I made these to do a ridiculously high dunk

something that's always bugged me is how hard it is to dunk a ball it's so high I took my inability to dunk personally so I decided to engineer some UPS these are dunk Boots imagine a dunk so high you have to be on a rope or you'll break your legs you know what you don't have to imagine it because that's what we're doing well after we work out the Kinks these are really similar to inspector gadgets boots do you remember go go gadget boots and that was basically my mission statement for this project extendable stilts on command that could make me Ascend into the heavens and that ideally I could take a step with which I technically I think satisfied that last part I also wasn't satisfied with a standard dunk that's 10 ft the world record is 12 ft but I designed these to go up to 16 ft I really don't know why I guess I have a thing for absurd basketball stuff although in retrospect I should have stopped at regulation height trying to go as high as I possibly can made things exponentially more complicated and it's also really dangerous my initial idea was some kind of scissor mechanism like you'd see on one of these lifts it has a bunch of linkages that kind of expand like an accordion when it's pushed by this hydraulic ram and I can even do a record setting dunk in this unfortunately this lift weighs about 3,000 lb so I can attach to my foot and take a step with it but I was thinking maybe I could miniaturize this concept into something much lighter that barely works but doing the math I don't see any way to make this where it doesn't just bend and break but then I just happen to find the answer at the hardware store this is a collapsible ladder it goes from a really small size to a really long ladder and it's strong enough to hold a person but it's also really light and portable this is exactly what we're looking for if we just remove this middle part we'll have two telescoping poles that we can build our stilts around then if we connect them to our feet and make them expand we have go- go gadget legs although at the moment this is just kind of a dead fish and we need to find a way to make these expand automatically I want the legs to extend by themselves to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and my best idea which I kind of hate Kind of Love is this Air This is called an air cylinder and it's kind of a mini version of what I'm thinking about so this is a sealed tube and inside there's a rod and if I put air behind the rod it's going to shoot out like this and if you think about it the segments of this ladder look a lot like an air cylinder that's inside of an air cylinder inside of an air cylinder inside an air cylinder inside of an air cylinder air cylinders all the way down if I could just make this air tight putting air into one end should make the whole thing expand lift me way up into the air to do an epic dunk although saying just make it airtight is an extremely loaded statement which Engineers love to do just make it lighter faster and cheaper just compute the optimal path that visits each City once just split the atom it's so tiny how hard could it be we just need to make it airtight except for its full of holes there's going to be a million seals in this and a bunch of them are going to move every single one of these tubes has to be able to slide while staying airtight and I think doing that reliably is going to be the hardest part my general strategy is going to be to put a rubber ring around each of these tubes and squeeze it tight against the tube so that it's sealed airtight but the tube can still slide underneath this ring and this is called an O-ring although the way I've drawn this air can still go up and out up here so we'll need another o-ring to seal the top let's get it made almost all the metal Parts can be made on my water jet if you haven't seen this machine before it cuts metal using water if you want to see how it works check out my pencil sharpeners man these would have taken so long to machine Machining metal Parts is the most work so I try to avoid it but there still were a number of parts I had to machine that's all the metal parts now we just have to make all of those seals every joint requires a custom piece so it would be way too much work to machine all these so I'm just 3D printing them these are the pieces that'll hold the O-rings they hold the O-rings inside these grooves then they slide onto the ladder and they're held in place with a very special screw everything has to be airtight so even the screw has a little o-ring on it to seal it all right now we just have to do this for 12 more joints putting this all together is really tricky because it's very easy to damage the O-rings that's all the seals for the joints and they feel pretty good feels like this would be airtight although we also have to seal the ends the little tube touches the ground and so there's kind of a foot that goes on the end of it to seal it and then the big hole on the top is sealed by this big complicated cap which has a lot going on but the only thing that matters right now is that there a spot where we can put air in to make this thing expand but there is a very important question here which is what makes it stop expanding because when we put air into this hole it's going to generate an insane amount of force trying to make it extend and at some point it has to stop or it's going to blow itself apart right so these legs have a range of Pistons from a very big one up here to a very small one down here and this little one is going to need a lot more pressure to lift me than the big one it's about 10 times the pressure which means that when I'm giving it the pressure to make this one expand this one's going to be seeing about 1,000 lbs of force trying to pull it apart and so the leg has to withstand that otherwise this is