The Slo Mo Guys use a Phantom Flex slow-motion camera to film a match-head bomb going off in their back yard. If you think it would be a good idea to try this at home, you should stop reading this right now.
Let’s face it: everything is better when it moves slowly. It could probably make a boring college lecture on economics look like it was shot for a Michael Bay movie.
Because of this, the Slo Mo Guys, a duo with a high-speed Phantom Flex slow-motion camera and 5.9 million subscribers to their YouTube channel, love to turn scenes of creative chaos into slow-motion art. This time, they pointed their camera at a match-head bomb, which is a bit dangerous but looks very pretty when slowed down to 2,500 frames per second.
Match-head bombs are made by lighting a lot of the heads of matches on fire, which makes a huge column of flame.
Most safety matches have a very flammable chemical called potassium chlorate in the head. According to the chemistry website Compound Interest, if you strike the head of a match on the rough side of a package that contains red phosphorus and something rough like powdered glass, the friction causes a flame. So picture 6,000 of these small flames all burning at the same time.
It goes without saying that you shouldn’t try this at home, even if you have one of those great insurance plans for your home.
Really, I bet some of you are still thinking about doing this. Just do what I say and stop right now. You might make the fire bigger or hurt yourself. Even the guys in this video that was posted on Friday go to dangerous places.
Even though the slow-motion footage looks amazing, Slo Mo Guy Daniel Gruchy almost gets burned when he puts his head over the container with the match heads to see if they are burning. If his co-host Gavin Free hadn’t told him to move out of the way at just the right time, you’d be watching a slow-motion video of a Slo Mo guy getting third-degree burns instead. None of us would want to see it.