:40 The switch performed horribly in this shot, but even so,

1:34:43 the nuts and bolts were glued to the cable

1:34:45 before the current had hit even a quarter of peak.

1:34:48 When the cable finally melted through,

1:34:50 it managed to catapult some of the bolts across the yard.

1:34:54 Anyone that grew up with a CRT TV is probably aware

1:34:57 of the fun that can be had when a magnet is brought near them.

1:35:02 Their sensitivity to magnetic fields is the same effect

1:35:05 as all the other magnetic forces in this video.

1:35:07 It is yet another example of the Lorentz force acting on current.

1:35:11 I was curious how much a CRT TV would

1:35:14 be affected by the fields produced by this battery bank.

1:35:17 The load for this shot is my standard pair of four aught copper cable.

1:35:22 I really hope this doesn't kill the TV.

1:35:25 All right, let's do this.

1:35:28 And here we go.

1:35:37 That had an adverse effect on the electronics in this TV.

1:35:43 [laughter] The magnetic field was so intense that it just turned off.

1:35:47 I didn't know that could happen.

1:35:49 Oh, yeah.

1:35:50 The the CRT looks different after that.

1:35:53 I know it temporarily killed it, but uh yeah, let's let's take a look.

1:35:58 Yeah, I think that was a bit excessive because it the magnetic

1:36:01 field was so strong it just completely deflected the beam off the screen.

1:36:05 So yeah, maybe I need to move it away.

1:36:08 Yeah, that plasma shield did some work there.

1:36:10 Ripped off one of the C clamps and then wrapped that cable back.

1:36:15 A peak of 160,000 amps.

1:36:18 So pretty intense.

1:36:19 You know, I think it was a bit much to have the uh the TV in the center there.

1:36:24 I decided I moved it out this time.

1:36:25 And I also uh I'm going to limit the currents

1:36:28 by using this steel rod instead of copper because yeah,

1:36:31 I think 160,000 amps was a bit much.

1:36:34 Then also now that the field is going to be

1:36:37 the magnetic field is going to be reversing directions here.

1:36:39 So uh maybe maybe we'll actually fix the TV by by having it sit out here.

1:36:48 So yeah.

1:36:49 Okay, here we go.

1:37:05 Yeah, that was much gentler that time.

1:37:07 That was only about 55,000 amps.

1:37:09 So, yeah, that was pretty interesting.

1:37:11 I'm glad I tried that.

1:37:13 Now it looks as good as new.

1:37:15 The image on a CRT TV is produced by an electron beam.

1:37:18 And it's this current that gets deflected by the magnetic field.

1:37:22 This sort of magnetic beam deflection

1:37:24 is actually the basis of mass spectrometry,

1:37:26 which is a standard analytical tool in chemistry.

1:37:29 I made an important discovery when I zapped a Z-shaped cable.

1:37:33 My intention was to physically simulate the forces

1:37:36 and torque present on my Z switch arrangement.

1:37:39 The clamps ended up failing on this one,

1:37:42 but it functioned as a magnetic catapult.

1:37:44 If you look closely, cable fragments were ejected so quickly that it managed

1:37:48 to do a little tree trimming out in the distance.

1:37:51 The slow-mo shows a lot of cool details.

1:37:54 A bunch of magnetic junk got sucked in like in every other shot.

1:37:58 But in this one, a little magnetic particle

1:38:00 managed to orbit the cable for a bit.

1:38:03 The main takeaway from this shot, though, is that the cable is bent

1:38:06 from its original arrangement and violently ejected upwards.

1:38:09 I stuffed the cable back in the blocks,

1:38:13 but this time I bent the cable so that it

1:38:15 was below the center line of the currents feeding it.

1:38:18 The switch struggled to close in this one,

1:38:20 causing the cable to bounce around for a while at first,

1:38:23 but the main result was clear.

1:38:26 It was being violently slammed downwards this time.

1:38:29 A bonus is that when the fuse in the center finally exploded,

1:38:33 it ejected a neat ring of liquid copper.

1:38:35 These shots gave me an epiphany regarding the mysterious

1:38:38 forces that eject the cables from the blocks.

1:38:40 I thought I had solved it earlier and that the fields

1:38:43 from the straight current through the blocks was causing this.

1:38:46 But no, that's completely wrong.

1:38:49 Those fields do exactly the opposite.

