Mythbusters: The Flying Guillotine!

[Trekker4747]

"Master of the Flying Guillotine" is probably one of the most awesome movies ever. In tonight's episode the "Junior Mythbusters" are going to test whether the ancient device is possible/could work!

Awesome!

Oh, and Jamie and Adam are dicking around with cooking with C4.

Started this thread since Christopher hasn't started a MB thread the last couple of weeks and, well, I wanted to discuss the flying guillotine!

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, sorry about the lack of MB threads. I was on a trip two weeks ago and came down with a ferocious cold right after I got home.


Cooking with C-4: Kind of an interesting set of tests, but they pretty much just confirm what C-4 was specifically designed to be, an extraordinarily stable explosive that can't be set off by accident. You can read about all this in the Wikipedia article on C-4. But that article mentions one thing Adam & Jamie failed to mention that maybe they should have: burning C-4 may not explode, but it gives off toxic fumes, so it's not a good idea to use it as cooking fuel.

What I found most interesting from a physics standpoint was that the C-4 burned really hot but didn't get the food very hot because it burned out so quickly. It goes to show... um... something about heat transfer, how it takes time for heat to propagate through a material. So if you expose something to great heat for a short amount of time, it won't have time to absorb as much heat as if you expose it to moderate heat for a longer time. Or something like that.


Flying guillotine: It's actually kinda scary how plausible this turned out to be. And I kinda have to wonder if maybe Tory should've kept one of his steps secret lest someone try to emulate this. Okay, there are probably more practical ways to murder someone, but still, it worked surprisingly well. (At least, I think it did. I assume they confirmed that the final device actually cut clear through the pig neck rather than just pulling the "head" off, since they were pretty clear on that distinction in the earlier tests. But for some reason, they didn't say so, at least not in the parts that were left in the American cut of the episode.)

I'm not sure we've ever seen the junior team do this kind of "split up and design competing devices" thing. It's usually more of an Adam vs. Jamie thing. Though there didn't seem to be as much of a sense of competition in this case.

I guess I haven't seen enough Hong Kong movies, since I'd never heard of this putative weapon before. When I saw the promo last week, my first thought was, "Oh, they must be doing Odd Job's hat from Goldfinger," until I remembered they already did that one years ago.

 

[Trekker4747]

"Master of the Flying Guillotine" was a series of cult-classic movies, there's a handful of them. Poorly dubbed, overly made. Pretty much everything you'd expect from those types of movies. Probably the most popular one is about a blind assassin who uses the titular device to avenge his (son's?) murder.

Tori's design lineage was probably "closest" to device used in the movie(s), though I think it's implied/partly seen that the device uses a series of knives that sweep in to do the cutting, sort of what it looked like their earlier devices were going for and what Grant's final device was (without the outward sweeping.)

I wish they had used whole pigs for their tests. I know it's a bit less "violent looking" to maybe use these manufactured dummies, and looks better to have a humanoid form, but using an actual animal that hasn't been butchered (beyond the internals being removed) would be a bit more resilient to damage than something that was put together.

Grant's final prototype was freaking wicked and I wish it had worked better or been more practical. The slow motion shot of the blades sweeping out and then back in was just nuts. Kudos and props to Tori for making a good device though, and he did it without causing himself great personal injury!

During their design phase I was thinking a device with an iris type of blade heavily tensed with springs would work. (I think the fictional/theoretical device uses something like an iris-like design.)

I don't have much to say on Jamie and Adam's C4 myth. I think it's been well established on this show before just how remarkably stable C-4 is. I still sort-of doubt troops are using it to cook food with, I suspect it's a bit more expensive than wood and knocking some rocks together or having a flint or something. I guess in a pinch you could use it, but... I'd be personally curious if burning the C-4 doesn't produce toxic fumes or some other by-product that you wouldn't want to eat lest you get sick or poisoned.

 

[Roger Wilco]

lol, Grant's decapitron was awesome.

