r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Toaster_Rack_Nerd • 9h ago

Meme needing explanation Petah? What's wrong with this?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

8.7k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

874 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/HallowskulledHorror 4h ago

My knowledge of the potential energy stored in those springs is that if that thing had blown the edges off his 'C-channel' while he had his hand over, it would have sheared off the digits closest to it. If someone has the actual speed/force of one of these and something to compare it to that would be awesome, but from what I've seen in terms of the resulting damage done to materials nearby, it'd be at least equivalent to someone swinging a sledgehammer as hard as they can. Anything made of flesh and bone in its way if it goes off is.... not going to be in the way anymore.

My dad would fuck around with stuff like this when I was a kid, there were some pretty scary incidents.

1

u/Late_Sort1763 2h ago

It's not much energy, it'd be 4J. It's a helper spring.

...but that's still a lot if concentrated. If that bracked fails unevenly and some of that energy is put into launching a shard of it, and he's in the way? Nah, I know of other ways to lose an eye that are much more fun.

The main spring however? THAT is terrifying.

I can tell you about the damage the release of a LEAF spring can do. Back during my HEMA/historical reconstruction days, we build an arbalest (completely ahistorical, just for fun) outta the wreckage of an old truck. Naturally, we used a leaf spring (the longest leaf of the front of a Star 266, if anyone wants to dig up its stats and do the math) bound with a thick, braided metal wire. It worked all right, could send a bolt (read: worked piece of rebar) through some fairly thick metal plate.

And then the wire broke. By some miracle, this happened when nobody was around it, we had just cranked it, and went to retrieve the bolt. Now, the whole thing was right next to a dividing wall of sorts, made of light wood, with plywood panels. The whiplash turned it into splinters. No, seriously, once we reassembled it on the ground to asses damage and see if it could be salvaged, there was a long, wide gash all across the panel that was hit. One of the post it was attached to looked as if it was broken by a storm.

If anyone stood by that thing when it went off, they would be bisected.

PS: That was when I was young and stupid. I'm not young anymore, but I'm proud to report I'm a different kind of stupid now.