1:38:51 They actually pulled inward via the z-pinch effect.

1:38:54 That means that this mysterious,

1:38:57 tremendously strong outward force is actually beating

1:38:59 the fierce z-pinch forces that pull it inward.

1:39:03 What's actually going on here is quite profound.

1:39:05 I've had to read a lot about fusion power

1:39:07 for this project because I'm dealing with fusion levels of current

1:39:10 and the people in this field have done a good job

1:39:14 at documenting the just crazy things that happen at extreme currents.

1:39:17 Now, sure enough, the same phenomenon that launches items

1:39:20 in my setup is actually a huge issue in fusion reactors.

1:39:24 So, here's the basic idea for what's going on.

1:39:27 So when a current path is perfectly straight,

1:39:29 that means that the magnetic forces

1:39:31 that crush inwards are also perfectly balanced.

1:39:34 However, this is an unstable equilibrium.

1:39:36 If there's any sort of bend in this current path,

1:39:39 then you get this buildup of magnetic field

1:39:41 on the inside of the curve compared to the outside,

1:39:43 which causes a net force pushing outwards.

1:39:45 Now, of course, this makes the current path make an even bigger bend,

1:39:49 which means you have an even bigger force pushing outwards,

1:39:52 and you get this runaway force.

1:39:54 And and this effect is called the kink instability.

1:39:57 Now, in my setup, the fact that the current has to make this small bend

1:40:00 off the blocks is actually the origin

1:40:02 of this incredibly strong force that launches my items.

1:40:05 And just to clarify this insanity,

1:40:08 simply making the current take a 1-in jump off

1:40:11 the center of the blocks produces forces so strong

1:40:14 that it can rip up four 8-in C-clamps that have

1:40:17 been wrenched down so hard that the handles are bent.

1:40:19 That is the nature of extreme currents for you.

1:40:22 Now, I'm lucky in that my current path is through a solid conductor,

1:40:26 which means I can just add more clamps or maybe

1:40:29 pound the ends flat first to defeat this force.

1:40:31 Now, when the conductor is a plasma,

1:40:33 like in fusion, this is much harder to deal with.

1:40:36 In fact, it's instabilities like this that are

1:40:38 one of the main obstacles to achieving fusion power.

1:40:41 In order to mitigate the kink instability,

1:40:44 I started using leftover pipes from the crushing experiments as loads.

1:40:47 By pounding the ends flat,

1:40:49 I can mount them closer to the blocks than the four out cable.

1:40:53 And the rigidity helps prevent runaway forces

1:40:55 compared to the flexible cable as well.

1:41:01 For this shot, I sprinkled a bunch of magnetite to under the pipe.

1:41:13 I was disappointed when I had to concede that I

1:41:15 couldn't get a perfect turn on with my switch.

1:41:18 But in many of these experiments,

1:41:19 the initial chaotic changes in current honestly make for cooler video.

1:41:23 In this clip, an initial brief pulse

1:41:26 launches some of the magnetite beyond the pipe.

1:41:28 And this happens once again before the switch finally latches shut.

1:41:32 If you look closely, you'll see that the magnetite spirals inward

1:41:36 as opposed to traveling straight to the pipe.

1:41:38 The coolest part of this clip is after the pipe

1:41:41 explodes and the magnetite rains down here in this crazy pattern.

1:41:44 I think what's happening here is

1:41:47 that the magnetite was magnetized by the current

1:41:50 and this residual magnetization causes the particles

1:41:52 to clump up and stick together.

1:41:54 I wanted a better slow-mo shot of bolts getting

1:41:57 sucked into the magnetic black hole of all its current.

1:42:03 So, I repeated this experiment using a pipe fragment as the load.

1:42:25 Woo!

1:42:25 All right.

1:42:26 Beautiful.

1:42:27 Unfortunately, both C-clamps failed to hold down the pipe in this one,

1:42:33 causing a bunch of sparks to obscure the view.

1:42:36 One of the C-clamps was completely destroyed here as well,

1:42:39 since it briefly conducted some of the battery current.

1:42:42 I used a longer pipe for the next shot.

1:42:48 That way I could hold it down with four C clamps instead of two.

1:43:07 This could be an epic one.

1:43:10 Let's see how this one went.

1:43:13 Oh yeah, that was awesome.

1:43:16 Cool.

