One of the guys from MotorAuthority.com duct taped samurai swords to the front of his mx5 after an autox event and sliced some fruit at high speed. Definitely worth a watch..



Enjoy!

 

He missed almost all of the fruit.

 

I'd say he got at least half of the fruit, some just got the tops skimmed off. I imagine accuracy is tricky with duct taped swords.

 

Looked like the sword was too high.

 

Awaits some drifter replicating this...

 

A drifter would just use a battering-ram.


I'd say that with a mount which better positions the sword and damps the forced applied to it by the car, you could slice the fruit with fairly good accuracy.

 

I hope he's better with the actual game...

 

This is why I love you guys, I posted this at m.net too and they're like OMG THAT'S SO DANGEROUS SOMEONE COULD GET HURT! Post it here and Joe points out ways to improve the slicing accuracy.

 

I have to admit, I did see potential of a sword flying off and impaling the driver. That thing was flopping pretty hard to be attached with duct tape.

That would have made two epic fail threads in one week.

 

Well, you have a couple of different force vectors at work here, and while you'd need to hire a competent physicist to really model the behavior of this system properly, a couple of things are immediately evident.

The motion of the car body, as it accelerates both longitudinally and on the axis if its suspension, is being coupled into the sword in a very elastic manner. This, along with the energy absorbed by the blade when it contacts the fruit, causes two separate oscillations (the flexing of the blade of the sword itself, and the deformation of the duct-tape bond) which interact and cause the blade to move in a highly unpredictable manner.

Rigidly coupling the sword handle to the chassis would simplify the problem greatly, however the exact position of the blade (on the time axis) would still be fairly nondeterministic.

I propose instead a coupling which permits the sword some degree of axial movement, and which incorporates both a large mass (to increase the inertia of the sword as a whole) as well as a damping mechanism tuned to combat the oscillation of the blade. In other words, use a steadicam-like mechanism to keep it stable on the Z-axis, and allow the entire sword to deflect when it absorbs energy from impact with a pineapple, with the aim of minimizing snap-effects in the relatively elastic blade.

If you can get that thing stable enough, you could slice grapes with it.

 

(This space reserved for JasonC to tell me why I'm wrong, and to blame something totally random and unrelated on the Federal Reserve bank.)

 

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Gay, only reason to let play is Vivaldi.

 

Hey it was this or make a thread titled "There is nothing wrong with either of my miatas, both cars are running great, no one needs to look at my logs or tune, all good here"

 

Not just a fruit slicer but also a cone masher.