Cetilim
Novicius
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Slinging Rocks!
Posts: 9
Pacific Northwest
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First, I will say that if this has already been done and posted, I wasn't able to find it. And if it has, I apologize for the redundancy.
I don't know if I'll think too hard about the reasons for my curiosity, but I did manage to satisfy it this past weekend. For a time now, I've been curious about what kind of damage a sling could do to certain objects. The most recent one is a car windshield. The results were not what I had originally expected, and what I did learn was even more interesting than I thought it would be. First, I think it would be good to say that no actual windshields, nor vehicles were harmed in this experiment.
Due to my rather short attention span, and rather long list of varying interests, I managed to acquire a two foot square piece of automotive windshield. At some point in my past I thought there was a better future for me in windshield repair than in my current job involving IT. Sanity must have returned at some point, because I'm still in IT.
Having seen the power that is generated by this weapon, I had initially expected to be able to throw a rock all the way through the windshield. Perhaps this is possible, but I now know that I did not sling with sufficient force to do this. And then there's the accuracy problem which made the piece of windshield the safest 2' x 2' square the safest place to be while I was trying to hit it for a disturbingly long time. Which also is my explanation, or excuse as to why I didn't film it...I started to get to the point where I wasn't sure which throw, if any, would actually make contact.
Now the results:
I was not able to get the rock to penetrate the laminate between the two pieces of windshield glass, no matter how hard I threw. While this might seem like failure, what did happen, at least in my opinion, was worse had this been an actual vehicle. On both sides of the laminate, the glass was completely gone where the rock had hit. The impact was so severe, and the laminate so strong, that the glass on the front of the windshield was powdered against the laminate. The rocks were about golf ball size, and the bare laminate spot on the glass was also about this same size. The backside of the windshield was also bare of glass, and the laminate was almost completely cleaned of glass. Spreading outward from the impact zone was a cone of shattered glass that extended about 6-10 feet back from the piece of windshield. Had this been a vehicle, I would imagine it would be like sitting in front of a shotgun that had just discharged a shell of broken glass. The glass was embedded in the ground in places, and every where behind the windshield, extending in a cone out to about ten feet were shards of glass that had come off the windshield.
For those of you who wonder what would happen if a rock was slung at a windshield, perhaps this will give some indication. At the very least, it is a good example of how dangerous a sling can be. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be behind the windshield at the time of impact.
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