[00:00] Fire (BANG!) I am at the American Museum of Natural History.
[00:12] And this is something that I saw ten years ago, and it changed the way I think about It's two bullets from the Civil War that met nose on.
[00:25] It's poorly lit, so I'm going to have to turn my phone light on here. So these two mini ball bullets met nose to nose.
[00:38] The plaque here says in Fredericksburg in December 1862. But look at that. Now, the interesting thing is this is not a glancing blow.
[00:50] So you have a bullet going one direction, I've seen many attempts to try to reproduce this, but they all fail.
[01:03] It's going to take a little engineering, but let's give it a shot. I've actually had some internal conflict about doing this video because Internet video has become sensational and spectacular.
[01:18] a bullet hitting another bullet, and I thought about all the camera angles. respectful way, that doesn't feel like I'm trying to win the Internet.
[01:31] So I want us to think together about how we're going to do the safety side of this. I worked for 15 years as a missile flight test engineer,
[01:44] and I had mentors that slowly walked me through the safety processes. and they corrected me, and they were always watching over my shoulder. So I'm not just some guy trying to do a complicated thing.
[01:56] I've done far more complicated things like this with larger groups of people. And the way we did that is intellectual humility. and atmosphere of intellectual humility about this.
[02:08] If we're going to hit a bullet. So we have two empty guns. If I go over here and I set up this gun right here,
[02:21] And I have to point another gun from this side. me over there with that gun is in the firing path of this gun. the guns, you got to think about other things.
[02:37] Because we're down range from that one, right? And once we do, we have all these mechanical inconsistencies. in terms of timing, which means those bullets might not meet
[02:52] What happens if this bullet misses? All this stuff means we have to over engineer this.
[03:04] First of all, my buddy Ernie. He's got years of experience designing circuitry for explosive systems. He's an excellent educator.
[03:18] and he engineers all kinds of crazy contraptions. He also worked on a neat contraption. I'll show you in a minute. who you may recognize from the vortex collision episode.
[03:32] He also reloads ammunition as a hobby, so this was a perfect fit for his skill set. In fact, we even used the shield as a part of the supersonic baseball cannon video.
[03:45] so we decided on the 45 long colt cartridge for this experiment. It's very easy to design around, We considered molding our own bullets using an authentic civil war bullet mold.
[04:02] It's time. This is the spot of dirt for many reasons. So if the bullet misses this way, it'll go into the dirt.
[04:16] The sun's up there. And then this is the thing that we've been waiting on right here. Yeah.
[04:30] is you have to establish the center of the earth. We made this big I beam, We're going to assume it's rigid and everything is measured from it.
[04:42] This thing's heavy. Well, this feels like a moment. These are the simplest guns we could possibly make. But first we have to bolt them to the I beam.
[04:56] of how a normal gun works. you have something called lock time. and I'm going to set the camera up here.
[05:10] "Lock Time" is how long it takes the mechanical hammer to fall and strike the firing pin and the firing pin to engage the percussion primer that's on the back of a bullet.
[05:24] And I'm going to get a high speed camera shot of it when it happens. All right. Three, two, one. for the spring down in the handle to accelerate the hammer towards the primer.
[05:42] to the moment the primer is struck, that's the lock time. how long it takes to ignite the primer So most weapons have about a ten millisecond or less lock time.
[06:00] In our case, we're going to hit a bullet versus a bullet. It's going to ignite the powder however long that takes. And the way we do that is replace
[06:12] In fact, we replace the mechanical primer with an electrical primer. So this is the gun, and it's just a barrel.
[06:24] And this is the breach. So the bullet goes right here, goes right in there like that. So we have a positive side and a negative side, so the whole thing is grounded.
[06:42] and you adjust these screws right here to change asthma left and right. David, what would you say about the elevation technique here?
[06:55] This is primitive stuff we had laying around, just a jam screw. load another bullet without being downstream of the first bullet? My buddy Jeremy Fielding has a CNC plasma,
[07:10] and so he helped make this, he designed this. All right, go ahead and unblock the first gun. Yeah.
[07:24] Okay, so basically, it's an ellipse here in a piece of steel that can take the impact of a bullet. We put the breach on, you can close this one, we block it.
