Explosive Bat in Slow Motion Ft. Stuff Made Here – Smarter Every Day 245

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript, with any inappropriate language or sensitive content removed:

—

– I feel like we don’t know each other well enough to be doing this right now.
– This is how you get to know each other. (laughs) The fast path.
– I’m ready.
– All right, three, two, one. (bat fires)
– What up? I’m Destin, this video is amazing. This baseball says “world’s longest home run,” and the reason it says that is because in an earlier episode of Smarter Every Day, Jeremy Fielding and I built what we called the Mad Batter. It’s a crazy device that spins baseball bats super fast, and if you ever make good connection, the ball will go sailing. Well, recently I heard about a guy on the internet, his name is Shane from the YouTube channel called Stuff Made Here, and he’s trying to beat that record. And he’s doing it with a really cool bat of a completely different design. Whereas the Mad Batter is a terrifying device that I don’t want to be anywhere near, he has a device that you can hold in your hands. It’s a baseball bat that uses powder cartridges, so when the baseball hits it, it’ll ignite that powder and fling the ball out over the fence.

So today on Smarter Every Day, there’s a few things going on here. Number one, I want to introduce you to Shane from Stuff Made Here, because this dude is the real deal. He’s just now starting out on YouTube, he is amazing, and I would like for you to consider subscribing to his channel on YouTube. It’s called Stuff Made Here. Shane has spent countless hours making a video about how he made that bat, but I think this is going to be key to understanding exactly what’s going on. So if you want to know how he made the bat, go watch that video on his channel. But on this channel, we’re going to take the Phantom high-speed camera and we’re going to try to understand the collision mechanics between the ball and Shane’s bat.

I understand the collision of a baseball with a bat when it happens on the Mad Batter. Basically, as the ball comes in and hits the bat, it squishes, and that strain energy is used to rebound the ball off the bat. There’s an efficiency coefficient there called the coefficient of restitution, and that determines how well the ball bounces off the bat. What’s so interesting about what Shane’s doing is he’s not squishing—well, he is squishing the ball. I don’t know, that’s the problem. He didn’t film it with a high-speed camera. So what we’re going to do is on this channel, I’m going to investigate the collision mechanics of Shane’s new powder-driven bat, and on Shane’s channel, we’re going to talk about how he built the thing.

So anyway, let’s go to North Carolina, learn about this bat, and see if we can get Smarter Every Day with Shane from Stuff Made Here. (upbeat music)

This is Shane from Stuff Made Here. I’m genuinely excited to be in this room because I like being the least knowledgeable person here, and I feel inadequate because of all of your tools. We’ve got a CNC router, woodworking stuff, we’ve got a brake, what is this?
– It’s a CNC.
– You built a CNC?
– When you can’t afford them, you’ve got to build them.
– Okay, you’ve got something that looks like a bridge port, but it’s not. I want Shane to beat the record, and you’ve already beat my record?
– According to my distance wheel.
– Yeah?
– 710 feet.
– Okay.
– So, I think you were high 600, 690, something like that.
– It’s actually a little over that.
– Oh, really?
– Let’s go look it up. We have to, whatever it is, I’m here to help you beat it. And I brought the slow-mo camera because I think what Shane is doing is amazing, and the whole point here is to beat the record, because records are made to be broken, right?

Okay, here’s the record.
– [Man] That’s awesome.
– So there you go, we hit what I believe to be the longest home run in history. And yes…
– [Shane] Oh no.
– [Destin] 717 feet.
– If remeasured.
– [Destin] Yeah.
– How didn’t I see that?
– [Destin] Have you done that? What was your number?
– 710.
– [Destin] Are you serious?
– Yeah, so I didn’t beat it.
– Okay.
– Aw man.
– But we’re going to beat it. The goal is to make you the dude, and then after that we go break it together, what do you think?

So basically, the cartridges go right here. When the ball hits the sweet spot, those firing pins hit these cartridges that fire the gas up in here, which then blows the pistons back that way, right?
– [Shane] Yeah, so there’s a manifold down here that connects both pistons to all the cartridges.
– [Destin] So now, when that hits, boom, the force fires the cartridges and then fires this thing out.
– [Shane] On this side there’s an exhaust manifold and all the gas comes out the tip.
– [Destin] All the gas comes out the tip, look at that.
– So that’s packed with steel wool.
– [Destin] It’s a muffler, basically. Will we need to wear hearing…?
– It’s not a suppressor, it’s a muffler.
– A muffler, you can’t say suppressor, it’s a muffler. We’re going to muffle things.
– [Shane] Yeah.
– Yeah, because laws, right? (laughs)

