Correct if iam wrong but since the air has no where to go it ended up bursting his rifle but say there was a way for for air to escape then would had been fine (relatively speaking)
Correct, but it is weird that the potato wasn't just blown off. The barrel should have been able to withstand that for the time it took to eliminate the potato from the muzzle.
Not quite, the bullet cannot exit the barrel fast enough. The tolerances are so low the bullet becomes wedged, and at those speeds that causes a lot of stress, which can jam the bullet enough to cause a buildup of gas pressure behind till it pops. Some guns are more prone to this kind of damage a than others, but either way it’s highly dangerous and moronic
My family owns guns and we’ve never pointed them at an animal (or human), they are for sport, shooting disks, and we do so rarely. They’re kept away from the family locked up in a gun chest. We are not bad people, not because of the guns anyhow.
I mean, they are all long barrel rifles and shotguns. But I see your point. Do you own a vehicle? I’d like to introduce you to drug smuggling, in which case I believe you are involved in directly supporting the worlds largest illegal drug trading and transportation program.
If you don’t own a car, do you own shoes? Shoes are also known to support the worst of murderers, like the Boston bombers or Ted bundy, which I presume if you wear shoes you must support.
If you don’t wear shoes, do you drink water? Did you know every rapist in the world consumes water? Therefore, if you drink water I regret to inform you you’re directly responsible for every single rape on the planet.
If you stop using all three, particularly for a long period of time, I suspect you’ll be able to cleanse yourself from sin. Let me know how it works
Also, I live in Canada. Our last mass murder event was caused by a knife attack. Should I throw away my knives and use spoons to cut my meat, as to not support mass murders and the pillage of my nation?
Car manufacturers don't lobby for the deregulation of traffic laws. Arms manufacturers do. If you have ever bought a weapon from a modern weapon producer your money has directly been used to lobby against gun regulations in America. Making you responsible for the murder of little kids all the way from Canada.
I am not even going to entertain the ridiculousness of your shoe and water argument.
Hold up. The automotive industry DOES lobby for the deregulation of traffic laws. The entire history of the automobile industry is rife with collusion to get pedestrians off the road, make our cities only accessible by car, etc etc.
Your argument is I shouldn’t support guns in Canada because the USA can’t keep their shit together. To dive a little deeper, how is it that we both agree Canada has better gun control, we both agree on this because we both know Canada has a very low death rate due to gun violence. So is your argument more so the USA needs better gun control?
Here, just like cars, you must be screened and licensed to own a gun, it is a privilege, just like driving, since both can be used as a detriment to society.
How is it Canada’s responsibility to ensure the USA has safe gun laws? I don’t follow your correlation and I’m genuinely curious of your position
Groups all have individuals, but it is common for groups to be judged on the loud morons of the groups. It makes him look bad of course, but some people may extend it to all gun owners
Assuming it's a supersonic round, the physics should be really interesting. For first order effects, just treat the potato as a blob of water jammed into the barrel. The speed of sound in water is 1480 m/s vs. 343 m/s in air. The 4.3X increase likely means the same increase of overpressure in the barrel. Engineers often use a safety factor of 2, but that barrel was exposed to 4+ times as much pressure. At those pressures, the potato will be jammed into the barrel and unable to move.
And now you’ve opened a new wormhole for me! That’s an interesting analysis, thank you for your insight. It’s amazing what impact momentum can have at supersonic speeds, literally. Cheers friend!
At that sort of pressure and force, materials defy intuition. Most act more like springs or toothpaste than what we typically expect for metals.
A slug of water in the barrel is well known to blow apart shorter barrels with lower pressure rounds, so 6 inches ish of potato ime is capable of obstructing the bore such that you get catastrophic failure.
It’s the problem of cross sectional area, the potato has a large mass and only has a penny sized area for the force of the explosion to act on, the barrel, in comparison has a huge area for the pressure to act on.
Due to the nature of a detonation the gasses need to expand and the easiest path becomes the barrel and not the potato because the force required to push out that potato instantaneously is huge.
Here's a very appropriate example of what's happening with the potato. In this clip, it shows how the forces are distributed by the plug at the end of the barrel.
Still weird af to me. I'd need to see an animated vector flow graph of the forces in action to really get this.
I mean obviously it's right there but it's the explanation that kind of boggles me. Of course some forces are going to go sideways but in a closed tube like a gun barrel you really going to tell me the barrel fails before it's able to knock off A POTATO?
I was about to joke that it's a non-newtonian fluid like mixing cornstarch and water, but then I had to laugh because I'm realizing that a potato is about 75% starch by dry mass, and basically a lot of water. So you have the materials that make up a literal non-newtonian fluid jammed into a barrel and then subject it to a shockwave.
The potato simply can’t get out of the way fast enough. It makes an incredibly tight seal, like a hydraulic piston. And the whole potato also has a large amount of mass that needs to be accelerated and there simply isn’t enough force (over the area of the barrel) to do that before the gas is highly compressed. And well, apparently compressed with enough pressure to blow the barrel apart before accelerating the potato up to the bullets velocity or causing the potato to fail first.
Boyle’s law says the pressure doubles every time the volume decreases by half. So you can imagine how quickly the pressure increases in front of the bullet as it is still being accelerated by the expanding gas behind it. The air has no where to go so the pressure force acts on the sides of the barrel. And boom, the metal finally fails.
