Mythbusters Recap: Stinky Car, Raccoon Rocket

Stinky Car. A pricey car is on the market at a great price. There has to be a catch, doesn't there? Sure there does! This deal stinks - literally! It turns out that someone died in the car and the smell just won't go away. So if this should happen to you, can the smell be cleaned?

As with the Hunt for Hoffa in Buried in Concrete, Daddy Longlegs, Jet Taxi, Adam and Jamie turn to pigs - dead pigs. They get a couple of recently deceased pigs, pack them up in a pretty nice Corvette, and pack it in a shippng container for two months. In the meantime they take some lessons on cleaning up messes from someone who should know - he cleans up crime scenes for a living, and he thinks it should be no problem. But he hasn't seen this scene yet.

After the two months is up, they break open the container and unleash a horrid scene of destruction. The entire interior of the Corvette has to be scrapped, and in the end it won't even start. The guys make a decent stab at cleaning the interior, but in the end, it still stinks. So the proceed directly to selling it. In the end, they do manage to sell it of for parts, and even then they had to drop the price further. Busted. This car couldn't be cleaned, it couldn't be started and though it was sold, it wasn't sold to anyone who wanted to drive the thing.

Raccoon Rocket. Any story that starts off with a bunch of rednecks chasing a raccoon into a culvert is bound to be good, and when you add some gasoline, it's just going to get better. Rumor has it that the redneck in question broke out his lighter, which ignited the gasoline, propelling him some 200 feet out of the pipe.

The first part of the myth was quickly busted, as it wasn't difficult to light the gasoline - but producing an explosive force requires compression, and that just isn't going to happen with an open end at the other side, not to mention the gaps around the unlikely hunter (in other words, Buster).

So our re-creators quickly proceeded to duplicating the results instead, by adding ten pounds of gunpowder and a sabot, which typically fits around a bullet, and provides the necessary gap-closing requirement.

Even so, the explosion was impressive - but produced only a 100-foot arc, so it seems unlikely that a bit of gasoline in the aforementioned culvert would have produced the mythological results. Busted.

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