Stuff Made Here Is Making More Than Just Exploding Bats
We covered Shane Wighton’s attempts to build an explosive baseball bat in the past, and now he’s adapting that technology for other sports.
There is a point, usually around the age of 30, when we realize that we’re probably never going to be professional athletes. You notice that the average age of an NBA draft pick is barely 20-years-old and then you cry yourself to sleep. Fortunately, technology is here to help us make up for our physical inadequacies. Shane Wighton, proprietor of the Stuff Made Here YouTube channel, has been on a journey to use explosive-equipped baseball bats to hit record-breaking homers. After achieving something resembling success, the only natural way to proceed was to find out what other implements could be improved with a bit of explosive power.
If you haven’t yet seen Wighton’s explosive bat, you should immediately go check out it. Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Back? Great! As you just learned, Wighton created multiple baseball bats that smacked baseballs at incredible speeds thanks to a piston actuated by small explosive charges that are usually used to drive nails into concrete. After growing bored with baseball, Wighton decided to find out how this explosive technology could be adapted for other sports. He first tried this with an axe, with dissatisfying results. He simply cut the head of a small hatchet and then attached it to the bat’s explosive-actuated piston. Unfortunately, the additional weight of the axe head kept it from actuating properly.
Wighton’s next experiment was to use the explosive piston with a golf club. Because a golf club is so darn different than a baseball bat, this required a complete rebuild. The same piston assembly was attached to the end of a golf club and Wighton was, surprisingly, able to find a driving range that was willing to let him test this absurdly dangerous contraption. He wasn’t able to get any real data on the results, but it certainly appears that he was able to drive the ball far further than he would have been able to with a standard club. Then a seal on the piston assembly blew out and the fun was over. There isn’t any real moral to this story, other than that just about anything can be improved with the use of some light explosives.