How STRONG is ROPE From VHS Tape? (Movie Mythbusting)

in today's video we're testing out a comment request to see if we can make a good strong rope out of video tape [Music] hey guys we just wanted to let you know that we have a bunch of DIY project kis up for sale in our shop including cool projects like the sky blaster slingshot the sky blaster slingshot can send water balloons over 150 feet away and if you make a set of sky balls you can use the slingshots to send them high into the sky so if you'd like to make one for yourself go ahead and click the link in the description to check them out okay night Dave Reeves had a video idea for us he says how strong is a rope made from VHS video tape like on the movie castaway excellent question Dave here's the basic idea we'll make a couple of types of rope out of video tape we'll test how strong it is and then we're going to see if we can use it to lash together a small raft I don't know who all has seen the movie castaway Tom Hanks gets stranded on an island he has to escape somehow and to do so he builds a raft he makes a lot of natural rope out of plant fibers but also washed up on the island with him were a lot of videotapes and so he also uses some tape to try and make ropes and lashes raft together when he runs out of natural ropes so we have some video tapes here and I think we want to try a few different methods of making rope to see how strong it is we can test how strong it is with our scale like we've done before maybe lashing it between a couple of cars we can pull before it actually snaps exactly and then like in the movie we can see if we can use it to lash together a raft we don't have the ocean to try and cost and we also don't have an abundance of coconut trees to cut down and make into a raft but we do have some some pool noodles and a video tape we're gonna try and lash those together and it's not so much of a test of holding the noodles together it's gonna be a test of if the lashed noodles can hold us like can we can we lash it together tightly enough and strong enough that it'll hold a person on top of it so here we've got our VHS tapes this wasn't the first thing people ever watched movies on no clothes but it was one of the first things you could watch movies on at home in any sort of mass-produced point you could get old reels and a projector kind of thing too and but this was the first we max modern form of convenience for them hey this is what really spread yeah so let's see to get these out these are each six-hour tapes you do that I'll be over here with mine sorry Bigfoot alright this had gotten hooked onto something but there you go there's a real and you can see how much of this there is that's burning okay not great it's not like fuse or anything but it burns it definitely gets ruined by heat like immediately okay I'm kind of curious how strong is just a single piece a lot of stretch in that and then it just snaps you can definitely break it without too much stress single piece of it that's not hard there's a few things I want to try first before we start making to the rope I think I'm going to take this outside and see how many layers of it I have to wrap before it can hold my weight this is 10 strands of video tape kinda don't think that by itself is gonna be enough but I want to double it up maybe I wasn't trying to break it really thin still but that is a lot of layers so I want to try it I'm not sure if you're maybe I don't know if you need 20 don't worry it's squishy ground balls yeah well and I can just sort of lift myself from here Oh can't hold on like that that's my main concern is you hurting yourself oh well like half a millimeter thick and that's holding me up holy cow it's hard to hold onto but it holds my weight for sure awesome that's pretty nuts I want to try ten try Ted 20 held my weight just fine so now we're going for half fat oh no ten is not enough so 20 is 10 is not so I'm gonna go back to 20 I'm gonna try and sort of twist it this is a very very ghetto slapdash rope but we'll see if it loses its strength when it's curled around like that a little bit oh wow when he does it so that that curls into a very small cord but it is strong a lot of layers there so I think we're going to try two different versions of this rope we're going to do one that is a braid and we found 20 was enough to hold a person's weight and I think that's a pretty good metric of what we should go for it I think we'll try and hold our weight on it again and then we'll see how it works for lashing together our pool noodles slapping a tree trunk this is our coconut trees they're blue and foam and sort of swirly star-shaped because I like it in the movie cast away we see Tom Hanks using video tape to lash his raft together but I don't believe we actually ever see him making rope out of video tape we see him braiding his bark rope that's made from plant fibers and we see him just wrapping tape around parts of the raft but I don't know that he actually made any sort of cordage out of it I think he just used the tape itself in the movie he talked about making rope and he said something about how he could make about 15 feet of rope per day I just made 10 feet of rope in half an hour with the video tape just braiding it is this as strong as what he was making I doubt it but I think I could make three of these and braid them together and it would still only take about two hours total and fairly strong like I said this number of strands before was able to hold my weight I will try that again with it braided and then after that we're gonna test it with our crane scale and see just how much weight it takes to snap this rope and then we'll try and use it to lash some rats together yeah I don't think this stuff knows how to get tangled it's so slick yeah that's right we've got two cords now one with our rope machine and one that Nate braided together I want to see if the rope that we've made this is now a braided rope made from 21 strands I want to see if braided up like this it still has enough strength to hold my weight or if something about the the twisting and the knotting have taken away some of its ability to lift so I've got it wrapped around these dowels because otherwise I think I