Ready to launch! (Patreon)

It has been quite the sprint for the last two weeks as I got this explosive bat built, tested, fixed, and then videoed. I'm happy to say the video is done and I am so stoked! I'm really happy with how it turned out and I am so antsy to get it posted. The plan is to go live this Sunday synced up with a special guest.

This project took me a full four weeks from concept to video finished. This is by far the most time consuming video project I've done thus far. That may be surprising when you compare this to things like my basketball hoops, but there were a number of things that conspired to make it take really long:

I ended up building two bats. I was way too ambitious with the first bat and scrapped it after a week of work getting it designed and reliable.

There are major safety concerns that add a ton of analysis and testing time. This could easily be lethal and I wasn't taking any chances which added a lot of analysis and testing.

This was HARD to get working with the performance I need and not breaking. I'm right up against the edge of what's possible in terms of forces and material properties. I broke so many parts. 

Every part was machined. This takes a lot of time and then when you factor in all the breaking parts to remake  it takes a crap-ton of time. Overall I made over 100 machined parts. 

But seeing this thing go *boom* is totally worth it. It is a seriously cool thing that I plan to do a lot more fun stuff with. It's a really neat platform for launching stuff real hard. I'm still undecided on the axe attachment to 1 hit KO a tree...

Let me know what questions you have about this project and what you might want me to talk about if I did a podcast focused on this project. I'm planning to do a patron only podcast going into more details to see if that is any good.

And finally a little sneak preview of one of my favorite high speed shots. There are lots of flames because one of the cartridges ruptured at the pressure of firing four shells. Although this one successfully fired without shooting out any parts of the bat, what you can't see is the piston stop springs being obliterated by the force. 

As always thanks so much for the support. It makes it much easier for me to execute these projects!