1.25L Diet Coke: $1.40
Mint Mentos: $1.70
Friends: $2 each (ie 1 chocolate bar)
Accidentally making a deadly rocket out of harmless party food:
Priceless
To this day, I don’t know exactly what happened. Here’s a shorter version of the rocket part:
We ran inside, babbling and near-hysterical – terrified our cameras had missed the whole thing. Out of the frantic hand-drawn pictures that ensued, this section was the most coherent:
The bottle was thrown down base-first from a height of 3.8m. It flew onto the roof of a 2-storey building 5.2m high. I think it rotated in the air and impacted on the lid, rupturing it and sending the bottle flying with maximum pressure.
The mentos-delivery system was that we laboriously strung four mentos together after putting pins through the middles (really not easy – and I accidentally* fed Ben the broken tip of a pin inside one of our reject mentos). CJ drilled through a spare lid so we could attach the mentos string, and then we put the loaded lid back on the bottle after pouring out some of the coke.
We attempted twice to replicate the rocket thing (from a far greater distance, I assure you!) but without success. Attempt # 3 was actually one of those – which is why it’s at a different location (one without people, cars, pets, or glass).
It takes just 7 pounds of pressure to break a bone, and 3 pounds to get a 1.25L bottle just 1cm off the ground. I don’t know how much force was generated in the moment of impact (however many pounds it takes to life a 1.25L bottle 5 metres in the air), but I’m confident it was enough to smash a human throat.
Playing along at home is perfectly safe on the ground, but if you throw mentos and coke onto a hard surface, make sure everyone and everything is a safe distance away – I recommend 4 metres (or twenty feet). It could definitely still hit you (coke and mentos can fly 14 metres along the ground), but it shouldn’t kill you.
And your last steampunk picture (since we’re about to seamlessly move into pirate territory for November’s twittertale “The Captain’s Daughter”):
That pic is from http://behlerblog.wordpress.com/ (this is a great writing-agent blog; the beagle is her secretary)
*Yes, really. Luckily Ben is paranoid, and his natural suspicion saved him.
Oh good! Glad these got up! No one died, so I call it a success. Language warning? Sigh. And that was me trying to censor myself. 😛
And it’s good to know the neighbors never came looking for us…
Steffi: Your censorship is what kept it PG. You did very well under rather exciting circumstances. And you got the money shot. Extremely well done.
That beagle has just re-defined ‘awesomeness’. I take my hat off to it, and thank it for the marvelous grin it’s given me.
CJ: I’m glad you like it. That dog is the hardest-working secretary in Australia.
That is awesome!
Hi Sara! Thanks for dropping by. I’m so very proud to have (accidentally) succeeded where Mythbusters failed. Huzzah for sheer dumb luck!