 

[Christopher]

I guess in a pinch you could use it, but... I'd be personally curious if burning the C-4 doesn't produce toxic fumes or some other by-product that you wouldn't want to eat lest you get sick or poisoned.

As I already said, according to Wikipedia, it does produce toxic fumes and therefore isn't safe to cook with.

Although Adam and Jamie used it to heat an MRE in its box, so I guess the fumes didn't come in direct contact with the food.

 

[Roger Wilco]

Well, nobody said it's practical. C4 is probably also an insanely expensive material for making a fire. I have no idea what a pound of C4 costs, but if you're ever in a situation where you have to use it to cook, you're probably so deep in the shit the fumes are the least of your problems.

 

[davejames]

Amazing how simple and effective Tori's version was (although technically I guess it was more of a saw than a guillotine).

As expected though, it was nearly impossible to use in a practical situation. You'd think that even if you COULD get the thing over someone's head, they'd whip it off in the very next second, before you could even begin to trigger it.

I have to say I'm really enjoying Penn and Teller's new show as well. The "one of these things is a lie" gimmick is a bit cheesy, but I really admire the speed and effeciency with which they test these myths (ahem, Mythbusters gang). I don't think I EVER would have expected a butter knife to slice a bullet in half like that.

 

[Christopher]

I have to say I'm really enjoying Penn and Teller's new show as well. The "one of these things is a lie" gimmick is a bit cheesy, but I really admire the speed and effeciency with which they test these myths (ahem, Mythbusters gang). I don't think I EVER would have expected a butter knife to slice a bullet in half like that.

Well, that didn't surprise me. Bullets are often made of soft material that's designed to deform or fragment on impact, because that way they do more damage. Really, the bullet that hit the butter knife didn't so much get bisected as shattered into several fragments.

But yeah, Penn and Teller Tell a Lie is a pretty interesting show so far. I'm embarrassed to admit that I have yet to guess the lie correctly. This is, what, four episodes now, and I've guessed wrong every time.

On the "speed and efficiency" thing, though, I think they could stand to take more time explaining the science behind why most of these things do work, like with the bullet, rather than just saying "Yeah, it's real." But then, even Mythbusters doesn't always explain the science well enough these days.

 

[Roger Wilco]

I was wrong in the first episode, thought the tiger thing is true and for sure the lifting-the-woman thing was a lie (and I'm still convinced that's nonsense, but whatever. ); but in the second episode I knew immediately the blowing out a forest fire myth cannot be true. I even noticed that the engine was the wrong way around, although that made me doubt a little bit because sucking out oxygen from a fire is at least a more plausible way to put it out than by blowing in oxygen.

 

[Christopher]

I was wrong in the first episode, thought the tiger thing is true and for sure the lifting-the-woman thing was a lie (and I'm still convinced that's nonsense, but whatever. )

Oh, no, I knew about that one before the show came along. As they explained, it's a simple matter of leverage and center of mass.

but in the second episode I knew immediately the blowing out a forest fire myth cannot be true. I even noticed that the engine was the wrong way around, although that made me doubt a little bit because sucking out oxygen from a fire is at least a more plausible way to put it out than by blowing in oxygen.

Yeah, I'm embarrassed that I missed the engine being the wrong way around.

 

[davejames]

Yeah I was fooled by the eggs holding up all the cheerleaders. I can certainly see that working in theory, because of the egg's shape, but I thought for sure in a practical setting that most of the eggs would still get smashed.

And the thing with the metal cheese was just trippy.

 

[Trekker4747]

Penn and Teller tell a lie is an interesting show but I don't think it's holding my interest. I sort of wish what they showcase in it didn't have hidden "clues" in the segment (like them saying the wrong state capital, the jet engine facing the wrong way) as that sort of spoils the whole show's gimmick and some of the things they've "tested" are repeats of stuff the Mythbusters have already done (like the cursing to relieve pain), again, spoiling the answer.

I've not watched this week's episode yet.

But, really, I don't think it's the "type of show" for Penn and Teller but that's a lot from watching them on Bullshit! for the last few years where their arguments were great.

