Making a Water Railgun 

Every time Mehdi brings out part of a microwave, it gives me visions of his wife or children, walking into the kitchen looking to warm something up, and just finding a hole where the microwave used to be.

12:50 "The key is not to touch any voltage" Words to live by as an electrician.

Mehdi: It's important to educate your audience on real science. Also Mehdi: I set the water on fire...

I love at 14:15 you were pretty much just welding with the broken motor

Love how the science youtube creators have 0 real beef. They all just point to the expert of each topic.

I love how mehdi just says "who cares about the rail gun this is more fun" and proceeds to do something he knows is dangerous for a laugh

I love the way he goes “I think I made a battery” as if that’s a perfectly pedestrian happenstance for him

Serioulsy, if you were our science teacher we all would have passed. We may have all died, but we would have passed lol.

Excellent. Water *is* slightly diamagnetic so you could possibly get it to move if you used a massively powerful (probably superconducting) magnet driven by half a power station. I'm sure there's a handy one under Mehdi's desk somewhere ...

I think him accidentally making a battery is the first thing to make me laugh out loud! Always love you vids

I've never been so afraid for someone else's life. Absolute mad lad. You're a legend Mehdi. You should make electric/reusable fireworks for Canada Day.

Salt water electrolysis produces Chlorine gas, hydrogen, oxygen and sodium hydroxide (which gets dissolved instantly) - but in quite inconsistent ammount. Also for the electrolysis to happen, you need around 1.3 Volts, at that voltage you are probably just frying the water, but I would do this outside just to be sure :)

I know it's a part of his schtick and he knows what he's doing but watching someone dunk a microwave transformer in water while holding it still gives me that vertigo sensation in my stomach. (even without the secondary winding)

Mehdi, you are the type of person that 150 years ago would have been leading electrical discoveries. I love your passion.

6:00 Plastic pppppplate thingy.

I am in the field of electrical engineering myself, working for the power distribution company in my country so i do get to watch massive sparks and loud explosions every now and then. Your videos are always a joy to watch. Been following since you were at like 800k subscribers although not really active in comments. This would be my first one. Keep up the great work!

Honestly my expectations were exceeded! Seeing it spit out the water when it was poured in was actually more than I expected.

can you imagine having this guy for your high school physics teacher -- best class ever

5:31 😂😂😂😂😂😂

3:03 still catches me off guard it's so good, you expect the shock to happen when he puts them inside the water not after the experiment has been done

I love how he can jump between different areas of science so quickly while still being equally educational about all of it and finding ways to shock himself all in one video. He's clearly been doing this long enough to know how to get his audience engaged

It's just the energy of mehdi that carries him throughout the video !! Absolutely love it 👍

Yet another small correction: water molecules do have a magnetic dipole, too (besides the electric one) and these are, course, randomly oriented.But if you freeze the water under a strong magnetic field you'll get a weak magnet. I wrote another small correction to the light bulbs video (about halogen second glass layer, is not for aspect but for UV-cutting, the first quartz one doesn't), but I suppose is quite unlikely to find them... just in case, give back a signal, doing it just to improve your videos, which I follow.

Breaker: pops to save his life Mehdi: *sighs in annoyance*

Thank you Mehdi. I was having a stress induced stomachache and panic attack from studying, but it helped a bit to watch this video of a man shocking himself for science.

I love how mehdi says he hates being salty, while he is almost always salty already

13:29 , depending on the type of salt used (table salt = sodium chloride) you are probably making chlorine gas as a bi-product. Drake at styropyro makes it quite often in his chemistry videos.

2:30 this is used in genetic and proteomic testing using electrophoresis gel. The protein or gene strand is put into a gel with varying degrees of density as a current runs through the fluid and pulls the materials through. Based on the length of the genetic strand it will stop moving at a certain point in the fluid because of friction and you can use this to see if your sample has a gene strand or protein that matches your control.

I actually did a extended essay on magnetohydrodynamic drive and it is a propulsion device for ships (and a full scale ship has been made with it before). But of course it only works in salt water. Had a really hard time with weak school lab power supplies and lousy magnets to get readings haha

Thank you Mehdi, I have been watching your stuff on and off for almost a decade now. "I think I made a battery" put me into a laughing fit just like I remember your content doing back when I was 15.

14:04 The moment when the child comes up in you, priceless🤣🤣🤣

I've been thought that those microwave transformers can kill you instantly. Seeing this man holding that thing with his hands over water is just too much for me. My god.