1:43:17 Yeah, it was awesome.

1:43:18 That was a good shot.

1:43:20 I couldn't tell where it went,

1:43:22 but that's just cuz it got slapped backwards there.

1:43:25 And all those bolts just went everywhere.

1:43:27 Yeah, it looks like a peak of 160,000 amps on that shot.

1:43:32 Switch had some issues, but uh hey, it did its job.

1:43:37 Sort of.

1:43:38 This is one of my favorite shots of the entire video.

1:43:42 The bolts were quickly sucked in by the current,

1:43:44 and the oscillatory nature of the startup is once again apparent here.

1:43:48 It's clear that it's not just the bolts getting pulled in by the field, though.

1:43:52 A spring clamp on the ground found its way to the pipe as well.

1:43:55 And even way in the background,

1:43:58 you can see everything magnetic getting thrown around.

1:44:00 The pipe eventually collapsed by the forces of the current it was carrying,

1:44:04 and it made a hefty fireball when it finally melted through.

1:44:07 I wanted to see if I could hit a weight limit for the lifting forces.

1:44:12 So, I placed about 10 lb of big bolts all around the pipe for this shot.

1:44:21 That sound good?

1:44:22 I I don't understand what happened.

1:44:25 What?

1:44:25 That's weird.

1:44:26 They all got sucked in and glued to it.

1:44:30 What?

1:44:30 That doesn't make any sense.

1:44:32 What?

1:44:32 That's so weird.

1:44:34 I've never had that happen.

1:44:36 This one was unusual in that the bolts didn't fall back down afterwards.

1:44:40 They were stuck to the pipe.

1:44:43 Now, this is really weird.

1:44:45 So, the pipe got pulled downwards and these are all like glued to the pipe.

1:44:51 They're all welded together.

1:44:52 The slow-mo shows that the nearby bolts

1:44:54 were effortlessly sucked in by the magnetic field.

1:44:56 And less than a tenth of a second later,

1:44:59 the bolts that were out of frame on the ground got sucked in as well.

1:45:02 There was so much iron getting pulled in and accumulating

1:45:05 on the pipe that it eventually spanned the entire gap between the blocks,

1:45:09 which meant that it too began directly conducting some of the current.

1:45:13 This current welded all of the bolts together and around the pipe.

1:45:16 So, this is why they didn't fall off afterwards.

1:45:18 The biggest iron object I had that would fit between the blocks was this anvil.

1:45:24 It weighs 10 kilos or 22 lb.

1:45:26 So, it's a hefty little piece of iron.

1:45:29 All right, here we go.

1:45:49 Sounds like the anvil got zapped.

1:45:52 It never stops being crazy to me

1:45:55 that the strongest electromagnet I've gotten to screw around

1:45:58 with on video isn't a big coil of wire

1:46:01 around an iron core or even a coil at all.

1:46:03 It's merely a straight piece of copper that just so happens to pass

1:46:07 an entire thunderstorm's worth of charge in a couple tenths of a second.

1:46:11 Much like the big bolts before this, the anvil

1:46:14 was pulled up against the copper blocks,

1:46:16 causing it to pass some of the current as well,

1:46:19 which is the reason for the sparks.

1:46:20 I want to point out something surprising about the dirt on the blocks here.

1:46:24 I know countless commenters are going to lecture

1:46:27 me about dirty contacts increasing resistance and causing problems,

1:46:30 but I found that the max current is

1:46:33 completely unaffected by whether I clean these or not.

1:46:36 Where contact resistance actually matters is in all

1:46:38 the little cable connections throughout the bank.

1:46:40 Those have to be spotless to get the currents I'm achieving.

1:46:43 However, I found that anywhere the current density gets extreme,

1:46:47 like the blocks or the switch, the contact interfaces actually melt,

1:46:51 giving a purely metal conduction path that has extremely low resistance.

1:46:56 If anything, the dirty blocks help the switch

1:46:58 close faster because the current initially ramps up slowly.

1:47:02 Pretty weird, right?

1:47:02 I zapped a pipe near an array of compasses

1:47:05 in order to visually map out the fields.

1:47:08 Notice how they're pointing all over the place at the start here.

1:47:11 This is because of the pieces of iron

1:47:20 nearby that have been magnetized from the previous experiments.

1:47:32 Jeez, where where'd it go?