Oh, golly, man. How fast does this paddle fly out? That’s the first question we want to answer, and you have not been able to figure that out.
– [Shane] Everything happens in less than a millisecond so I have no idea…
– [Destin] what’s going on.
– Yeah, I don’t know.
– [Destin] Okay, so we’re going to use the high speed to figure that out. We got started by setting up the high-speed camera and then we established the test plan, which is one cartridge, then two, then three, then four, because stuff might start breaking at three and four. 28,000 frames per second, Shane’s going to swing the bat, got the Phantom set up over here on the engine hoist.
– [Destin] What’s this?
– [Shane] Body armor man.
– [Destin] Body armor?
– [Shane] Just in case. That is live.
– [Destin] That is live?
– [Shane] Yep.
– [Destin] Safety boy is out?
– [Shane] Yep. Ready to go?
– [Destin] Yeah.
– [Shane] I’m just going to give it a tap. (bat fires)
– Is that it?
– [Shane] That’s it, the muffler works.
– Yeah, I didn’t hear anything, dude. Okay, here we go. We’re coming in, there’s the pins.
– [Shane] That was a bit low. Now you can see the springs really working, that’s cool.

So it’s still pushing. A typical interaction between a ball is like, if something hits a ball, it bounces off depending on something called the coefficient of restitution. What’s happening here is far more complicated than that. You get the collision, but then you’re adding energy after that…
– Getting a… A better than one,
– A better than one coefficient of restitution. It’s exactly what’s happening.
– Yep.
– Two cartridges, still shouldn’t be too loud, but we’ll see.
– [Destin] Okay, ready?
– [Shane] All right, here we go. (bat fires)
– [Destin] Okay, now we’re talking.
– [Shane] There goes your camera.
– It did break the camera. Okay, so it looks different this time. There’s a, it’s a two-part, okay, so watch.
– [Shane] It almost does hit it twice.
– [Destin] Seeing your face see this is pretty fun.

Cause you’ve been…
– [Shane] That’s bizarre.
– [Shane] Yeah, like it almost launched it and then it was like not so fast.
– [Destin] Yeah, so what seems to be happening is you get the squish when it’s compressing the firing pin, that’s bending brass.
– [Shane] Yeah and then it’s sort of bouncing.
– [Destin] Almost.
– [Shane] Then it spanks it.
– [Destin] That’s really fun. So you got three cartridges now?
– [Shane] Yeah.
– [Destin] You’re good? I’m ready.
– [Shane] All right, here we go. (bat fires)
– [Destin] (laughs)
– [Shane] A bit more power.
– [Destin] Oh that’s… Oh yeah, like cheap fireworks is what that smells like.
– It’s like intoxicating power.
– [Destin] What do you mean intoxicating power?
– [Shane] It’s how powerful I feel.
– [Destin] (laughs) (slow motion firing)

Okay, so what’s your guess on that velocity?
– [Shane] 135.
– [Destin] Are you serious?
– [Shane] Yeah.
– [Destin] It is, why do you think that?
– Cause that’s what I calculate it would be from other stuff.
– [Destin] It’s one thirty-three.
– Cool.
– Dude is smarter than me and I know it and he knows it. Do you know it?
– No.
– It depends on the topic, he’s smarter than me. I guess it does depend on the topic.
– [Shane] I spent a lot of time with this bat, so I kind of have an advantage.
– [Destin] Okay, here we go. We have the data we want. Now we can analyze it. So first, let’s take the diameter of the baseball and we can use that as a pixel calibration to determine the velocity of each individual shot. Specifically, we can track the paddle, and we can also track the baseball.

Let’s look at this single cartridge shot first. I’m going to plot the paddle velocity and the ball velocity and just let you look at it, and let’s see what we can learn together. Okay, that is a lot of squiggly lines on the screen, but it didn’t really hit the bat squarely so let’s move to the second shot with two cartridges, and see what we can find here. Oh wow, okay, there’s a lot to look at here. Let’s do it. You can see initially the bat has a positive velocity because it’s being swung, and the ball is at zero. There’s no velocity there, but the exact moment they hit something interesting happens. The bat starts to decelerate and the ball starts to accelerate, and they start to converge on one another, and eventually they are moving at the same velocity. And at this point we are a collision system. Like they’re moving as one. You can see that there’s this rebound of the bat, it kind of goes backwards and ignites the cartridges. But it seems to almost bounce off of the cartridges and there’s this little bit of lag time while we’re waiting on everything to light off, bang! And then there’s the fire. You can see that we have an acceleration on the paddle itself. But look at this, the acceleration of the ball lags behind, like it’s later. And I’m going to call that the squish delay. And it looks like the same curve, but it’s just offset.

So the slope of this velocity curve is acceleration. So eventually the baseball is moving at the same acceleration as the paddle, but then up at the top, you can see the paddle stops accelerating, and that’s when the bat and the ball decouple from each other and the ball starts to fly. Eventually the pistons are fully extended and the paddle decelerates, we see this really sharp drop in the curve and that’s due to Shane’s clever braking design.