just going to pop apart there's a plastic cap on the top of each of the segments which wedges itself in this sort of circumferential Ridge on the inside of the tube my instincts are telling me there's no way this piece of plastic will be able to take the forces so we're going to test it just to see we're going to give it all the pressure and see if the tube pops apart I also calculated that the tubes can take this pressure without [Music] rupturing wa well that answers that question we need something that's going to keep these from going Beyond a certain point this is hard because there's just no room we can't even start putting holes and stuff because we have to keep it airtight the initial design that I came up with was to use steel cables that would connect each segment to the next one and they would bend out of the way when it was collapsed and then stretch tight when they reach their limit but the more I thought about it the more I hated this design so we're not going to do this I have cable for a future project what I'm going to do is really similar but a lot better instead of a cable we're going to make a sort of chain out of two pieces of metal connecting the segments together with this we'll hold them together and it'll fold down really nicely all right let's make it I have over a 100 Custom Metal parts now thank goodness I have the water jet because Machining these would be a nightmare all of these little rings are how I'm going to mount the chains to the tubes without putting holes in them rebuilding the legs is not fast though and hopefully I don't blow seals much because you have to take the entire leg apart to get to a seal the question now is if this thing can lift me and I add a little foot rest to stand on and I only have one because these are very timec consuming to make ultimately I'll have two of them one for each leg but not until we work out the Kinks with this one so if I'm successful I'm going to go way up and then fall down and I'd rather not land on my head so I'm going to have an auto ble attached to the ceiling and attached to me I'll be wearing a harness and what this does is it's basically a rope that's automatically pulled up as I go up and if I fall it will catch me and lower me down safely the same way that a rock climbing bler would work another danger when this thing is fully extended it's going to be way up there it's really topheavy if it falls over it could punch a hole in the wall which is why I added this tarp to try to protect the wall could also land on my head so I have this rope with a pulley that can move up but not down the leg will be attached to this and then if I fall off it'll just hang by the pulley rather than falling on me my last fear here is that this thing is going to punch me in the face when I pressurize it it's going to be trying to expand but my body weight is going to be pushing it down and if my foot pops off it will shoot up with potentially a lot of force and it could hit me in the face I'm not sure how bad this effect will be so I'm going to do is pressurize it up carefully and jump off to see where it goes W yeah we should probably do something about that so here here's what we're going to do we're going to run a cable down the inside of the leg anchored to the foot and it's going to go up and attached to a winch and it can expand it in a controlled Way by unspooling it here's the winch and the very smooth cable which seals against the cap where it goes into the leg this lets it slide through the cap without air coming out it attaches very securely to a new metal foot and it winds onto the winch on the side and wraps over this pulley so that it goes straight into the leg I think it's safe to say that standing on the leg and just letting it rip is not a good way to test it everything happens very fast I can't tell what's going on so I made this roller coaster track that will guide the leg up and down in a straight line this will let me be much more systematic and take things slow it also should be a lot safer since it's moving in a controlled way rather than shooting off in random directions especially not into my face this air gun is what lets air into the legs to make the testing easier I'm running the winch with a drill yes it works [Music] you know what never mind this winch design is just terrible every time the leg retracts it goes slack and gets tangled up and it's really easy to damage the line and it gets kinked really the only thing I'm trying to solve is this thing shooting up uncontrollably and if that's the main problem to solve there's other ways to solve it let's be real this is why they make helmets all right let's see if this thing can lift [Music] me so I didn't design the seal fittings right they're the wrong shape so I printed a new set which we're going to install and hopefully that'll do it rebuilding these legs takes so long this is the most painful part of this project for sure all right let's try it again [Music] unfortunately I designed the seal fittings wrong they just leak still so I designed and printed another set and hopefully these ones will work did I mention how painful this process is but I think the seals are good now and look how tall these things things are wow I think we're ready to make the second leg so allow me to present 20 hours of my life in 10 seconds or less we're still going to use the guide rail so I'm modifying it to hold two legs all right here we [Music] go so good it works I still think this ladder is shooting up too fast so we're going to connect it to an auto ble in Reverse this should keep it from shooting up too fast let's see how it [Music] works that is way better now that it's not going to kill me let's try dunking some [Music] balls see if we can [Music] dunk [Applause] easy okay so now there's two questions how high can we go and can I do it without the rail let's