1:47:36 Where' the pipe go?

1:47:39 I have no idea where the pipe went.

1:47:45 Here it is.

1:47:47 Oh, it got crumpled like crazy.

1:47:49 Look at that.

1:47:51 Wow.

1:47:51 It really folded in.

1:47:53 That's impressive.

1:47:54 That was one of my best crushes.

1:47:56 I nearly didn't include this compass bit in the video

1:48:00 because what the compasses show doesn't make any sense.

1:48:03 In particular, the four compasses on the side

1:48:06 of the block to the left read alternating values.

1:48:09 That's ridiculous.

1:48:10 They should all be aligned with each other.

1:48:12 I initially chocked this up to the compasses

1:48:14 being cheap garbage and simply reading incorrectly.

1:48:16 The pipe crush at the end was so good, though,

1:48:19 that I wanted to include this clip in the video.

1:48:22 I decided to give the compasses the benefit of the doubt.

1:48:25 I grabbed my box of new compasses and tested them with a magnet.

1:48:30 Much to my surprise, they all tested perfectly.

1:48:32 That's strange.

1:48:33 I had kept the compasses used in the experiment separate since they were dirty.

1:48:38 So I grabbed that box and tested them.

1:48:41 Lo and behold, some of them read exactly the opposite of what they should.

1:48:45 What gives?

1:48:46 A compass works on the principle of a magnetized

1:48:49 needle aligning itself with a magnetic field.

1:48:51 It seems what happened here is that the magnetic

1:48:54 field became so strong so suddenly that the compass needles

1:48:58 that were initially aligned against the field didn't have enough

1:49:01 time to reorient and were remagnetized in the opposite direction.

1:49:05 That's pretty neat.

1:49:06 I had noticed that these pipes have been acting as decent catapults.

1:49:11 So, I wanted to try intentionally launching something this way.

1:49:14 I glued a big steel nut to this GoPro here and notched

1:49:17 the pipe to cause it to melt through in this location.

1:49:24 Yep, we're good.

1:49:31 All right, here we go.

1:49:43 Where'd it go?

1:49:45 Oh, it it didn't get lodged.

1:49:48 Well, it did not get launched into orbit, it looks like.

1:49:53 Sad.

1:49:54 A little crispy, too.

1:49:55 The inertial forces were too strong,

1:49:58 and the nut was immediately ripped off the GoPro.

1:50:01 The nut was catapulted into oblivion, but the GoPro barely moved.

1:50:06 I ended up bolting the nut to the GoPro

1:50:10 in a very ironic way in order to give this another try.

1:50:30 We're going to get launched.

1:50:32 It wasn't launched as far as I'd like,

1:50:34 but I am impressed how well it held up to the magnetic fields.

1:50:38 I've had major issues with my cameras getting EMPed throughout this video,

1:50:42 and that's even with them spaced much further away from the big currents.

1:50:46 The time has come for the final experiments.

1:50:48 In my favorite shots of this project,

1:50:50 I'm going to see what happens to ferrofluid

1:50:52 next to a pipe carrying 160,000 amps.

1:50:55 Ferrofluid is a neat way to visualize magnetic fields,

1:51:00 and it consists of magnetic particles suspended in a fluid.

1:51:03 Most demos showcase it around permanent magnets,

1:51:06 but of course it works just as well around electromagnets, too.

1:51:11 Considering the strength of the fields I have available,

1:51:21 I expect this one to be pretty cool.

1:51:30 Woo!

1:51:30 Something exploded.

1:51:31 Oh god, the pipe crushed.

1:51:33 All right, that was cool.

1:51:36 See what that looks like.

1:51:39 Holy, that was an epic shot.

1:51:43 Wow.

1:51:44 Wow.

1:51:45 Okay, I didn't realize that the dark background wouldn't offer

1:51:48 enough contrast against the ferrofluid to see it rise up.

1:51:51 But at least the fluid wrapping around the pipe was super obvious.

1:51:54 I want to point out the bit of ferrofluid

1:51:56 that gets trapped around this little iron post.

1:51:58 And that's due to the iron concentrating the fields in this area.

1:52:02 As the pipe heated up, so did the ferrofluid around it,

1:52:05 causing the oils to boil off and make a thick white fog.

1:52:09 The pipe in this shot was crushed from the current.

