Vsauce, I’m Jake and my parents have left
me…Home...Alone. Which is scary because I’m only 8 years
old but the silver lining is, that being 8, I have an incredibly intuitive understanding
of thermal dynamics, mechanical engineering, and physics in general. Which is good because there have been a lot of robberies in my neighborhood. So to protect myself I've recreated some of the traps from the movie Home Alone. Now, there have been videos and articles about this before, about how damaging the traps would be. But nobody has recreated them, physically,
and tested them on the human body…or in our case, a ballistic dummy. So we will be testing two traps that always
stood out to me as being the most fascinating: The red hot door handle, and paint can to
the face. As a bonus, even though it isn’t a trap,
the crowbar to the chest because that just has to be dangerous, that is if you even made
it past those first two. Oh…I think I hear the bandits coming towards
the house, I’m gonna go get ready. Hey, we’re the Threadbanger Bandits and
we are robbing all these empty houses, right Corinne? That's right Rob. We're gonna knock off this little 8 year
old kid cus it’s not like he has a bunch of intricate traps set up that could seriously
hurt us. Exactly. Corinne, you check the front door and I’ll
try the back. Now we need to heat up a door handle to such
a, literal, degree that it glows red, becomes incandescent, that is the emission of electromagnetic
radiation from a hot body that makes it visible. In the film they use an electric BBQ lighter
placed on the interior side of the door, and the heat then transfers from the brass knob,
through the steel spindle into the exterior knob. One thing to consider before we test: the
object that is holding this hot door handle. The door is metal but the interior of it is
wood and foam…so if I had to hypothesis what’d happen, if we heat the knob close
to 1000°F, the temperature at which it will glow, then the metal door will start to warp
and the foam and wood inside it will combust into flame…which wouldn’t be good. But there’s only one way to know for sure. After 30 minutes the interior door handle
got to around 900 degrees F. The exterior door knob, only about 65 degrees F. It’s
taking a very long time so to speed things up we are going to use this map gas torch
to get things a little bit hotter a little bit more quickly. The exterior door knob only got to about 115
degrees F which still wouldn’t be that pleasant to touch but wouldn’t do that much damage. The interior door knob we got to a total temperature
of 1400 degrees F. Which is incredibly hot. To test how badly it would burn instead of
using a hand we used pork belly, which has similar skin thickness. And held it on the door handle for 3 seconds
like in the film. And the burn results were pretty similar to
the movie and pretty severe. But more importantly what did happen which
i thought would, the interior of the door lit on fire. The wood, the foam burned. The metal right here warped, we could actually
see some fire coming out of the door knob. Over hours you could probably get the exterior
door knob to heat up not hot enough to glow, to be incandescent. But the interior door knob would get there
over a long enough period of time. Let’s move on. And it should be noted that with this going
for hours the door would most likely, totally light on fire which defeats the purpose because
the villains could just walk right in. So...ya know. The Hot Door Knob is very similar to the Blowtorch
to the head trap from the film which my friend Mark Rober and I tested over on his channel. And speaking of heads and Mark Rober, let’s
find out what happens when a full can of paint hits you there. To help explain, the star of my favorite B&W gangster film “Angles with Filthy Physics”, mechanical engineer Mark Rober. I’m gonna give you to the count of 10 to get your
ugly, yella, no good - Oh, Vsauce! It’s you. Let’s talk paint can to the face physics. A standard 1 gallon can of paint has a mass
of about 13lbs. In the film the can is dropped from the top of the stairs with the
bandits roughly in the middle. This means, as it falls, it gains speed because
of the conversion of gravitation potential energy to kinetic, which works out to 17 mph. This is the speed of the can as if it were
just released, but you add in a swing before release meaning you have a 13lb paint can
coming towards your head at 20mph. Now if we assume your face crumples a bit
and stops this paint can in about 3/4 of an inch of travel, that puts the impact force
at 12kN. That is like getting bare knuckle punched
by Mike Tyson twice at one time. 12kN is 6 times more force than is required
to break your nose. THEN, if we take that force and divide by
the mass of your head that means your head snaps back at 266g’s. That means there is virtually a 100% chance
you will be knocked out and a 42% chance your skull would actually crack. Now where was I? Oh yeah! I'm gonna give you 10 seconds to get no good, yella belly, ugly, dirty rotten keester outta here. As Mark was saying, your skull cracking is not good. Also, because of the way the head is struck,
the bandits are likely to suffer an unhealthy dose of whiplash – causing even more damage
to the brain. After this trap, your burgling days are most likely over. Hey! He’s at the top of the stairs! I think I need to go to the hospital, my hand
is pretty burned. Get him! Time to test the trap! So a paint can to the face would be incredibly devastating...which I feel is an understatement. But luckily for us, Threadbanger
Bandits are very, very tough so this brings us to the last test: The crowbar to the chest. I just need one thing...oh. Here it is! Ahhhhhhhhh! Why is this happening to me? Rob...what are you doing? Corinne…don’t move. The crowbars weighs about 5lbs. And is swinging through the air at
around 35 mph It will deliver a total force of 15,000N. About 4.5 times the amount of force needed
to break an average human rib. It broke through the skin, 7
ribs, and in this test actually punctured a lung and the heart. Ok, so after doing this tests, what did we find out? Well, the hot door handle would get very, very, very hot give enough time, a very long time. You'd get 3rd degree burns on your hand and you would probably have to go to a hospital. You wouldn't be able to use this baby for the rest of the night Then we get to paint can to the head. Which is devastating, really cool, but really devastating. That would be the end of your robbing career and you probably wouldn't walk away from it. But you do, some how, and we get to crowbar to the chest. Which not only breaks your ribs but punctures your internal organs. And that's not good and you should really go see a doctor at this point if this happens to you. Please this is just a PSA from me to you. So could you survive the Home Alone traps? Most likely probably, pretty much, no you couldn't. Which makes me think I should check on Rob and Corinne... And, as always, thanks for watching.
Home alone 1? Maybe. Home Alone 2? He would have killed them each at least 5 times over. I mean cmon, chucking a brick off a four story building at someone's face!? Lol.
Paint can impact was way more gruesome than I could have imagined.
That looks pretty expensive, for a 500k views video.
oh vsauce, answering the questions I've never asked
Without even watching this if you watch the movies as an adult you've already said to yourself "...motherfucker woulda died from that"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WKgNyvsNDM Honest Action is pretty awesome
Wow you could almost tell he wasnt reading his lines during the black and white scene
does he not know this video was already made?