- So you clicked on this video
to watch a polished aluminum foil ball be cut in half,
that will happen later on in the video. But before we do that, we're going to make a vacuum
canon, and we're going to shoot a polished aluminum foil slug at a watermelon. (shot) So, that's cool too. Today we are making a vacuum canon and we are going to use that to launch these aluminum foil balls that they polish and make look like regular metal balls. - Step one, drill hole. (drilling) Sick, nice hole. Step two, we thread in this barbed adapter so that we can hook the
vacuum pump up to it. And this connection is
just threaded in there. If we find out that that
leaks later on we'll need to come back and seal that up. But we'll see if this works first. Next step, we put tape on the back end, load the ping pong
ammunition, see it going down. It'll go down once we make it a vacuum. - We should have loaded it
before we put the tape on. - Then tape the barrel closed. Attach the vacuum pump. Turn on the vacuum pump. (motor running) - Not bad. - It's a white ping pong ball, so it's impossible to see in camera, but it launched out there, hit that branch and then bounced
off the roof right there. Can you lick this and
tell us how it works? - I'd be happy to. Okay, fluid vacuum canon works is that the vacuum pump sucks all
of the air out of the canon. We've got the ball loaded back here. And so, there's no air in front of it, and we've go both ends sealed, so when you break the seal on one end, the air comes rushing in at 14 psi or atmospheric pressure,
air comes rushing in, pushing the balls towards the front, which then breaks the
tape on the other end and launches the ball into
low earth orbit. (laughter) - So those are the
basics of a vacuum canon, but there's a way that you can
make it a little bit better. So the atmospheric pressure is 14 psi, and that's what's rushing in to that end and propelling it forward. But what if we attached a
pressurized tank on the back of it and we increased that from
14 psi to say 80, 90 psi? So that's what we're going to try next. (high energy music) (compressor) This is what came up with. We've got our pressure tank back there, we've got a gauge so we
can see how much pressure, that's hooked up to the air compressor. We've got a ball valve here, and then the vacuum
connects in right there. It took a lot of testing to
get it to all work though. I feel like it could work
even better, but, no, no, no. - So the idea is to have negative pressure in front of the ball, positive pressure behind it. So then when you release it, it goes hundreds of miles an hour. - We did several tests before, we did one of just vacuum. (swish) We did a test of just
compressed air. (buzzing) and then we did three
different tests of it combined with the vacuum
and with the compressed air. (buzzing, wood clap) These are the results. The compressed air went
significantly faster than we thought it was going to. The vacuum did alright. Combined it did a little
bit better than the just the compressed air, but, I don't know, I feel like
maybe we did something wrong. So now what we want to do, this is a highly compressed
aluminum foil projectile. - I'd go with moderately compressed. - Moderately compressed,
it's still pretty solid. That's a watermelon. And we're going to shoot something heavier than a ping pong ball out of this and see if it explodes. - That's one of my best ideas. We're using a ping pong ball like wadding, and that's going to go in there, so the ping pong ball
will make a tighter seal. On a scale of 12 to 42, how
spooked are you right now? - Probably a winky emoji. Where's my glove? (compressor sound) - High speed is on,
safety splints engaged. (shot) That wasn't bad. (shot) (electronic music) And there's some of the, our ping pong ball wadding is in there. I feel like if anywhere, it
went off the the left side. Oh, here it is. - It bounced off. - It made it more compressed. - This is how you make
the Japanese bullet. shoot it at of a watermelon enough times. - That's how you compress it. We did the watermelon first,
because we knew the watermelons wouldn't deform the balls much, but now we have a can of Easy Cheese. - Sharp cheddar flavor. (shot) - Yep, it shattered it. (shot) So that's where all the cheese went. Is that like hard cheese in there? - That's sharp cheddar alright. (laughter) - There it is. It just cleanly cut the can in half. - It's not my definition of clean. It doesn't go through it at all, - It goes off to the side. - The shock from the
hit was enough to make - The can rip apart? - Yeah. - The ping pong ball
gets hit by it afterward as it's spinning, because
it broke the ping pong ball. - That's crazy. And that brings us to the next point, where is that Japanese bullet? It bounced off the right side of the can, there's no holes in the shed. There it is. This board is kind of slanted, so it hit that and shot up and went into the jet stream and the jet stream carried it over there. So that's roughly how
you make a vacuum cannon. And now we've got to cut
a, what do they call these? Japanese, no a foiled Japanese polished, we don't want to make one of those but, somebody else made one of
those and sent it to us, and so we're going to
cut that in half now. This was sent to us from another channel called Inspire to Make. He spent hours probably,
months, (crosstalk) years, he probably used
slave labor too. (crosstalk) You can watch his video
to see how he made it. It's about three and a
half inches in diameter. So now we are going to cut this in half and see what kind of
layers its got and voids. See how good of a job he did. (electronic music) It is, wow, that's more solid
than I thought it would be. - In the middle it's still like soft foil, but the outside, that's hard. - That's like pretty solid
stuff for a half an inch. - I think that if he would have started it and compressed it as he went, you'd have a much denser, - Start with a compressed core and keep adding layers to that. But that's still really impressive. Now the real question is, is that a Japanese polished
aluminum foil ball, or is it Chinese, is it Mongolian? Did he make the wrong one? - It's freaking Canadian. (laughter) - Thanks again to the Youtube
channel, Inspire to Make, for sending us this Canadian,
polished aluminum foil ball. If you guys want to see how he made that, it's a very long,
painful annoying process. He suffered for your entertainment. So you can go to his channel, watch his video, see how
he made that and yeah. (electronic music)