would cut my hands in half from the weight of it so same thing cos goes oh that's trouble no I did stretch and that doesn't surprise me given how much a single piece of it stretches but it held just fine Wow there you go all right and I used I intentionally used one end of this this is the the braided one that I have like 10 feet of and so we can we can do the actual strength test with the rest of it all of these yeah the structural integrity is really changed like you can see how thin and lined it and this one's just like twice as wide so we'll just be sure to only use the wide part of it that hasn't been stretched out yet and of course it will stretch a lot as we're doing the test now we are going to test the twisted one that was made on our rope from machine see how strong it is very slowly drive the truck away and see what it gets up to before it snaps and this one we did not put our weight on Nate was hanging off of one end of his braided rope on the playground we wanted to make sure that it was still just as strong as it was when he was holding all of the strands loose this one we haven't done any stress testing on yet so it's fresh brand new let's see what it can take we've had people in the past comment that there should be a setting on our scale that automatically records the highest it gets to vary unfortunately this particular brand does not have that it looks almost identical to some that do but our doesn't so we may in the future invest in a scale it does have that feature it just automatically records the maximum that it gets to on ours we just have to film it and see what it looks like it hit 2008 just passed 40 just passed 60 that's stretching a lot a lot of stretch that's 100 oh alright what we hit so that seemed to get to about 115 which is less than the weight that I had on it although going over a bar yeah it's gonna be different because it's a nice smooth curve that may have some resistance against the cord and then I've got two of them that I'm hanging from at once so that may divide up the weight a little bit let's try the other one the braided one throw it on and see what we get we've got our braided video tape rope we're gonna see how it does just attaching it to the carabiner and the scale on the other side slowly drive the truck away and see what it hits 40 50 60 80 90 the other thing is the stopping and starting could be hurting it to just past a hundred whoa pretty much the same about 115 maybe 120 that stretched a lot I wasn't watching a stretch but I could sort of see how far the car was getting away I was keeping my eye on the scale and that hit about 115 120 which is a good amount of pull for a cord this size a check I would say it's you know it's not as strong as a paracord but this is video tape we've got our palm tree logs and now it's time to start tying them together we're gonna use the the cord that we've made and we're going to try just the individual strands of tape in the movie like I think I said it shows him he just wraps it around stuff over and over and you know if you wrap it enough times I think I'd probably do a pretty good job but we do also want to use our cords so I think we're gonna try the plain tape on one side and the cord on the other if we have enough we may meant parts of the other side with some plain tape as well generally just testing can use video tape to hold a raft together now of course we know that pool noodles with enough of these we're gonna float that's obvious that's what they're made for but the same thing is true with logs if you've got logs logs are gonna float the question is just whether the cord is enough to handle the stress of a person moving on it will it hold together or will it break this is a perfect test and analog now it's just our version of it here at the studio I wouldn't want to take it on the Pacific Ocean but I'm happy to try it on the hot tub be great I don't know I'm gonna go for it great so many ways okay so I've sort of made like a hammock ground that actually sounds and how to maintain with this I mean I'm overheating but Wilson you're gonna be a pillow that actually okay you're a new invention lashed together pool noodles with a maybe a slightly better pool pillow but this is this is nice look everyone second there we go okay go ahead Wilson you're always there for me could you could you surf on it I definitely could not could somebody surf on it that's possible okay really weird Tigers coming oh it's not my side coming undone ha it's both but more mine these are not terribly sturdy could you like you straddle it work how you're supposed to use a pool noodle oh yeah it's lifting me up pretty well I feel very high up out of the water my feet are dangling down as shark bait ooh ha ha ha all right so now I'm just it was kind of started thrashing around on and see what it takes for it start coming apart because the ocean was energetic oh wait you broke one side you broke the rope you just came untied leaves I'm going inside alright let's see how it's about okay and all together still it's looking worse but it's still holding together someone you're tying method was definitely better than mine well you had the rope I got to use what I'll see Tom Hanks use you just did it better huh oh no just a loop came off it didn't break just to fold the end loop just came off somehow there you go there you go that's it better a whole four minutes and it's not broken apart you can totally cross the Pacific Ocean it did better than my rice cake raft guys that's it for today but you know we've always got more for deceit click that box up the top to check out our most recent video and we will see you the next one knock it in [Music]

Channel: TKOR

Views: 1,071,439

Keywords: cast away movie, how to make your own rope, rope making machine, movie mythbusting, tkor, thekingofrandom, grant thompson, nate, calli, wilson, rope making machine diy, castaway movie ending, rope making machine king of random, mythbusters, debunking viral videos, VHS, tape recorder, video tape rope, VHS player, film strip, plastic soda bottle rope, survival rope, fuse rope, make all the rope, build a raft, movie truth, movie logic

Id: BO8rvxWFZF8

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019