MythBusters Episode 67: "Firearms Folklore"
Air Date: November 29, 2006
A bullet can be shot into the empty chamber of another revolver.
confirmed
The MythBusters were actually able to fire a bullet straight down the chamber of the test revolver. The bullet went in and lodged itself inside the chamber, matching the photograph that the MythBusters had.
A sniper can kill another sniper by shooting them straight through the scope.
plausible*
Using a police industry standard SWAT sniper rifle and standard police match ammunition, the MythBusters fired several shots at a scoped rifle mounted on a ballistics gel dummy. Unfortunately, the bullet was unable to hit the dummy. The bullet was either stopped or deflected by the multiple layers of lenses in the scope, leaving the dummy relatively unharmed. Without any clear evidence that a bullet can penetrate a sniper scope, the MythBusters decided to label the myth as busted.
*This myth was originally labeled "busted," but due to much debate by viewers it was revisited in episode 75. Using a period-accurate scope (this myth originates from reports of Carlos Hathcock in the Vietnam War), it was found to be plausible.
During the Civil War, two soldiers’ bullets collided in midair and fused together.
plausible
The MythBusters first tried to mount two Civil War rifles in front of each other so that when fired, the bullets would collide in midair. However, this proved impossible because they were unable to get the guns to fire at the same time. Instead, they aimed a single rifle at a bullet suspended in the air. The fired bullet hit dead center, and the MythBusters found that both bullets had fused together into a single mass. Though incredibly unlikely, it is possible for two bullets to collide and fuse together in midair.
If two hammers strike each other, at least one of them will completely shatter with lethal force.
busted
Using a custom rig, the MythBusters repeatedly struck pairs of hammers together, but none shattered. Hammers with wooden handles merely snapped in two and hammers with metal handles bent. The MythBusters then decided to make the steel hammers harder and more brittle by adding more carbon and through heat treatment. In particular, they attempted to case harden the hammers, however it is questionable if this was done correctly. They heated the hammers to high temperatures and then coated the hammer heads in used engine oil. They also decided to have the hammers strike a more sturdy anvil instead of each other. However, during testing, the carbonized hammers merely bent at the handles without shattering. Furthermore, an anvil is generally not made of particularly hard steel, and so that test may have been doomed from the beginning. An anvil with a hardened tool steel insert would have been more appropriate. Though the myth was busted, some hammers come with warnings not to use them to strike another tool or hardened nail with excessive force; although no hammerhead shattered or chipped, high-speed footage showed particle dust flying in all directions, which presents an eye hazard.
(This myth was revisited in episode 75 and it was re-busted.)
When I was a boy,(some time ago)I remember seeing bullets that had been fused together in a Civil War museum in the Gettysburg,Pa.area.I think there were several in the display.They’re probably still there.
June 25, 2007 at 7:24 PMI have a piece of an ax head in my right shoulder and had a piece of hammer head removed from my left forearm. Both are results of striking two hammers together and a hammer and an ax together.
July 4, 2007 at 6:51 PMI just see the myth “A bullet can be shot into the empty chamber of another revolver” and yes for what we see it is confirmed. But if that appen during a shoutout the recever revolver should maybe have a cartbridge in the chamber?
Fan from Quebec
July 4, 2007 at 10:01 PMThe exploding hammers one is definitely true. 2 guys from work were horsing around, and wanted to hit 2 steel hammers together. I wanted none of it.
July 8, 2007 at 3:25 PMThey hit them together, and a piece of shrapnel embedded itself in my leg. It bled a lot, and I still have the scar.
The same test should be done with the brittle hammers but this time hitting a pointy object like a nail. In other words do the test in a real life type situation and not the hammer hitting machine. I would imagine that a brittle hammer hitting a nail head with a force of tens of thousands of psi (all that force from the hammer head hitting something as small as the size of the head of the nail)would cause it (the hammer head) to fracture. Your tests have used two hammers hitting flush against each other. I don’t think that that was a real life test.
