I made the worlds strongest nut cracker

this is jaws jaws is not a nutcracker he's a nut obliterator he's 15 000 times more powerful than a normal nutcracker so load up and strap on your body armor because with jaws you just might need it [Music] jaws was made because i thought it would be really funny to crack this kind of nut so we'll be testing that and of course sticking everything else we can think of in there if you're wondering why something like this should exist i mean come on it's gonna be awesome three two one wow this all started when i made an explosive powered bat which as best i can tell broke the mlb home run distance record ever since i've been wanting to make a nutcracker using this technology and tis the season the bat was powered by these little explosive blanks which are used to drive nails directly into concrete they should be really good at driving nutcracker jaws into everything the red tip on these blanks means that they're maximum power which is really cool but you know what's even cooler four blanks at the same time getting this thing working was pretty hard it really wants to just violently tear itself apart that reminds me i need to tell you do not try this at home if you don't know exactly what you're doing this is incredibly dangerous and even deadly there's a lot of engineering testing and precautions that i'm not even showing in the video that i'm doing to make this safe so live vicariously through me and if the friend asks you if you want to make something powder actuated just say no all right let's go back to the beginning a traditional nutcracker works by amplifying the force from your hand with a lever to squeeze a nut really hard and crack it with powder actuation i should be able to make a nutcracker that generates up to 80 000 pounds of force that's like 15 000 times stronger than this nutcracker and that's all thanks to these wonderful little blinks you're supposed to put them in a special tool which tickles them in just the right way they shoot out super high pressure gas which drives a nail into concrete my goal is to somehow use this expanding gas to actuate the nutcracker although i'm not going to use a lever because they really like to snap and besides this is so powerful i don't need no stinking lever if i put a piston over these blanks the expanding gas will shoot it up and crush these nuts this is similar to how my bat worked but there's a big difference this is the pushy bit from the bat that launches the ball it's 50 cal because the pistons are half of an inch diameter and this is what i'm going to be making the piston for the nutcracker out of 200 cal 2 inches this is going to make the nutcracker generate about 10 times the force of the bat to understand why we have to talk about pressure pressurized gas is basically gas that wants to take up a lot of space smooshed down into a tiny little space and like a compressed spring it wants to expand except the gas wants to expand in every direction at the same time pressure is measuring how hard the gas is pushing on a given area if i have a bigger area it will push harder the problem is that when you start making the piston really big it really wants to tear itself apart and that's because the stress in the cylinder grows like this as you make the piston bigger so to try to make it strong enough i could just make everything thicker than a bowl of oatmeal but that isn't a very good strategy for one i could be wrong and it could explode in my face but also metal is really expensive and if i make it thicker than it needs to be i'm wasting material which is a tragedy this is why engineering is a thing if i can calculate how strong the nutcracker needs to be and how strong a given design is i can design it to be just strong enough and it's just like they say any old schmuck can build a bridge but only an engineer can make a bridge that barely stands i'm planning to bolt together a stack of thick steel plates to make the piston when the pressure's pushing the piston up it's also pushing downward the opposing forces will try to rip the nutcracker in half and the bolts are the only thing keeping it together so it's critical that the bolts are strong enough so let's talk about steel if i tighten the nut on this big bolt it's hard to see but the bolt is getting longer and if i loosen the nut it springs back to its original length usually at least if you're anything like me you've cranked the nut to the point where it suddenly gets easy to turn and what's happening is that the bolt stretches so much and it starts to permanently deform we need to use bolts that are strong enough but the question is what size different size bolts take different amounts of force to stretch but if i take the force it took to stretch any given bolt and divide it by the bolt's cross sectional area i always get the same number which is interesting and this number is actually a really important property of metals it's called yield strength it's telling me how many pounds per square inch of cross-section steel can take before it stretches i can use this to directly calculate what size bolt i need and this is one of the ways that engineers predict how something's going to behave rather than having to physically test it so at this point we have a piston that we're going to shoot upwards utilizing the farts of these shells the plan is for the piston to be the nutcracker's torso so we're going to move the shells over to the nutcracker's back where there's also room for the firing pins and a hammer and all that stuff when it goes bang all the gas shoots down the tube and launches the piston upwards but once it's done i need to let the gas out i could have a little hole that opens up like this and lets the gas out but this is going to be incredibly loud and nutcrackers are supposed to be used in the family room with everyone gathered around them loud explosions would totally spoil the mood and besides everyone knows that the only loud explosions allowed in these situations is vicious political debate so i'm going to add a tube to the piston that gets pulled up as the nutcracker fires when the jaw reaches the closed position it'll open up a little hole that lets the gas shoot down the tube which will have a muffler on the end of it which will make it quiet this tube lets me solve another big problem which is stopping the piston remember it's going to be a chunk of 2 inch steel and if i fire the nutcracker with nothing in it it's going to be going