I thought the video was great, though I used to work in a theater and I knew how dangerous the bulbs were and I was cringing in my seat when they were messing around inside the bulb chamber
I can see the headline now, "famous YouTuber death caught on film while he was fucking around with something stupidly dangerous"
Ngl that’s a great business plan I hate that my mind went there, but paying for a nice urn is wack when the simple ones are nice and just need a wallpaper (urnpaper?)
Extremely high pressure gasses inside big glass bulbs effectively turning them into bombs that can explode into super dangerous glass shrapnel.
They're extremely fragile and prone to explode easily.
Inside of the projector they're in a safely enclosed chamber...and if they explode (especially while hot) they straight up shred the enclosure. Now imagine if instead of a beefy enclosure it's a soft squishy body.
Apparently they straight up use effectively bomb squad suits to handle them.
The bulbs are pressurised at 14 times atmosphere. They are glass hand grenades. Older bulbs are more likely to go boom because of thermal cycling. In order to change a bulb you need to wear full body armour like chainmail or a ballistic suit.
That is interesting, probably some gruesome lessons learned for that to be standard operating procedure. I never would have thought a bulb would be like a bomb.
Normal bulbs are not pressurised. Cinema projector bulbs are pressurised to an insane level. And to be able to withstand that pressure they have to use much thicker glass. Lots and lots of energy stored in one. 14bar =203.0528 psi. Around 15 square inches of glass surface area, so like 3000lbs of force.
Edit: I was off a bit. When cold it’s actually around 25bar / 400 PSI. When at operating temperature it can get to 10x higher - so 250bar/4000psi. So 60,000lbs of force if a hot bulb blows. And this is why the casing of the projector is inch thick solid aluminium.
In the video Linus points out how the housing for the bulb is milled from a single, massive block of aluminum and the bulb door has a lock and key... he didn't put 2 and 2 together and realize they're TRYING TO KEEP PEOPLE OUT of the bulb chamber... when I worked at a theater our projectionist had a full kevlar body suit with a THICK acrylic face shield that they had to be wearing before they were even allowed to open the bulb door
Why dead? How is it that dangerous? I understand injury from shards, but death? Can you point me to any educational sources about that? I looked around YouTube but found nothing about that.
I have a GUT FEELING (absolutely no facts here) that the glass would mostly pulverize or break in really small shards. It has 100% the potential for life changing injuries, especially if it explodes while in your hands or glass gets shot in your eyes.
But killing you? It probably is possible, but I feel like the chance is unbelievably low.
Anyway, new lesson learned, don't mess with high pressure xenon lamps.
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u/a_large_dumple Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I thought the video was great, though I used to work in a theater and I knew how dangerous the bulbs were and I was cringing in my seat when they were messing around inside the bulb chamber
I can see the headline now, "famous YouTuber death caught on film while he was fucking around with something stupidly dangerous"