July 9, 2007 at 12:18 PMThe key word is ’shatter’. Hammers will chip if you do something like this and they said so on the show.
July 18, 2007 at 11:09 PMA hammer hitting another hammer can most definitely come apart. Maybe not explode in a sense but definitely can pose a serious hazard. What will happen is that the case hardened portion of the hammer (typically a “skin” approximately .050 in all around the head)will separate from the soft core. The effect would be most easily described as covering a tennis ball in ice then bouncing it. The core can deform, but the skin cannot. Eventually it would crack and separate from the core, and fly off. Cast steel hammers are different. They will eventually form stress cracks due to the crystalline structure of the steel, and come apart in large chunks. It all depends on the hammers. A large hammer will break easier than a small one because the amount of force (ft/lbs) in relation to the thickness of the skin is much greater.
August 20, 2007 at 8:11 PMstandard police match ammunition is what caliber ???
August 20, 2007 at 10:59 PMYour myth about hitting two hammers together Will cause damage I know because I did it working on a car in 1978, and one of the hammers chipped and the piece of the hammer went into my wrist and broke an artery and lodge into my bone and I was bleeding really bad and had to rushed to the Hospital. Two weeks later I had to go in for surgery and have the peice of hammer removed from my wrist bone. And in 2003 I found out that I had Hep C and had to have a liver transplant. I think I got the Hep C from the Hospital that operated in 1978 because it was dirty. If you would like to know more about this story like what kind of hammers I used (and I still have one of them) then feel free to contact me by E-mail
August 21, 2007 at 12:12 AMHammer myth, definatly true! In real situtations one hammer is held still while the other is swung at it. People usually do this when thay are trying to demolish things on a jobsite. I witnessed it firsthand, still have the hammers. When the worker was taken to the hospital, the doctors thoaght that he had been shot with a .22 cal. gun!
August 26, 2007 at 8:06 PMcan you make a bullet fire bu hitting it with a nail hammer and not having the bullet in any type of chamber
September 19, 2007 at 1:10 PMSniper rounds would most likley be full metal jackets so would not break up so easily and be harder to deflect
November 2, 2007 at 3:22 PMLove the show but please if talking about metallurgy (case hardening, etc) with the hammers get the process right. In my opinion a hammer can certainly shatter or chip if there is and manufacturing flaw and/or improper heat treatment. Travis covered my concerns about the sniper scope.
November 18, 2007 at 12:24 AMRe shooting a sniper through telescopic sight.
I have not seen your update re this but I noticed you were using a modern hunting rifle with what looked like mushrooming (expanding) ammunition. You should know that the military in WWII used FMJ (full metal jacketed) ammunition. These would have a far better chance of penetrating fully.
Grant
November 19, 2007 at 1:29 PMI was a victim of a shattering hammer. My two older brothers were trying to hit the hammer heads together in mid-air. I (being about 5 years old) was watching one minute and the next thing I remember is waking up on a table with my father pulling a piece of metal out of my head, right between the eyes. It was not lethal force but it was enough to stick in my head and leave a pretty good scar
November 20, 2007 at 10:17 PMa related myth is that a machine gun used in combat gets so hot from use that it ‘runs away’ or fires bullets without the operator and will continue until the belt is depleted. i contend the barrel will melt and cause an explosion before this could ever happen. can u check this out?
November 23, 2007 at 5:46 PMThe thing that you need to worry about with respect to hitting two hammers together is when you don’t get a good square hit and a piece of one of the hammers coming off and hitting you in the eye. I’ve had a few scratches on my glasses because of things like this or because I has hitting the head of a chisel. The worst scenario is with aan old hammer or tool whose head has started to mushroom. Yeah, technically, you should regrind those heads to remove the mushroom, but some of us don’t think about it until a piece breaks off and hits us in the glasses. I had an uncle that lost an eye because of this type of action. One of the disadvantages of having 20/20 vision, I guess. I’ve pretty much always had to wear glasses, so I guess I’ve always got safety glasses with me. I suspect that if I hadn’t been wearing glasses all these years, I would have probably lost an eye by now.