up to 200 miles per hour if it slams into a solid steel wall at that speed it will destroy everything so i'm going to put a spring right here which has to be compressed before the piston hits the wall this will bring it to a gentle stop and by gentle i mean 18 000 g's which would liquify your brain but it's much better than hitting the wall this is the spring we're going to be using the technical spec for this is beef supreme remember that gas that tried to rip our bolts in half well it also pushes out sideways which is a big problem we need to make the nutcracker thick enough so that this doesn't happen but how thick is thick enough just like the bolts our goal is to make sure that this tube never stretches to the point that it permanently deforms but figuring this one out is tricky if i pressurize the pipe and look at how much it's stretching it varies in a complicated way across the pipe this problem is a lot easier to think about if we zoom way in on the pipe and look at a little tiny piece that's so small the variation across it is negligible we can imagine what happens to this little piece the pressure in the tube is pushing it outwards but this piece has little pieces next to it that pull on it to keep it from moving away it also has a piece behind it that's going to keep it from moving which is also held in place by pieces next to it and so on everything is pushing and pulling and squeezing on everything if this seems like a huge complicated mess you're right i'll spare you the specific details but math makes it possible to precisely specify all these different things that happen in a little piece which you can use to figure out the stretch or the stress for any part in the tube then all we have to do is run the numbers until we find a tube that's thick enough so that it doesn't explode if you've ever wondered why anyone cares about calculus or differential equations this is why they are incredibly powerful tools for a huge number of problems i just ran the numbers and they're kind of crazy to keep the nutcracker from exploding the walls have to be an inch thick which is really thick hopefully this reinforces why you don't want to mess with these things i would have never thought that the walls need to be that thick all we got to do now is design it i've been working on this for a couple days now and this is what i've come up with basically a giant block of steel which is what it takes to hold this thing together steel is pretty slow to machine so this is going to take a while if you've ever wondered what it's like to make something like this look no further [Music] so [Music] man that took forever assembly is usually a lot easier than the fabrication this is the triggering mechanism these are the pins that ignite the shells [Music] all of these big steel parts are the piston i tried to reduce the number of seals but there's still a lot of seals all the non-strength critical parts are 3d printed on the fuse one this is starting to look like a nutcracker i think he's ready to make his big debut [Music] sporting a classic military uniform with an avant-garde flare he has a face that says see what happens will the influencers of the world adopt his style i think that would be great but only time will [Music] tell all right let's be honest this is amazing this is so cool ah it's huge there's a normal nutcracker i love this this is so good this little backpack that he's wearing is what holds the shells and does the firing and just like a real nutcracker you push this lever down to fire it to load it you open the breech and put the shells in here then when you're done you close the breech and then it and it's armed my goal was to make it impossible to set this thing off when you don't intend to and there's a series of safeties to ensure this the first thing we have is the safety stick this physically prevents the nutcracker lever from being depressed it also goes inside of the nutcracker and physically blocks the hammer from reaching the shells so even if you somehow release the hammer it just can't go off if the slide isn't fully shut it blocks the hammer as well and the slide can't be fully shut unless the breech is fully locked this prevents it from being triggered with the breech partially locked or open which could be really dangerous and then if we decapitate him these bolts that hold the body together are designed to fail before the body itself this means that if somehow something went pop it's gonna shoot this plate straight up rather than pieces of the body outwards which is much more dangerous that's a lot of engineering and precautions but i still don't trust my engineering that much so we've got body armor hard hat eye protection i'm cowering behind the barricade and it has remote start so i don't have to be anywhere near it a while back i had to fast for a couple of days and this is a reenactment of what it looked like when i finally got some food three two one this isn't nearly as powderized as i would have expected let's do something a little more quantitative metal nut versus two shells three two one what what some really precise measurements i think i can barely detect some squish but i shouldn't need calipers to see this it should be smooshed a lot more i spent a lot of time wandering in the wilderness and we're just going to skip over that part this has just been driving me crazy i've been messing with this for multiple days now i've fired it a million times and it kind of works but the power just is not matching what it should be i thought there was a bunch of different problems i remade the chamber that holds the shells three times and i'm pretty sure i figured out the actual problem the gas from the shells comes out of this hole and goes into this hole to drive the piston and it would really hurt the performance of the nutcracker if these holes didn't line up no one could have guessed that right i mean come on it only took three tries to figure it out there is at least a quick hack to fix this three two one [Music] it's better but it still isn't as powerful as i calculated the nut with three shells should be flat i'm just going to go for four i want to know if it can survive it i want to know if i'm gonna have to remake a bunch of parts three two one [Music] that was so loud even with the hearing protection i felt that in my soul it didn't even do anything with a nut it's worse than three shells like what doesn't make any sense i don't understand what is wrong with you oh i see