kwc blog

MythBusters: Chicken Gun

This site is not sponsored or affiliated with the Discovery Channel/MythBusters. Please visit the Discovery Channel's MythBusters fansite for official content and to purchase official merchandise.

Two cool myths, one lame one, all were pretty obscure. In fact, the cool ones sounded like they made them up just so they could build some cool stuff.

Cool Myth #1: NASA builds a chicken gun to fire chicken carcasses at their windshields. A European company hears about this and uses a chicken gun to test their railroad cars. When they fire, the chicken flies through the windshield and embeds itself in a seat way back in the car. They write NASA about this, to which NASA replies, "thaw your chickens."

So, in essence, they were testing whether a frozen chicken does more damage than a thawed chicken. But I just think they wanted to build a chicken gun. And a chicken gun they did build.

Jamie ended up using a 250 psi tank with a butterfly valve on the cannon and a big fat lever to pull down in order to launch the chicken. This thing annihilated the chickens, turning them into puree. They also loaded in a pumpkin for good measure and managed to puncture the fuselage of the plane they were using for target practice. Result of myth: when a chicken is flying that fast, it don't matter what temperature it is.

Cool Myth #2: This one was so absurd and busted so quickly and on so many accounts. The story is that a guy is so lazy that he wants to clean all of his 50 pounds of clothes at once. He steps on the clothes to try and jam them into the washer, and ends up slipping down into the machine. In doing so, he activates the spin cycle, which whirls him around, knocking over some bleach into his eyes, and eventually kills him from the whirling/impacts. There was also some silly tidbit about a dog wandering in, peeing on some spilled baking soda, which results in a small explosion.

This myth had Jamie and Adam wandering around the Mission District picking up clothes and what looked like Dolores Park in order to collect some dog urine. What made this myth cool was that as they quickly showed how unfeasible it was (washing machines can be stopped with your bare hands), they then went overboard in trying to replicate the results. Jamie found an engine from an electric car and hooked that up using a chain from a motorcycle. The washing machine now had over a hundred horsepower.

When they spun up the machine with Buster lodged in it, his arms spun around like a top destroying the shelves around him and sent the machine skidding around. It was pretty cool.

The last myth was lame, diver swallows octopus egg, octopus hatches in stomach, yadda, yadda, busted.