December 4, 2007 at 5:16 PMI watched this episode. During the show they talked about how hard it would be to get a “larger” bullet, the 9 mm luger, into the chamber or cylinder of a 38 special. In all reality the 9 mm luger is smaller in diameter at .355″ and the 38 special uses larger bullets at .357″. Two thousands of an inch difference, small difference but the 9mm is still smaller.
December 15, 2007 at 1:01 PMThe problem with the Hathcock story has to do with trajectory, rather than factors treated in the Mythbusters experiment. At only one comparative level (height one above the other) could the trajectory of Hathcock’s shot have tranversed the scope in question exactly; and, in such case, the enemy sniper could not have been aiming at Hathcock. This one is busted (and more easily demonstated by mathematics than actual experiment).
December 26, 2007 at 3:45 PMOops - “typo!” That “demonstated” should have been “demonstrated.”
December 26, 2007 at 3:47 PMHal
January 14, 2008 at 1:26 PMBullets don’t fly in straight lines.
Distance, wind, bullet size,and weight. All play a roll. They need to get a real sniper, and the right gun & ammo. And do it at long distance. Heck make a contest out of it. It would fun to watch. ha ha
I visited the Petersburg, Virginia, Civil War battlesite a few days ago. In the visitor center museum they had several bullets that met in midair. One pair was a head-on hit. They basically flattened into a disk with the back of the bullets sticking out from the middle. I still remember seeing the Gettysburg bullets about 50 years ago.
January 15, 2008 at 8:40 PMI swing a hammer 4 50 hours a week over a steel table and every ones hammer is chipped and they hurt !!! universal forest products 325
February 10, 2008 at 7:11 PMWhy did they mark the bullet fuse myth as plausible if it’s totally probable and has definetely happened b4 if the above comments about the gettysburg museum are true, even though very hard to do it should still be confirmed
And the answer to number 11’s comment, Raymond, is that yes, you could hit a bullet with a hammer and cause it to fire, but it wouldn’t be extremely smart
February 23, 2008 at 3:09 PMThree words, Full Metal Jacket. The military uses these and I know that a 7.62×54 FMJ will shoot through any scope as I have shot through junk cars cracking the engine block inside. The FMJ shouldn’t be deflected by the lenses in a scope.
March 18, 2008 at 10:58 PMBased on my experience shooting junked cars and farm machinery, I am sure that a military issue FMJ / Full Metal Jacket 150 grain 7.62 NATO bullet will completely penetrate a rifle scope end to end. A soft point expanding bullet as appeared to be used in your test would not, as you proved. In the book “Marine Sniper, 93 Confirmed Kills” by Charles Henderson, Hathcock says that he used match grade military 7.62 NATO FMJ ammo in his bolt action sniper rifle in Vietnam.
March 20, 2008 at 6:24 AMThere are other instances of shots through opposing sniper’s scopes from other wars. Hathcock wasn’t the first. As far as the angular variation…what was the distance? Probably not further than a few hundred yards, and that close, there won’t be enough variation to have gross misalignment. The reality is that snipers rarely shot ultra long range. Yeah there are some that happen, but most are much closer in.
If they used “police match” ammo, it was probably a 168gr boattail hp, with a thin jacket…definitely will not carry through like a FMJ would. Especially when they put it ultra close as the higher impact velocity increases expansion rate.
May 19, 2008 at 10:13 PMis bullet bending possible???? like in the movie ~wanted~. try a bust on it tooo, a.s.a.p
August 26, 2008 at 11:25 PMshould be useing 7.65 147 grain M118 ball amunition(era marine sniper ammo). just to be historicly accurate. fireing into a proper mosin nagant scope(what charlie had during the war)
October 5, 2008 at 8:42 PM