New MythBusters episodes starting Wednesday

All new episodes of the MythBusters will soon be upon us! The first of which is this Wednesday night at 9:00pm eastern on the Discovery Channel. We here at the Squid are big fans of the fedora sporting ADHD guy and the mustachioed, beret wearing, mountain of a man (or maybe it’s just Kari… yeah, that’s probably it). Anybody who’s watched the MythBusters knows that they have converted more than a few full size vehicles to radio control in cases when having a human driver would be too dangerous. We can only guess what kind of cool new radio controlled projects they might have up their sleeves for this season. So let’s reminisce about some of their projects from seasons passed, shall we?

JATO Rocket Car

In the very first episode of the MythBusters ever, they gave us their very first radio controlled full size car ever. So the myth was that some guy (some totally cool guy no doubt) strapped a rocket to the top of his car and ended up killing himself. That’s the way I’d want to go. To see if such a thing was even possible they did the next best thing… strapped three rockets to the top of a car and let it loose while trying to keep it under control with a r/c transmitter from a helicopter. What happened?
Awesomeness. Let’s watch.
Yeah, that Impala may have over 3,000 horsepower, but my old ’67 Dodge Charger was still way cooler, I never should have sold her.

Speed bus flip & jump

The movie Speed, beyond the fantastic acting of the brilliant thespian Keanu Reeves (I thought he played the part of the tree very well), featured a speeding bus and… Well that’s about it really… But they did do a couple cool stunts in it. The MythBusters thought that maybe, just maybe,
there were some liberties taken in a fictional action movie. So they set out to test what would happen if you were to try to suddenly turn a bus going 50 mph through a 90° corner.

To keep everybody at a safe distance they fabricated a full on driver’s cockpit with the steering wheel routed through their trusty r/c transmitter.

(Sorry, this video isn’t embeddable you’ll have to click the link. Shame on you Discovery Channel!)
Click here to watch.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough for most people though, so they went back and tested another of the stunts in the movie. The jump. Yes, THE jump. Using the same setup as above, they attempted to hurl their bus off of a ramp made out of shipping containers that had been cut in half.

I think I’m going to create a setup just like that for all of my radio controlled cars.

James Bond boat jump

In another movie “myth” the guys try their hand at making a boat fly. They started out using an Aquacraft Pro Fisherman boat for scale testing. It didn’t work out too well. So they decided to do it full scale, because we all know that bigger is always better. The final result? Surprisingly, it
didn’t work out too well.

What Adam did at the last second kinda reminds me of when you hand a transmitter to somebody for the first time, how they just seem to automatically veer off course and smack the nearest solid object at high speed. Adam needs to work on driving in a straight line.

McGuyver Bamboo ultralight

Can bamboo, trashbags, and a lawnmower engine fly? Well, not on their own, no. But what if you tried to fashion an airplane out of those materials? Will they fly then?

The answer to that is also no.

Those are just a few of the instances where the MythBusters made use of r/c technology to do some really cool things. If you’re a fan of the show, or you’ve never tuned into it before, besure to check it out this Wednesday.