[07:40] And so any fragments from the bullet would go that way. Dude!!! [silly chuckling] It's time for procedures, which is extremely important.
[07:55] but that's not going to keep us safe if we don't use it correctly. So what I did at this point is I created a checklist that goes into painstaking And more importantly, I drew up these stick figure drawings
[08:11] I'm not going to show you all the safety measures here. But if there's anything I've learned over the past many years doing dangerous things, the moment I start to think I've
[08:26] So, at this point, I knew it was extremely critique what I've done so that I could stay safe.
[08:38] that you got buddies that test explosives, and they know what's up. We're going to do a safety checklist, and they're probably gonna... Y'all gonna be mean... or nice?
[08:51] all right, let's go for it. and conversations like this are one of my favorite things to do. which were obvious as soon as they said it, and that's why I love doing this.
[09:06] I was gonna say you could.... [Destin] - Disconnect first? [Coop] - Between three and four.... {Destin and Coop's tone indicates they have worked together} [Destin] - Yeah..?
[09:20] so we wouldn't have that issue. [Sheldon, clearly ahead of Destin] -Yeah. There's still potential for it to fire this way [Destin, starting to understand] - Yes.
[09:32] [Destin] - So.... I need a misfire procedure for each... possible... ["Misfire scenario" is implied] ? Thank you. [Destin Narrating] Get smart people in your life who love you enough to smile and tell you you're wrong.
[09:45] independently to make sure all the hardware worked [Destin, in the field] - Verify there is NO voltage. Three, two, one, fire. [BANG]
[09:58] and then align both guns to the same point in space. colors to see what would work best for the high speed camera. All right, I vote we just go for it.
[10:13] [Destin, realizes he proposed something stupid] Okay, that makes sense. [David] - I'm pretty sure.... [Destin] - (Sarcastically) You're making sense, David. [Destin] - Oh, Gah!!
[10:27] Okay. Once we looked at the holes, we realized that they were a little bit off, We decided not to move the north gun.
[10:40] that the holes would align and the bullets would hopefully intercept. So here we go... It took years to get to THIS moment. [Destin] - I'm going to do stray voltage over here.
[10:55] Stray voltage check is good. [David] - Yeah! [Destin] - I'm loading the north gun. {There is a tense silence. Destin and David are shifting to a more disciplined form of communication}
[11:15] [Electric motor sounds] Okay.
[11:29] Loading the south gun. We lost all of our light. All right, unblock
[11:44] [Electric motor sounds] [Destin] -Here's the arm plug. Three, two, one, fire. [Gun shot]
[12:01] Did you hear it? [David] - uh-uh (no) We're about to see.... I didn't feel them.....but I heard them [David] - I was going to say , can you elaborate on that?
[12:16] I mean, we're about to see a bullet impact a bullet. David, I think this has just happened. Okay. Heart beating faster than expected.
[12:29] Okay. Those are bullet fragments. [slap] [laughter]
[13:09] That was only, like, five or six inches to the right or center, wasn't it? Oh, dude, it's pretty dramatic. Yeah.
[13:21] David, we did it on the third shot. Yeah, it's the first time we tried it, Maybe we can skip the part of the video where we struggle to figure it out because
[13:36] No, we're not. Another thing to think about is those bullets exploded, We're trying to fuse them together like the Civil War bullets in the museum.
[13:51] My answer to this is to zoom in and try to get a better feel for what's going on. To do that, we need to move the slow motion camera closer and I need the lowest And I decided to make what's called a "fiducial".
[14:05] This is a measuring stick of sorts, and I decided to put Smarter Every Day And I just thought it would be great to be like a physical watermark of sorts, at least people will know that they're
[14:21] So my goal at this point was to get as tight and as fast as possible and to just [soft guitar music plays]
[14:34] Only saw smoke on the left side. Only the south gun fired. procedures because we used them immediately.
[14:47] Clear. It's all clear. Three, two, one, go. Did you feel it?
[15:15] Fire. [gun fire]
[15:32] We started missing things several times and we didn't know why. So we turned the high speed camera over and tried to analyze it. Sometimes it would miss and sometimes it would hit.