1:52:12 And when it finally melted through,

1:52:14 the sparks ignited the oil vapors and made a huge fireball.

1:52:17 I decided to give this another try with a better background

1:52:21 using a piece of wood to offer some contrast against the ferrofluid.

1:52:32 All right, here we go.

1:52:47 Woo.

1:52:47 That was That was nice.

1:52:50 See what that looked like.

1:52:53 Wow.

1:52:54 So, completely stained that piece of wood black

1:52:58 from the ferrofluid and then it just crumbled that pipe.

1:53:02 Nice.

1:53:02 Wonder what the current was on that.

1:53:05 Oh, it was huge.

1:53:06 Oh yeah.

1:53:07 Yep.

1:53:07 That was 160 at its peak.

1:53:09 That was a a really good shot.

1:53:12 Well, for the new switch configuration.

1:53:15 Holy heck.

1:53:15 Sadly, I had bumped the camera lens out of focus for this one,

1:53:19 which is such a shame because this shot was destined for greatness.

1:53:22 This was my last bit of ferrofluid, too.

1:53:25 So, I almost called it quits here and settled on the earlier shot.

1:53:29 I realized that if there was one shot to do right, it was this one.

1:53:33 So, I ordered another bottle of ferrofluid to give it yet another go.

1:53:37 All right, so I'm going to go camera light, heat switch, and back to the camera.

1:53:54 Okay, here we go.

1:54:03 Jeez.

1:54:07 Wow.

1:54:10 That is always so surprisingly loud.

1:54:13 See?

1:54:14 Yes.

1:54:14 Yes.

1:54:15 That was finally it.

1:54:17 This was the shot right here.

1:54:19 And I think it's the coolest thing I've ever filmed in my life.

1:54:23 In the span of a tenth of a second,

1:54:25 nearly the entirety of the dish of ferrofluid was slammed up against

1:54:28 the pipe while the total circuit power rose to over 10 million watts.

1:54:33 One detail that stands out to me is how the smaller

1:54:36 bits of ferrofluid in midair are aligned with the field.

1:54:39 And another is that many of the particles take a spiraled path inwards.

1:54:43 Just like in the other attempts,

1:54:45 the pipe implodes from the 160,000 amps that it passes.

1:54:49 And once it melts through,

1:54:51 it ignites the hot ferrofluid to make a huge fireball.

1:54:54 I think it will be hard for me to ever top a shot like this.

1:54:58 I've already mentioned that this video was not my idea.

1:55:01 It was actually the company AnyDesk that reached out to me

1:55:04 and wanted me to experiment with a bunch of car batteries.

1:55:06 And of course, they bought me all the batteries as well

1:55:09 as the supplies I needed to make this video possible.

1:55:11 Now, the fact that a video sponsor came up with the best

1:55:14 idea for a video on my channel is still just astonishing to me.

1:55:17 I know Any Desk is going for the whole Red Bull of Science kind of vibe,

1:55:21 and they really hit it out of the park with this one

1:55:23 because this was a genius idea for so many reasons.

1:55:25 It's one thing to make an electrical

1:55:27 video about something like capacitors or Tesla coils.

1:55:30 And although these can be a lot of fun,

1:55:32 these aren't things that most people can relate with, but car batteries,

1:55:36 everybody knows what those are and everybody knows they are powerful.

1:55:40 It goes far beyond the clickbait appeal, though.

1:55:43 These car batteries gave me currents

1:55:45 riving what's seen in multi-billion dollar facilities.

1:55:47 They allowed me to poke the fundamental forces of the universe.

1:55:51 And as a result, they allowed me

1:55:54 to take footage unlike anything ever recorded before.

1:55:56 You can thank AnyDesk for making all of this possible.

1:56:00 So, what even is AnyDesk?

1:56:03 Well, AnyDesk gives you a lightning fast connection to all your devices.

1:56:07 Whether it's your computer, your surveillance network,

1:56:09 or even your favorite experimental apparatus,

1:56:12 you can manage them from all around

1:56:14 the world with low latency and on low bandwidth.

1:56:17 With AnyDesk, you can offer tech support for loved ones from the comfort

1:56:21 of your home or help out work clients from wherever life takes you.

1:56:24 AnyDesk free for personal use and offers business plans that are

1:56:28 custom tailored to your IT and work from home needs.

1:56:31 AnyDesk is also in the business of supporting

1:56:33 some of the coolest science projects on the internet.