it looks like the pressure's so high that it blew the tops of the shells off and squeezed them out into this little tiny gap in the breech which is surprising because the fit is really good on this it's built like a swiss watch maybe a swiss watch made in china it's pretty good unfortunately what happened here is pretty fundamental to the design of these parts i don't see any way to modify these to make it work i guess i'm going to go redesign and remake all these parts great it's not that bad i just remade these parts and you're not going to believe it the firing pins don't line up with the shells so i get to remake them again all right it is that bad this doesn't fit this one should fit finally the new design bolts everything together so there's no gap to squeeze the shells into i just realized a big problem when this thing fires all that gas goes down through the muffler into the legs which are totally sealed it has nowhere to go i gotta find a way to get the hot gas out before i break something you know this is the best spot don't judge me [Music] all right i think he's finally ready for prime time and in this corner we have jaws weighing in at 25 pounds he is a chonker and in the other corner is lil joe weighing less than two mice i have to say is this fair wait he's already devoured him is that even legal all right i think it's working we get to do the fun part now we get to see what this little man is made of i've brought the wife in so she can render her opinions what do you think of jaws manicured mustache and eyebrows clearly had some dental work done they're also metal he's got a grill and i really like his hair we're going to start with what this thingy is designed for this is a rock hard macadamia nut what do you think is gonna happen to this nut it's gonna explode and then the nut is gonna be smushed you heard it here first three two one wow [Music] it seems to have ejected all of the nut nut dust called it nice all right what do we got here some silly putty any predictions satisfying smoosh it's not nearly as exciting it seems like it would be really fun boring snore i got jawbreakers but they're too big red hot jawbreakers shatter it that's pretty much what i was expecting i think what about five jawbreakers same thing i ate too many jawbreakers oh i think i'm going to be sick oh disgusting it's just all stuck to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter a glass marble this doesn't sound dangerous i just feel like everything's gonna shatter come on give him something hard a hardened steel ball bearing this is the hardest jawbreaker like split in half or something i don't know these bearings are really hard so we're going with four shells i'm a little concerned about four if it does crack it could really come flying out fast so we're gonna evacuate the wife get out of here doing four doing live three two one wow it just pressed the ball bearing into the jaws and the bottom the bearing is so hard it's forming the steel jaws around it a literal jawbreaker it should be able to shatter this i think i just need harder jaws we'll save that one for later because right now we're gonna do what we've all been waiting for metal nut versus four shells i think that's gonna get smooshed you think it's gonna smush this three two one [Music] all right this looks great it looks like that cool s estee drawn middle school anyone who's cool in any grade it was one piece but with a little touch it snapped i can't believe it actually cracked the nut success my life's work crack can i fire it uh yeah what do you want to smash what a battery i thought the same thing but that's a really bad idea do you have an extra lego men that i have i forgot that i had festivities very festive okay now we can lego man this little man went through santa's court of law and has been deemed naughty oh yeah he goes into the nutcracker who is santa's enforcement who is currently loaded with four shells two one [Music] [Applause] [Music] swap both arms all wow santa doesn't mess around don't get on the naughty list kids absolute carnage [Music] wow oh my gosh his poor head it's like it split open in the back i think he's dead pretty crazy the big question i already married is do you think that this is an important invention a little i can't say no with him looking right at me all right he's not looking no i mean what's it gonna change the world i'd like to see it try see what she says behind his back it's ridiculous i think he's very two-faced and very festive and very handsome do you like it yes you gotta ask the right questions this is my favorite kind of project it's awesome arguably useless and definitely commercially not viable and that means that after all the engineering there isn't really anything for me to sell which makes projects like this really dependent on your support so i'm not trying to make you feel guilty if you enjoyed the video i'm happy but if you do want to help support projects like this there are a couple things that you can do so you might have noticed this awesome shirt that i'm wearing this is a blueprint of my unpickable lock and if you like it you can get one at stuffmatehere.shop another thing you can do is support these projects directly on patreon and the last thing you can do is take a minute to check out this video sponsor kiwico what kiwico does is every month they send you a crate that has everything that you need to do some kind of project and this one is an automaton it simulates santa coming to deliver all of your presents the reason i love these crates so much is they go beyond the project to teach you general concepts and in the case of this project santa is driven by a set of differently timed cams my unpickable lock actually had a bunch of cams people who see my projects like the unpickable lock ask me where did i learn to design stuff like that and it all started with a steady diet of kits and projects just like these they're just a great investment in a kid's future at this point pretty much all the kids in my extended family are getting kiwico crates if you're thinking about useful gifts that you could give a loved one you should check out kiwico and if you go to kiwico.com stuff made here they'll give you 50 off your first month and they have a ton of different crates for different age groups and interests and that's it thank you kiwiko for sponsoring this video and thank you for taking the time to listen [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 2,171,311