[15:46] It was a combination of timing and aiming. [sound of bullets hitting in slow motion like a gong]
[16:04] [gun fire]
[16:18] [gun fire]
[16:32] So our shots are inconsistent and we've got to address what's going on. The guns are offset by about one degree. We haven't damaged the other gun yet.
[16:45] This is the 45 long Colt cartridge that we talked about earlier, right? but we don't want too much because we don't want it to be too fast. shorter brass cartridges so that we could fill them all the way up with powder.
[17:00] And I've got some split cartridges here, and let's fill them up with gunpowder. on the left, and we've got the short cartridge on the right.
[17:12] And you'll notice that the cartridge on the right, the shorter one, is full. And the assumption is when you go to load that longer bullet inside the gun,
[17:25] It's not filling up the entire volume. There's one thing about this, though. you'll notice that way up here, up front, that bullet is engaging the riflings.
[17:39] that spin, or these grooves that spin the bullet as it goes down the barrel. So we've got two things going on. but we are engaging the riflings. The short cartridge.
[17:54] If you look really close here, yes, the powder is more consistent. but there's a gap between the front of the bullet and the back of the riflings. to jump the gap whenever you fire the bullet.
[18:10] on the high speed, we can see a fireball come out before the bullet, which tells us fire is getting through that little gap right there. All this is so hard.
[18:23] But even in the edit, when we started looking at all the shots which was our Datum, {Bang!} there's a nut on the elevation control So we were trying to aim to something that was moving.
[18:39] but it's okay, because eventually we figured out that the long cartridges work better and we got into a rhythm and we started actually getting some hits. [Happy finger picking guitar]
[19:01] [bullets exploding] [Bullets exploding]
[19:22] [bullets exploding] about these intercepts is when the bullets come in and collide. the tangent points define a plane of fragmentation.
[19:36] one's low, then the angle of the fragments will be like that. If this one's left versus right, it's going to just change and make a three dimensional plane defined by where the tangent points touch each other.
[19:49] [Rad cello music playing makes you feel things]
[20:05] We're we're seeing the high speed camera view right there What happens if we rotate it around isometric like this? We're going to get to see that if we put
[20:19] the high speed camera in just a little bit more danger than from the side. Let's go see what it looks like.
[20:36] [Super Cool slowmo sounds] [Music is a fun combination of Spanish Guitar and 80's Cop show]
[20:49] [Deep throbbing crushing sounds, you can feel it]
[21:08] [gun fire]
[21:21] bullet, which is why it exploded in such a crazy way. which is just a copper sheath on the outside of a lead bullet.
[21:34] against each other, and something incredible happened. Three, two, one, fire. [gun shot] [David... his voice unchanging] - I did. [Destin] - {Eager Laughing} Awesome!
[21:49] [Destin] - {LOUD GASP} [David, who doesn't get excited easily] - Oh wow. [Destin] - It stopped!!
[22:44] You see it? It hung in the air. That was a perfect momentum transfer.
[22:57] That is as close as we've gotten to make 'em fuse. We can find the tip of that thing. That might be one of the back ends.
[23:09] Yeah, these are them Dave. You can see there's a little circle where the nose of the bullet was where they met. So there's a little piece of copper that was in between those.
[23:23] Actually, two circles of copper. I wonder if the other camera will show us which way it went. Yeah, I'm still waiting on the big file to save.
[23:38] That is that guy. Odds of finding oh, man. Which means where are you? [gun shot]
[23:59] [whirling sound] So I'm going to get right here at the intercept point.
[24:13] and it's like on this line right here, just a little bit to the left. You got it! Yes!
[24:28] That's awesome! Yes! So that should go in between our other two pieces.
[24:42] That looks like it to me. [David] -I would guess.. That's not quite a fusion, but almost.
[24:57] of that meant that that was from the collision I guess. That means that's one copper note. I don't know, man.
[25:13] It is so cool that you said you saw that one. That means that long video, that long lens should be able to see it, too. If we replay that long lens, we could see it.
[25:30] I can just only describe it to you. so, all this work and we still haven't fused two bullets together.
[25:42] And our lead is not the same type of lead used in the Civil War. we had within our control, which is load super slow bullets.