Yeah, Christopher, speed reading screwed me again. I over looked you mentioning the fact about Jamie and Adam not mentioning C-4 giving off toxic fumes. I, personally, wouldn't feel much comforted by the food being in a sealed package. There's still a lot of "cooked with toxic stuff" thought in there.

Doing a quick check C4 costs $11-$20 per pound. At a campsite dead wood is free and a flint costs very little and makes as much fire as you have kindling. I'm sure the cost of a chemical fire/chaffing dish candle/etc. would be more practical than paying $20 to create a little bit of toxic fire. But, again, it's impressive how hot it could make something inside of a minute as well as how stable it is.

But, for me, the highlight of this episode was the flying guillotine, I would though love to see what Jamie and Adam could come up with on that one. (Revisit?)

 

[Christopher]

Yeah I was fooled by the eggs holding up all the cheerleaders. I can certainly see that working in theory, because of the egg's shape, but I thought for sure in a practical setting that most of the eggs would still get smashed.

Well, not just because of their shape, but because of their number, the weight being distrubuted across so many that each one felt very little force. As they said, it's the same reason you can safely lie on a bed of nails.

And they did have to be very careful to ensure the cheerleaders' weight remained evenly distributed, or they would've broken some of the eggs.

 

[Trekker4747]

Yeah, plenty of experience with cooking and grocery work has taught me that eggs are very good and distributing weight and force. On the front of the Mythbusters, I'd like to see them build a device that can compress an egg evenly on all sides (like you're squeezing it with your (a) fist) and seeing at what point does the egg's shell fail to handle the pressure. I mean, could Superman crush an egg with his fist? I think of it as being sort of like the interlaced phone books myth where it wasn't so much the friction of the pages but the pressure of the weight from pulling on the end causing all the pages to press together more and more. They finally got the phone books to fail by simply applying more pressure than the books could handle.

Seems to me it'd be the same with an egg, at some point it's no longer going to be able to handle pressure.

Christopher, I return the duty of the Mythbusters discussion threads to you, good sir.

 

[CmdrAJD]

I felt a little cheated by the lie on Penn & Teller this week, since, as Penn pointed out, the whole thing was scientifically plausible, if unlikely. The whole thing hinged on whether or not a fire in Montana had actually been caused this way. Still, I've been enjoying the show. It's a nice mix of their old BS series and Mythbusters.

 

[davejames]

I felt a little cheated by the lie on Penn & Teller this week, since, as Penn pointed out, the whole thing was scientifically plausible, if unlikely. The whole thing hinged on whether or not a fire in Montana had actually been caused this way. Still, I've been enjoying the show. It's a nice mix of their old BS series and Mythbusters.

Yeah as farfetched as that was, it's probably STILL more likely than actually making a living panning for gold dust in NY sidewalk cracks (and not just earning a little extra side money while living at your parent's house. lol)

 

[Mr. Adventure]

The Flying Guillotine was pretty awesome. I actually have the one on DVD after watching it years earlier on late night TV. To have something in the realm of "plausible" was a treat. The junior team has been holding their own lately. Good to see there are still some creative myths left out there to tackle.

The C4 myth petered out pretty quickly after cooking the food but better than a couple of weeks ago declaring it impossible for any human to walk straight after trying twice.

 

[Christopher]

The C4 myth petered out pretty quickly after cooking the food but better than a couple of weeks ago declaring it impossible for any human to walk straight after trying twice.

They probably tried more than twice. The show tends to cut down multiple trials into the appearance of a single trial in order to save screen time. In fact, I'm pretty sure I recall that they did show the results of multiple trials in the "walk a straight line" myth.

 

[Roger Wilco]

Regarding the walk straight blindfolded myth - I would have wanted them to get an actual blind person (preferably one born blind) to try it.

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, that's the thing that really bugged me about that one -- that they failed to consider actual blind people when testing the myth. From the way they talked, it's like they didn't even realize it was possible for human beings to be blind.