1:11 "So I guess I should be thanking these fakers?" I saw this coming but it still made my day

6:06; Please don't try this at home if you are a professional and educated engineer that deals with electricity. Also, Mehdi, don't hold the microwave transformer on one hand to test it by plugging it on; otherwise, the plates that open sideways, and it explodes.

5:31 LOL THIS GOT ME LAUGHING SO HARD

Just discovered this awesome channel Mehdi, fantastic work, you could make make paint drying entertaining The world needs more teachers like you

14:10 🤣🤣🤣

Thanks to you Mehdi, I went to Purdue University to study Electrical Engineering. I just recently completed our introductory general engineering program (which we call FYE, or First Year Engineering) last semester and now that I’m in my desired program, I’m absolutely loving it! It’s so cool to see the things I’ve learned in school correlate with your videos, and vice versa. Thanks for inspiring me, Mehdi!

5:00 one of the scariest electroboom scenes in my opinion 0_O

14:27 - Garbage ?!?! Not exactly... you can use this principle to move submarines without make any noise.. indeed, they already used that. Remember movie The Hunt for Red October ?

"I wonder if all these gases, coming from the water, are poisonous or not!" He says with joy.

@14:17 luigi came out

You always brighten our day, Mehdi!

4:29 made me laugh so hard, because how loud the transformer was

This is totally hilarious. The comedy and presentation have really gone through the roof on this channel since I last watched. Thanks for making me laugh, I was having a bad day until now. Now I'm ready to take the world on again, cheers !

I'm not an electrician and I really don't understand many terms you use and even explain but I usually watch through your whole videos like this one. Good job.

I love how Mehdi is channeling his inner scientist from victorian England testing with this new incredible thing called "electricity"🤣 I have a fear for electric outlets and messing with any electric appliances due to childhood accident involving my nightlight and a faulty extension cord, but these videos are such a treat! 😁

3:20 and this is why PC water cooling uses distilled water and is also recommended to be flushed every now and then since the water will over time eat away the metals in the loop and make the water conductive again. ofc flushing cant be done on AIO since those are most of the time a closed loop

13:40 I think I will have a hard time sleeping tonight...

3:02 Holy Fudge! I almost had a heart attack...

It's people like this that give me hope for the future, yet I get slight anxiety everitime Mehdi releases a new video. Electricity is no toy, but he sure knows what he is doing.

“I think it’s a win!” KHHH! “WAH!” (Railgun shorts out.) “And now we have firework. DAMMIT!” “And the motor is destroyed…!” 😑

Mehdi is the sole reason i got into studying electronics Been watching him since 2018

11:15 you know you are pushing things when the damn water starts burning XD

"I don't know whether these gasses are poisonous or not" Does nothing to prevent him from breathing them. True engineer

I'm surprised you are still alive.

13:58 elctrolysis (h2 and cl2gass + naoh in solution)

13:31 yeah actually at high salt concentrations there's enough chlorine anion that it overtakes oxygen production so you get pure chlorine gas and hydrogen gas, as well as sodium hydroxide in the water. Concentration is probably way too small to cause harm here but it's an industrial process to produce hydroxide and chlroine iirc (chloralkai or smth)

Tech Ingredients did a wonderful video explaining this. Also, you should consider getting a foot pedal for turning on some of your projects. Like a momentary switch from a tig welder so you can have your hands free. When you were holding that mot over the saline solution with the cord in the other hand I was really worried about you buddy.

4:52 It is Aliumagnetic

7:05 "Aaaand the resistance of the salt water is... like... What? Minus two megaohms?" If I had a resistor with minus two megaohms of resistance I could put it in a low-power circuit to bump it up XD

Thanks for a great video as usual! This doesn't need a fancy name - it's a simple example of the right-hand rule (the Lorentz force F= qv x B associated with a charge moving in a magnetic field producing a force as the cross product of those 2 vectors). As -ve ions move towards the +ve plate they will experience a force along the channel. The +ve ions move in the other direction across the channel, but because they are of opposite sign, the effective current is in the same direction and so they also experience a force in the same direction along the channel and so the entire body of water is pushed along the channel. Yes the gases are poisonous (chlorine if you used table salt) - far safer to use sodium bicarbonate to make it conductive, but when has danger ever stopped you from experimenting! 🙂 A cool thing I created back in high school, along the lines of what was shown in the debunked video, was to make the water spin - put the water in a petri dish and line the interior wall with foil, place a magnet under the dish and another with the opposite pole above the dish, suspend a pin from the top magnet that dips into the the center of the water, run a radial current from the foil to the pin (via a connection to the top magnet) and viola, you've got a model cyclotron. 🙂 Cheers.

