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Mythbusters - Duct/k Tape Special

Trekker4747

Trekker4747

Boldly going...
Premium Member
Interesting episode, obivously there's plenty more they could've done as the duct tape myths out there are endless, this could've easily been one of their two-hour specials.

Lifting the car with the duct tape:

It worked, for a short-time at least. Not too surprising as duct-tape has pretty good tensile strength and the tape itself failed before the adhesive did, which is the real surprising part. If they doubled their use of the tape the car probably would've stayed suspended indefintely.

The myth with the canon is pretty cool, I suspect the cannon's performance was below that of the "real" cannon's due to the tightness of the cannonball inside of it. If the ball fit more like a regular canon the performance would've been much different I suspect.

Using the tape as a "patch" for the boar dry wasn't too surprising nor was using it as an emergency patch while the boat was in the water. Adam put it best, duct tape isn't waterproof it's water-resistant and adhesives don't work too well in the presence of water.

The duct tape sailboat was just simply cool.
 
About fixing the hole in the boat, I would have made a wad of duct tape and stuffed it into the hole to plug the hole, then taped over it
 
Fun episode, but a bit of conceptual drift here. None of their experiments were really testing any specific myths; they were just testing the properties of duct tape in general and making up "myths" that let them assess its strength, water resistance, versatility, etc. They confirmed the things they made up, but that didn't really prove that duct tape is as endlessly versatile or supernally powerful as its mythology suggests, because the premise is so open-ended. So this wasn't so much Mythbusting as just playing with duct tape.


I'm glad they included some Red Green clips at the beginning -- it wouldn't be a duct tape special without an appearance by the patron saint of duct tape.


Brent said:
About fixing the hole in the boat, I would have made a wad of duct tape and stuffed it into the hole to plug the hole, then taped over it
Click to expand...

Wouldn't have helped much given the water issues. The tape still wouldn't have been sticky enough to be any good at holding the wad in place or sealing the edges.


I've read that the one thing duct tape isn't really good for is taping up ducts, ironically. So I wondered why it was called that. Now I know -- it's an overcorrection of the slang term "duck tape." I always thought it was the other way around, that "duck tape" was a mishearing.

I once had a roll of duct tape from a company named Tuck, and I made a point of folding the corners of the strip end underneath, partly so that it'd be easy to find the end, but mainly so that I'd have an excuse to say "tucked Tuck duct tape." It's quite a tongue-twister.


The rupturing of the tape holding up the car was fascinating -- first four strips broke one by one, gradually, but then suddenly some kind of threshold was surpassed and the whole left side tore apart at once, with the right soon after. It's weird and intriguing how nonlinear the process of material failure can be -- which is what spawned the saying "the straw that broke the camel's back."

I wish they'd explained more about the "adhesive-to-adhesive" method that let them make such a solid "fabric" for their boat hull. You couldn't even see the individual strips there -- it looked like a single piece of material.

Even more generally, I really respect the skill and dexterity that enabled them to work with all that duct tape at all without it getting horribly tangled and stuck to itself and everything. That's a knack I haven't managed to develop.


Wow, Kari's really getting far along now, isn't she? (Or rather, months ago when this was taped.) I guess it won't be long before her maternity leave.
 
I think that they weaved the tape for the sailboat. Hell I bet you could repair a fighterjet or make a parachute with duct tape fabric.

Oh also Star Trek references FTW.
 
That was a pretty entertaining episode though I don't think they needed to show the car lift prematurely which took a bit of the wind out of the sails. Speaking of sails, the boat was really cool. I wonder how much it weighed.

I also liked that they showed Red Green in their silly montage.
 
Ah, we had this a couple of weeks ago (UK Discovery finally caught up with the US ones, albeit branding it a "new series" rather than "the rest of the series we stopped earlier")

Monday night here was Kitchen Disasters - is it a bad idea to put water on burning oil etc - which came over as a bit of a paid informecial from the fire department (albeit a useful and entertaining one) - and could a 19th century navy have used cheese as cannon ammo...

Monday coming it's revisiting "Five Fan Favourites" - the water heater rocket, shooting round corners, snowplough splitting a car in half, and two others I don't know (there's only room for the three on the EPG)
 
I have to say I was surprised that the boat they built out of duck tape didn't need to be coated with any waterproofing, I thought the boat was going to fail eventually but the adhesive surface to adhesive surface sealed the tape nicely. It was a really cool experiment and a good episode!:bolian:
 
I loved this episode, my most favourite in a long time, I liked every single "myth" they tested and the way tested them.
 
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