[25:56] amount of powder we thought possible and still make it down the barrel. Boy, those things just barely flew. We may have a Squib on the other side, meaning it didn't exit the barrel.
[26:12] That's the bullet. [Destin laughing] So clearly that wasn't enough gun powder.
[26:26] Fire. [gun fire]
[26:39] You see that?
[26:55] So close! It's our lead, David.
[27:16] They want to stick together so bad, but they refuse to. All right, so it looks like we cannot make these things fuse together with the lead So I think we need to figure out a way
[27:30] to shoot them slower to mimic terminal velocity more. And we also need to change the metal composition. I may have accidentally shot the coolest
[27:43] It's for Ridge wallet. So Ridge reached out and they're like, hey, we want to sponsor Smarter Every Day. They're like, that's cool, no big deal.
[27:59] One day I'm walking around the house and I look at that thing. And so I put my cards in it and I put it in my front pocket and I love it.
[28:11] This is the old man part that I'm afraid to say, but my lower back pain went away. So anyway, I called Ridge back. Will you please reconsider sponsoring Smarter Every Day?
[28:27] And then something amazing happened. I ended up shooting a really, really cool promotion for Ridge. They have Damascus steel, which looks like that.
[28:42] And they have aluminum, which looks like that. And this is what I want to tell you. I asked Ridge if I could give you this.
[28:57] And it is the most amazing thing. I can find my wallet in my house using an air tag. And I asked them if I could give you a free air tag moneyclip if people go
[29:09] to 👉 Ridge.com/Smarter and they get a Ridge wallet. And they said, "We don't do that". And they said "Yes".
[29:21] So if you want to try this, I promise you're going to love this wallet. and you get to tag on an air tag money clip to your order. Money back guarantee.
[29:36] backed by a lifetime warranty, these make fantastic gifts for your dad. on right now where there's ways you can get up to 40% off.
[29:49] It's a genuinely good wallet. And, you know, if I'm telling the truth, and I am, and I want you to have an air Let's shoot these things
[30:04] We thought it would be fun to shoot these The first one we decided to shoot was the Damascus steel version because it It's gone. I heard something.
[30:19] Big land in the woods. which I think made it even MORE awesome
[30:45] Aw Man! It did not penetrate the bullets fired at the same time.
[31:25] aluminum, so we used my actual wallet because I've had my eye on a new blue one, What happened here was surprising.
[31:37] Firing against my wallet in three, two, one, fire. This was an aluminum wallet. Can't tell for sure, but the wallet's still in place.
[31:54] [David, sounding cool like a cowboy] What d'ya got? Is the bullet... What just happened?
[32:34] It's got to be right there on the ground. It's right at the bottom under the tripod. Didn't even have to move.
[32:50] Please focus. Here you go. Is that one or two bullets? [Destin laughing, again]
[33:03] That might be more than one bullet. There's a tiny bit in the back that's heavier than this feels heavier than I wonder now.
[33:15] I wonder if the aluminum slowed them down just enough so they would fuse. You see that? And then look at that. It's absorbing it, and it's not letting it leave like it's holding it.
[33:30] And maybe even that air tag thing contained it. Yeah, there's just a little piece of bullet leaving. We have my wallet, an unfired bullet, and the bullet we pulled out of that.
[33:46] Bullet first.  Digital scale, 14 grams. What about the thing we pulled out?
[33:59] We had a partial fusion inside the wallet, and I have decided it doesn't count. Thank you to everyone who supports on patreon. It takes years to do a project like this.
[34:14] And I'm grateful to everyone who supports  at patreon.com/smartereveryday. well, I'm not going to tell you what we're going to do. So if you would consider supporting at Patreon, I do a few things.
[34:30] And also every year we have what we call The first year was the supersonic baseball team. That was a holographic sticker. That was amazing.
[34:45] kind of bullet versus bullet team or something like that. with me, you can do that at patreon.com/smartereveryday. I'll just tell you when I upload new videos,
[35:00] Anyway, I'm grateful to everyone who watches this stuff. I would do this like again, even if internet video wasn't a thing. I'm grateful that you're consuming this content,
[35:13] that me and my buddies spend so much time building. You're gettin Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.