@ 13:35 EB just revealed the caterpillar drive technology

i know that this is what he does... but i am convinced that Death is just over his shoulder saying " you have a lot of nerve being alive!"

Mehdi just casually reinventing top secret submarine technology lol. He basically built a form of caterpillar drive. Super cool.

10:37 made me jump. My high power subwoofer slammed in my car. Tons of bass! 100 amp of bass, 1000 watts of bass, 10000 smiles. Well, closer to 75 amps really.

I keep thinking of the caterpillar drive in "Search for Red October". If a nuclear powered sub used huge magnets then the flow of the salt water would cool everything keeping the magnets below their Curie temperature It'd have to use batteries as a generator would be too loud. You'd only need a couple of knots to make a totally silent drive worthwhile.

Hi! I'm from Brazil! I got a Micro Bit from the BBC London project and I'm learning the basics of electrics and electronics by my own....your Chanel is amazing....thanks a lot for you and Brilliant 🎉🎉🎉

As I understand it one of the major problems with the rail guns in military development is the arcing that happens at the end of the barrel when the projectile is breaking contact. I think I saw a little of that effect going on in the water railgun!

congrats. you managed to set water on fire. this was a great video as always.absolutely love them. stay safe ^-^

11:00 scared the life out of me

5:06 RIP electronic danger noodle 😂

13:02 AdD soMe pEpPEr tO yoUr MIx

8:35ish Electrocute's playing has gotten better over the years!

13:28 These "gases" are probably hydrogen and oxygen xD

1:28 It is...just a little bit. Even with strong magnet they move slowly

4:43 made my day

Hey Medhi, you should be a high school science (physics) teacher! In the previous video when you made the million amp transformer, you made a vintage fire alarm buzzer. I went to a high school that had that as the fire alarm signal.

I love a good debunking video, and having a talented science communicator positively recommend other channels is just a bonus

Electroboom is the absolute madman that tries all the dangerous things we've thought of but weren't crazy enough to actually do. Stuff explodes right in his face, he's like "yeah it's fine I'm still not going to wear any safety equipment lol" and I love that attitude (ok but seriously I think you should get eye protection at least)

ELECTROcute has got skilled 8:07

Hey Mehdi - if you see this. We used to test in the lab the conductivity of liquids. There is a neat process called titrations where you add a liquid to an other one until it changes colour. Well - if you have something that is black like coke, and it changes from black to black... You can not do much. But you can measure the conductivity of the liquid and measure its contents that way. It is called conductometry :D I'd love a video about this at it is really interesting - uses chemistry and electricity. Lovely stuff :D

13:02 He just seasoned the water😂

words cannot express how much i this guy's videos he's like a mad scientist bent on educating people instead of world domination

5:11 get a room you two

7:10 is where we learn from your mistakes. Even the less spectacular ones.

*12:55** making a water rail gun? no no , converting water into hydrogen awyeah!*

the amount of fuses this guy must go through on a daily basis is insane-

The reaction after you added the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER was amazing! Did you just turn salt water into plasma?

12:27 did the water carry a glob of plasma in an arc at the back left?

6:21 behold the most dangerous-looking thing I've ever seen

New Challenge: Take a shot every time something trips a breaker or blows up

@6:09 lmao that one got yer attention.

8:08 Is that your daughter playing the piano? If it is, then damn she progressed so far since the last time you featured her on a video

You are my salvation

There is a way to make a water cannon that shoots farther and tighter than the spray of other cheap devices . The turbulence must be arrested with vanes, the barrel should be choked like a shot gun to stretch out the water, increasing it's speed and a bubble of compressed air or Co2 gas should be inserted in the stream to advance the speed again and one more very important thing, use a leaf blower to move a column of air around the barrel of your cannon to match the speed of the water so it does not diffuse into a spray. I think you can do it.

12:44😂😂 guess he’s never stuck a 9 volt to his tongue.

I don't know why, but the floating Mehdi head at 9:29 had me chuckling like a loon.

I thought I had grown resistant to Mehdi's jumpscares but the 3 minute mark one got me good lol

Pure water isn't conductive but being a polar molecule is affected by magnetic fields. That's why the AC moves water but DC doesn't, DC doesn't make a moving magnetic field. If you hold a staticly charged balloon by a running faucet, it will pull the stream towards it since the slightly charged end of the molecule is moving past the static magnetic field from the charged balloon.