start by going high before I get injured we're going for 16 ft all right so wow all right on ballet you can do it man so this is about the limit of the legs it's really slow [Music] come on come on one more one more oh yeah boom I can't believe I just inflated a ladder to lift me up 16 ft to perform a completely um uh fraudulent dunk what a time to be alive I was doing a bit more testing when the rail got jammed the force of the legs completely obliterated the mount which is really strong this is a great example of why I'm so afraid of these things let's make sure that doesn't happen again I'm making a new rail guide That's All Steel super strong and it should be unjam basically the same thing as the wooden guide It's just made of steel and seeing how strong this is makes me more confident so I want to see how fast we can go I upgraded the air delivery system so that we can get more air into these things faster all right we are on blet I'm a little bit afraid to give it full Chooch here we go whoa oh my goodness that is that was faster than I was expecting that that was freaky all right on ble ble is on dunking dunk on Full Speed so good [Music] on oh that's crazy this is incredibly fun and it's really cool but I'm not totally satisfied I really want to see dunking with a self-balancing set of legs so I'm going to work my way up to full balancing starting with this I'm attaching the stilts to the cart with a pivot that lets them move side to side so I'll have to balance in that direction but they won't let me go forward and back so it's sort of half balancing let's see if we can do it this ended up being a lot harder than I was expecting I ended up spending multiple days practicing and then sleeping on it to try to make it muscle memory ow what the and after a lot of practice I can do this there we go D that was pretty smooth Maybe I am learning to balance on these things we are now disconnected from the rail let's see if we can balance in all directions I can't even balance on the ground I don't know if that's going to happen man well that was prophetic I spent hours trying to balance on this I slept on it to see if I could get better and I didn't oh there is no way I'm balancing front to back but that's okay cuz I just realized I'm a why am I trying to walk around on peg legs I don't walk around on my heels I walk on feet I made some size 11 ft for it which just like my size 11 ft should help it balance front to back we are no longer attached to the rail I've got a climbing rope with a one-way pulley which should keep it from tipping over and slamming into my head or the floor but it's not actually strong so it's not helping me balance [Music] I didn't fall this still isn't really fair the stilts are connected together by this beefy frame and it makes it easier and they're not stilts I can't walk in them so we have to do it without this I could totally walk in these if they were connected to my feet I designed these to do that but it's way too d dangerous so I'm not doing it all right here we go no [Music] no tell you what you really wouldn't want to get in front of these things man that's so scary every time we're getting there I mean we're getting there sort of this is really hard hard and really sketchy we're going to keep trying but before we do that if you're wondering how I'm able to make something like this and have it mostly work and not punch me in the face it's really because I've taken the time to develop a theoretical understanding of how things work so I can predict what pressure do I need is this thing going to explode what are the forces going to be before I've built anything and then I can design it so it'll probably work usually and it's not magic it's takes a bit of time and effort to learn it which is why I'm a huge fan of this video sponsor brilliant brilliant is a tool that makes it really easy to learn technical stuff it'll take a subject like mechanics and break it down into a series of lessons that teach you the theory but then have you work examples so you're learning by doing which is just the best way to make the stuff stick the other really important thing is schedule you can't just read a textbook for 8 hours once a month you need to be learning consistently and sleeping on it which is something that brilliant is designed for the lessons are broken down into these bite-sized chunks which makes it really easy to do a little bit every day you're going to be amazed if you do this consistently how much you learn and they have so many topics all the math computer science data science physics mechanics there's probably something here that you want to learn so it is a tool that's designed to make it as easy as possible to pipe technical knowledge into your brain and it works really well so if you're interested in building up your technical abilities you need to check out brilliant it's free to try for 30 days so you can see if it works for you just go to brilliant.org stuff made here you can also click the link in the description and the first 200 people to do this will get 20% off their annual premium membership I love having brilliant as a sponsor because learning is such an important thing for you and for humankind so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this video and thank you for taking the time to check it out all right it's time we have to do this so here we go 12T 1 in world record by the nerd totally legal totally regulation here we go all right we are just going for it yes yes it works oh my that is [Music] scary finally full dunk at speed with stilts with no help we did it it's the only time I'm doing it cuz that's way too sketchy I need to go sit down thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 3,408,120

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Id: 9SRFbFreCkE

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024