Okay, let’s look at the same graph, but for a three cartridge shot, which means it should take place quicker, but also be more powerful. All right, here we go. Contact, squish, primer ignition, paddle acceleration. Baseball is delayed. The paddle stops, and the ball is launched. Holy cow! We now understand this super complex dynamic system. I guess it’s time for the absolutely ridiculous four cartridge load, which we don’t trust. So in the interest of safety, I’m going to stand behind big metal things. And Shane’s going to stand behind the swinging device that he devised, strictly to protect him from this thing exploding. I’m hiding behind your router bed.
– [Shane] Three, two, one. (bat firing) (slow motion firing)
– [Destin] (laughs)
– [Shane] It’s like a rocket.
– [Destin] It’s still going.

We would expect the fourth charge shot to be higher, right? Except it’s not, it’s actually lower. So what could cause our baseball to go slower if we have more charges firing it? For starters, there was a whole lot of fire this time.
– [Shane] Whoa.
– [Destin] What we got?
– Yeah, that was where the fire was coming from. It just blew out where the, completely notched out where the firing pin is.
– Holy moly dude!
– [Shane] I thought that was coming past the O-rings.
– [Destin] If you look closely, you can see that the back of the powder charges actually blew out, meaning it vented a lot of that pressure. Another thing that Shane and I think might be happening here is something called an impedance mismatch. Basically, if you have something squishy and you have something rigid and they hit, the amount of time it takes to compress them and then relax leads to a less efficient elastic collision. So basically, you want to match the rigidity of the objects that are colliding so that they can compress and relax at the same time, and you get a more efficient collision. In this case, you can clearly see in the data that the ball isn’t done squishing by the time the paddle stops pushing. My guess, looking at these graphs is that the optimum charge load for this bat is somewhere around three and a half cartridges.

Okay, we’ve done the four shots, just to get the comparison to the four different velocities. Now we want to understand the dynamics a little better. We’ve got the high-speed camera looking straight down here. We’ll get a really cool shot.
– Two, one. (bat fires)
– [Destin] It was pretty clear to Shane that the reason we kept breaking stuff is we were trying to decelerate the paddle. So eventually we removed that stopping mechanism and we just let the paddle fly out freely after launching each ball.
– [Shane] It just pushed it, it just rocket ships it man.

Okay, here we go. Today is the day where Shane is going to break the record. Show the crown.
– No one’s allowed to wear it. I guess you have to wear it, because you have the…
– No, no, no, no, no. It was, it’s shared with Jeremy Fielding so…
– You both can wear it, we’ll make a big crown. (Laughs) Two-headed.

So anyway, here’s the deal. The goal is for you to wear that by the end of the day, for the home run record, right?
– That’s the goal.
– Shane’s method for not losing the paddle that flies out of the bat was to tie it to a bucket with some Kevlar string, is a pretty elegant solution, batter up.
– All right, three, two, one. (loud bang)
– [Destin] Holy cow.
– [Shane] That was the, there goes the bucket handle. (laughs)

Let’s go see where this went. I saw the… Oh, it’s an electrified fence, I need to be careful with that. There it is. We have to find that, because we can’t shoot any more if we don’t have that, right by the horse area. So horse area is how far this went. Okay, here’s this.
– Not seeing the ball.
– [Destin] The ball just go away?
– [Shane] We can go look in the field.
– Just watch it real quick. (slow motion firing)
– Oh, no that was a good launch angle, but maybe a little low.
– [Destin] I think you were a little over it.
– [Shane] Yeah.
– [Destin] Oh, you’ve got this dude, you’re going to break the record.
– This wasn’t what I intended.
– [Destin] Hey Shane, why didn’t you make extractors for this?
– [Shane] Cause I’m a fool. I’m going to hit the ball right this time.
– [Destin] Let’s not get carried away, ready?
– [Shane] All right, here we go. Three, two, one. (bat fires)
– Whoa, that went way up…
– [Destin] Right there. It was a pop fly to like shallow right center. (slow motion firing)

Five, four, three, two, one. (bat fires) (bat fires) (bat fires) (slow motion firing)
– That’s a good hit man, good job.
– Yeah, that was much better.
– Good job.

Okay, you gotta check this out. I wanted to get a super sweet shot. So what I decided to do was operate the high-speed camera with my right hand, while simultaneously flying the drone with my left. It all worked out because Shane put together a really good swing for this one.
– All right.
– Nope, no, nope, not ready.
– Okay, Ready?
– Yep.
– [Destin] Three, two, one, go. (loud bang)
– There we go, that was good. (bat fires) (drone buzzing)
– Three, two, one, go. (loud bang)
– There we go, that was good.
– I didn’t trigger that. Turns out I did trigger it. (slow motion firing) (dr