Shane Wighton has some nuts… and he needs to crack them. Luckily Shane also IS nuts… he’s also an engineer. So Shane decided to construct the world’s strongest nutcracker, and in the spirit of ‘Go Big or Go Home’ he made a .50 Caliber nutcracker and put it on Youtube at his channel “Stuff Made Here”. As Mr. Wighton puts it, “This is my favorite kind of project. It’s awesome, arguably useless, and definitely commercially not viable”. But that’s why we love it.
Shane explains,
“A traditional nutcracker works by amplifying the force from your hand with a lever to squeeze a nut really hard and crack it with powder actuation I should be able to make a nutcracker that generates up to 80 000 pounds of force that’s like 15,000 times stronger than this nutcracker”
Math, Steel And Gunpowder. A Man’s Nutcracker.
“If you’ve ever wondered why anyone cares about calculus or differential equations. This is why. They are incredibly powerful tools for a huge number of problems. I just ran the numbers and they’re kind of crazy. To keep the nutcracker from exploding the walls have to be an inch thick! Which is really thick! Hopefully, this reinforces why you don’t want to mess with these things. I would have never thought that the walls need to be that thick.”
In the end, the result is incredibly impressive and steel nuts, lego figures, lesser nutcrackers, jaw breakers, ball bearings and yes: macadamias fall before the might of jaws. Check it out.
