Crushing Dynamite with a Hydraulic Press
We have seen it crush Nokia phones and Barbie dolls, and even a four-thousand-dollar diamond. The hydraulic press of the now-famous Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube has nearly 1.5 million followers looking for instant gratification by watching all kinds of objects get destroyed. But this time, its creator got a portable hydraulic press and joined forces with the Swedish Dynamite channel to crush nothing less than dynamite. Does the press win, or will we see twisted metal?
With 1.4 million subscribers and almost 140 million views, the star of the channel is a hydraulic press. Fiction writers for film and television must be banging their heads against the wall, but it's the kind of entertainment the web demands and consumes. Among its recent victims we find lithium batteries, duct tape, a padlock, neodymium magnets (they put up a great fight), a metal ball, and even a running motor. But its latest video brings something more explosive: Dynamite. The Hydraulic Press Channel and Swedish Dynamite decided to put their resources to the test and crush sticks of dynamite with a portable hydraulic press.
Modern Dynamite Is Safer Than It Looks
Modern dynamite turned out to be much safer than I imagined. Although the main ingredient remains intact (nitroglycerin), dynamite is a “stabilization format” for the explosive, so to speak. In the first attempt, the press came out victorious, deforming what appeared to be two sticks without detonation. In the second test, they added the detonator, which according to Swedish Dynamite gave it a “50 percent” chance of exploding. Even so, the press crushed the dynamite again successfully. Finally, they decided to do what we all wanted to see: detonate the dynamite and send the press flying into the air.
The Swedish Dynamite video is a fabulous complement, and in a sense serves as a “behind-the-scenes” for the original short that already has almost 2.5 million views. I recommend watching both, and that said, we now have a solid idea of what happens when a Finnish hydraulic press addict and a Swedish dynamite expert get together with the help of YouTube.