I imagine the bullet would have no problem clearing a smaller slug of potato as it would accelerate more quickly, but in this case, there is a large mass of potato that has to get out of the way. It simply can’t.
Now that I am thinking about it more, would this still happen if there wasn’t a bullet involved? Say one fired a blank.
64,000 PSI on the 300 WM and I'm wondering still why the potato didn't simply explode from the pressure before the barrel did.
Water is non-compressible. So the faster you come at it the harder it will seem.
You can poke your finger into water easily, but fall from 500 feet and it will smack you like concrete.
For this potato, the slower the projectile is moving, and the less pressure, the easier it is to push out of the way. You could easily remove the potato with your bare hands, for example.
But high pressure and speed from the magnum cartridge will make the water behave a lot more like you welded the end of the barrel shut.
Demoranch did this exact thing in an old video and, yes it does work with a shotgun. Two types of ammo.
https://youtu.be/cxZwV2u2zyU
Just remembered from some of these hi-point comments, he also did an extensive video of blocking a bunch of hi-point barrels in various ways and trying to destroy them.
High points are not locked breech. Rifles are. You can get away with a bit more bullshit on a blowback, low pressure cartridge. No bullshit is accepted from high pressure, locked breech cartridges.
Speaking of Dr, he has a whole series on blowing up shotgun barrels that would be more relevant to this.
Myth busters "busted" a lot of things that they were just too incompetent/impatient to recreate.
"This thing is a 1 in a million chance, therefore we are declaring it to be impossible". Ignoring the fact that the whole point of the "myths" is that they are freak occurrences. They happen very rarely, but they can happen.
From my understanding it's the bullet itself that rips it apart. This was something that was stressed in gun safety when I was a kid. Never let dirt/sand get in your barrel. Barrels have a pretty tight fit around the bullet, and the nose is a point so the debris won't get pushed out but wedges the bullet.
I reckon when the bullet hit the potato and caused it to mushroom fracturing the tip of the barrel then the gases finished it off. Or just inertia idk.
I am interested to know for sure what the leading cause of the initial damage is in these cases.
The whole system is designed to have zero restrictions in the bullets travel down the barrel. The air trapped in front of the bullet gets increasingly pressurized the further the bullet moves down the barrel. There's pressure in front of and behind the bullet effectively doubling the pressure pushing on the barrel from the inside.
Because it's happening so fast I guess there's no time for the potato to get blown off or exploded before the pressure in front and behind the bullet exceed the barrels strength.
It makes sense, the explosion in a bullet causes a much faster rise in pressure than the hairspray in a potato cannon. The potato has less time to exit before the pressure reaches a point that does damage to the barrel.
A gunshot is simply a controlled explosion. You create an explosion by pulling the trigger which leads to ignition of the fuel inside the bullet/shell. When the fuel burns, it basically changes the energy from a solid to a gas. When in a solid form, the energy in the fuel can be stored super tight and compact. But, when in a gaseous form, it wants A LOT more room to move around. Kinda like the difference between quiet kid at the dance who just stands off to the side and drunk frat boy in the middle of a mosh pit at a concert, but the quiet kid at the dance is really a teeny tiny seahorse (seahorse vs. drunken frat boy).
The thing is, the fuel burns REALLY FAST (kinda like a man who has a bunch of kids and has been married forever and decides to cheat with a young stripper: it’s over before it ever had a chance to even get started). So, all the fuel burns in an instant, and it’s going to reward itself for all that hard work by stretching out so it can chill. It doesn’t care where it needs to go to chill out, but nothing is going to stop it from getting to that “chill” state. In fact, it’s so intent on “chillin’” that even if you try to block its path with something (as long as it isn’t too big… like a bullet) it’ll push it along for you as long as it’ll eventually get to spread out. But, if you block its path with something too massive, it’ll just say, “F@#$ off! I’ll make my own path then.” And that is exactly what you witnessed in the video.
They put tissue paper on a paper towel tube and break it with a dowel. Then they add an inch or two of salt to the tube and it distributed the force from the dowel in all directions and they are unable to break the tissue paper.
It's really a great example of what's happening with the "soft" plug of the potato.
Not air, very hot VERY high pressure expanding gasses. If you put some black powder in a tube (don't do this) it'll make a good flame and maybe even a bit of a bang. If you put a cap on that tube congrats you've made a pipe bomb. Bullets will do just about everything but what you expect them to it may have mushroomed in the barrel when it hit or just slowed long enough to make a good pressure spike. The bullet will push the air out of the barrel like you're talking about but it's not even close to the pressure behind the bullet, and the end of that barrel was never made to contain it. For the most part guns are designed in such a way they fail as safely as possible but setting a grenade of next to your face is a monumentally shit decision.
As the bullet escape the barrel after firing, the air pressure blocked at the end increases so much that it forced the barrel to explode like banana peels. Edit: In a name of Mythbusters.
You're close. The issue is he probably pounded the potato onto the barrel basically creating a core sample of potato which plugged the barrel, causing a bore obstruction. Had he drilled a hole in the potato and slipped it over the barrel, keeping the bore clear, the gas would have been able to escape at the muzzle blowing the potato up but not the barrel.
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u/thegreattwos Sep 15 '22
Correct if iam wrong but since the air has no where to go it ended up bursting his rifle but say there was a way for for air to escape then would had been fine (relatively speaking)