Burning paper with giant steel balls

Burning paper with giant steel balls

I bought these enormous ball bearings from this guy. They're fantastically heavy. When you whack them together you get a lovely sound. But for that brief moment and in that small space you also get really high temperatures and you can easily burn holes in paper. Here's a video:

You can even smell it! Here's a close up:

Burning paper with giant steel balls

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Science. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • Wesly
    Hello, I am doing a research on the phenomena, can you plz give the information about the weight of the steel balls and perhaps the velocity? Thank you very much!
  • Hi Wesly, I'm not sure about the velocity but the balls are 60mm in diameter. So that's 0.03m radius. So the volume is 4/3*pi*0.03^3 = 0.13x10^-4 m^3. The density of steel is about 7,500 kg/m^3.

    So the mass is just those two multiplied together 0.13x10^-4 * 7,500 = 0.85kg.

    The weight is just the mass times the acceleration due to gravity (9.8m/s^2) = 8.3 Newtons
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