Why "Golf Ball Car" Is Pivotal in MythBusters' History

hey everybody adam savage here surrounded by some  of mythbusters history and it's for an excellent   reason the props behind me and in front of  me traveled around the united states as part   of mythbusters the explosive exhibition for the  last 10 years and that exhibit is over but don't   be sad because now the props from that show can go  straight to your home that are being auctioned off   by prop store uh to benefit the grant imahara  steam foundation and you can own your very own   piece of mythbusters history and i'm doing show  and tell us about the pieces and today i want to   talk about golf ball car over the 13 years we  made mythbusters jamie carrie grant tori and i   we loved to talk about the fact of how seat of the  pants it was how how much we were sort of blank   slates when we began we didn't really realize we  were making a science show at the beginning we   kind of fell into it and figured it out and there  are a lot of of methodologies and experiments that   we conducted that are exceedingly primitive  this one golf ball car this is a maquette   from the episode golf ball car this represents  the other end of the spectrum of mythbusters   scientific excursions because i think of this as  a myth that jamie and i did when we felt quite   mature about our ability to design and execute  a reasonable scientific methodology so the myth   was a golf ball well so okay before i tell you  the myth i have to give you one fact which is   that a golf ball has those detents 544 of them i  can't quite remember but a golf ball has little   detents on it because they create a little bit of  turbulent air that creates a slipstream around the   golf ball that allows it to fly farther i know  that sounds weird but if you shot a smooth golf   ball that was the same weight as a dimpled golf  ball the dimple golf ball flies far further so we   know this is an effect we know that it works for a  golf ball the myth is that it could work for a car   and there are products out there that like cover  your car with a wrap with little detents that are   supposed to be able to do this effect jamie and  i wanted to find out if you could do it for real   so this is where we began uh we eventually  covered an actual full-sized car in several   hundred pounds of wet clay and then carved eleven  hundred detents in its surface using a bunch of   automotive prototypers from the academy of art  college's automotive department yeah like this   was a sophisticated attempt at solving this myth  but this was our first prototype for testing it   and what we did was we simply bought a vacuform  shell for a remote control car filled it with uh   resin and then drilled these hemispherical holes  all the way around it and we took this down to   the nasa ames wind tunnel facility which is one  of my favorite places on earth and we put this   in their water tank which is one of my favorite  machines on earth honestly the water tank is this   reciprocating pool of perfectly laminar flowing  water that moves past whatever object you put   into it the the first time we put a car in there  the windows were down and i started to notice this   in the water tank which uses fluorescent  ink i noticed this ink pattern coming off   the car that we were using because the  windows were down it was like doing this   and i said is that little turbulent thing is  that the reason i hear the pop up when one of the   windows in my car is open and they were like yes  and we were like really and they were like yeah   that's called a strudel wave because it looks like  a strudel the water tank is just a place of wonder   anyway we put this car in our water tank and  we witnessed what seemed to be the effect   that we were looking for which is that these  detents did seem to each in and of themselves   create a little bit of a turbulence that created  a slipstream over the car so the next step was   to do this in a real car and as i said we brought  a bunch of automotive sculptures from the academy   of art we carved this in the car we ran it through  our fuel efficiency tests which by the way if you   want to know precisely how much fuel you use in  one mile to do a thing it is really difficult to   do and we did it so many times and it was always  an ass kicker and i consider this to be our   finest execution of that experiment which is we  took a car with no gasoline in it and put a one   gallon tank then we weighed that tank both before  and after the experiment to know exactly how much   gas we had used and when we finished running  both tests with the unmodified car and the   golf ball car we got i think a 14 improvement  in fuel efficiency for the golf ball car this   is one of those cases where in the episode you see  jamie and i open the trunk we take it out we weigh   it we check our results we laugh we're surprised  we check the results again we realize it's right   we call it a day we shake hands we leave we were  like there's no coverage that you could shoot of   that interaction with us that does that's going  to equate or be better than what we just got so we   didn't shoot any coverage we literally just ended  the episode with that because we were so surprised   there is one more story to go with golf ball  car and that is about a year later we got an   email from someone who worked with one of the big  three automakers that they were curious about this   and what you might not know is that big carb  prototypes are actually made out of clay   yeah that's one of the key ways in which they  prototype cart forms so they pulled this clay   suv frame they had out of storage and some  poor guy carved a thousand detents in the   outside of this clay car and the this  automaker put it in their wind tunnel   and then they wrote us to say that they  did not come to the same results we did   and that didn't bother me at all one they were  using a totally different kind of car so i don't   consider that it's valid it's apples and oranges  not really a scientific methodological approach   that i would approve but secondly we wasted the  time of a big three automaker for like a week   that is so cool that's like that's one of  those ways in which mythbusters allowed   all of us to feel kind of like peers with all the  scientists we were working with like we're asking   genuinely interesting questions and we're really  trying to come up with robust ways to test them anyway thanks for this walk down memory lane get  yourself your own piece of mythbusters memorabilia   the address is propstory.com mythbusters this is  all to benefit the grant yamaha steam foundation   the most excellent of causes and  thank you guys i'll see you next time you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,595,803

Keywords: tested, adam savage, adam savage tested, adam savage tested mythbusters, mythbusters behind the scenes, grant imahara foundation, grant imahara, grant imahara STEAM Foundation, prop store auction, prop store auction 2021, tested prop store, mythbusters prop store, mythbusters auction, mythbusters props for sale, mythbusters grant imahara auction, adam savage mythbusters, golf ball car mythbusters, golf ball car, dimpled car mythbusters, dimpled car experiment, dimpled car

Id: snNL5GgOq_c

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021