Rating: 4.9761596 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Q1RaC7YJ7sk

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ndg127]

Amazing work Shane! The step up in the animations/editing on this video were incredible. Did you hire someone to help or are you ALSO a talented animator, on top of all your engineering skills?

[u/Shattered14]

Awesome video. Any chance you can share the calculations you used for FOS on the bolts?

As a MechE, I am always curious how different companies / groups / people analyze their bolts / joints

[u/mccunicorn]

This was great. I of course love anything that goes boom, but I think it would also be fun to see Shane engineer a completely mechanical (non-explosive) nutcracker and multiply the mechanical advantage to to a ridiculous degree of cracking strength.

[u/DJVT7]

Amazing work! This is easily one of my favorite videos so far!

What sort of machining tolerances do you typically try to hit with projects like this and the bullet powered baseball bat?

[u/Inmoral_Merchant]

Nice work. If Shane again or anyone reading this ever wants to build something like this; I highly highly recommend that you read the "Book on Weaponry" by Rheinmetall.

It contains a lot of the technical theory behind guns and a lot of it is directly applicable to these kinds of things. It might save you from loosing your hand or worse.

The book is old and not printed anymore. Physical copies are rare and somewhere around 150$, however you can read it for free on the Internet Archive. Just Google the title.

Because the book is old, the models in there are not 100% accurate, but the margin of security is high.