1:56:36 If you have ideas for ridiculous science experiments

1:56:39 that you'd like me or another YouTuber to try,

1:56:43 submit them at anydesk.com/science.

1:56:44 The ideas that are brought to reality will win

1:56:48 cool prizes and lead to the creation of epic videos.

1:56:51 So yeah, a big thank you to AnyDesk for making this project possible.

1:56:54 So at this point, I've ran out of time to continue the battery experiments.

1:56:59 I mean, winter's clearly here,

1:57:00 and the cold temperatures dramatically limit the kind

1:57:03 of current I can pull from the batteries.

1:57:05 That means that any further experiments will have to wait

1:57:07 until next year when it warms back up again.

1:57:10 So, what will I do with the batteries until then?

1:57:12 Well, they're just going to hibernate out here in the yard.

1:57:15 Now, I know this is surprising to most,

1:57:17 but the rain and snow really aren't bad for them.

1:57:19 I mean, the only critical detail for storing them

1:57:22 in the cold is that they're kept fully charged.

1:57:24 I mean, the first hundred have been sitting out here for 2 years now.

1:57:27 Oh my gosh, the snow is blinding me.

1:57:29 But those those two-year-old batteries still test almost

1:57:32 new just because I've always kept them fully charged.

1:57:35 Now, if you're curious how I've been charging the batteries,

1:57:38 I've just been using this 1500 watt power supply here.

1:57:40 Now, if you think this seems small, well, it is.

1:57:43 It's just that, you know,

1:57:44 every experiment with these batteries takes a lot of prep.

1:57:47 So, in a typical day, I can really only do a few shots and, you know,

1:57:51 that doesn't really discharge them by all that much.

1:57:53 So, you know, slowly charging them with this thing is more than adequate.

1:57:57 Now, I will say that it feels like I've

1:57:59 barely scratched the surface of what's possible with these batteries.

1:58:02 It's just that I spent so much time working on the Switch that I

1:58:05 didn't have time to get through all the experiments that I wanted to.

1:58:08 So, needless to say,

1:58:09 there will be more videos with these batteries in the future.

1:58:12 Now, as far as future experiments go, there's a lot I have in mind.

1:58:16 Uh, I really wanted to melt tungsten underwater,

1:58:18 as well as some other underwater experiments.

1:58:20 So, that's probably like the lowest hanging

1:58:22 fruit of uh future experiments I can do.

1:58:24 Now, I know a lot of people want me to wire all these things in series here,

1:58:28 but I really just can't think of that many

1:58:30 things I'd do with that kind of arrangement.

1:58:32 I mean, yeah, I could draw some just ridiculous arcs,

1:58:35 but other than that, I just I really don't

1:58:37 feel that it's worth the effort or risk really.

1:58:40 Now, that being said, I did arrange all these battery subbanks in a way

1:58:44 where I can fairly easily rewire this bank to 500 volts.

1:58:47 and you know 500 volts at 20,000 amps.

1:58:49 I think there's a lot of fun to be had there.

1:58:52 There is a more interesting way to get higher voltage from the batteries though.

1:58:55 If I were to stick a big coil in the circuit,

1:58:58 uh that would allow me to get these big currents also at a high voltage.

1:59:01 So the idea with that is that uh you know you'd build up a bunch of uh

1:59:06 magnetic energy in the coil which you can then

1:59:09 release in an instant in this just enormous pulse.

1:59:12 So if I wanted to build a rail gun with these batteries,

1:59:15 that's how I would power it.

1:59:16 and even just for like blowing things up.

1:59:18 If you stick a big coil between the batteries and the load,

1:59:21 it's going to make the explosions a lot more violent.

1:59:23 I'd like to give a special thank you to Greg Leyh, Seth Miller, Bert Hickman,

1:59:27 as well as all the members of my Discord

1:59:30 for the advice that they gave me throughout this project.

1:59:32 I'd also like to thank all of my Patreon

1:59:35 and channel members for all of the support.

1:59:37 As always, these supporters get early viewing of my videos

1:59:40 as well as sneak peeks on all of my projects.

1:59:43 So yeah, that's all I have for this video.

1:59:46 I hope you enjoyed it and uh and be sure

1:59:49 to stay tuned for even crazier experiments in the future.

1:59:51 Thanks for watching.