What happened to that ball anyway? (Patreon)

If you haven't seen my latest video about my explosive bat V2, you should check it out. This post somewhat spoils it. Also check out the Smarter Every Day video diving into the details of how the bat works.

So that ball that got swallowed by the field... yeah it's bugging me. But on the plus side, it gives me strong motivation to get down to Alabama where they mow their fields. Once there, SMH+SED can beat the record for sure, hopefully even harder. Not only that there is good prospects for torturing baseballs in other exciting ways. 

The reason we had to stop when we did is that we broke one of the piston assemblies (the thing that contacts the ball) with an off center hit which bent it into an "italic" shape. We lost the second backup assembly when it came untied from the kevlar stop line and sailed into infinity. I heard a couple days ago that someones lawnmower found the piston assembly...

After we broke everything, Destin had to head back to the airport and I was going to lose my mind if I had to make another piston assembly. At that point I had made at least 7 of them (my mind is a bit foggy from so many iterations and most of them are lost so I can't count :). I was nominally satisfied because I proved without a shadow of a doubt that the bat can break my original goal of 575 feet, and 99.99% did it by hand as well. 

The italicization was a new failure mode that I will address before fixing / making a new version of this bat. Steel would be ideal but is too heavy since the moving mass is what primarily sets the acceleration. Most likely I will make the piston rods out of titanium, though I am also considering changes that will prevent firing unless the hit is nominally centered.

Someone on the discord had an amazing idea to embedded some metal in the ball so I could use a metal detector to find it - if only. I did spend the better part of a day searching for the ball systematically working a grid and then doing it again at 90 degrees, then searching the adjacent properties "just in case." The grass in that field is the worst possible thing the ball could have landed in. It is extremely dense and matted - perfect for swallowing the ball yet impossible to see through and very difficult to sift. Actually, on second thought maybe the grass wasn't the absolute worst thing - it could have landed in fire... but the grass is pretty close. 

This isn't that last we'll you'll be seeing of this bat. There are all kinds of fun upgrades like:

Golf club adapter

Axe head to 1 hit KO a tree

Mounting it under a tube to launch things like a mortar

Hitting more baseballs

Shooting it with baseball cannons just because

It was a lot of fun collaborating with Destin on this. Hopefully you all enjoyed it as well. It was also very useful - the high speed has given me a lot more insight into what is going on which will make future bats easier to design.  

Thank you all for the support. I'm putting 100% of patreon proceeds back into projects and certain AV upgrades like the chronos camera.  Hopefully the projects will get more ambitious and crazier!

- Shane