Driver on closed track. Don’t try this without professional help.
The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car: Early Experiments
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"Voltz and Grobe have deciphered the magic of making viral videos."
—Stafford Green, The Coca-Cola Company
Try This at Home!
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Coke & Mentos Experiments
- Make Your Own Coke & Mentos Geysers
- Get Your Own Coke & Mentos Geyser Kit
- How Does it Work?
About The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car: Early Experiments
Not all the experiments EepyBird attempts are, umm, well, spectacular successes. Every experiment is an important part of discovering the limits of what is possible, and the experiments where things don’t work are the most important.
Here are some of the steps along the way to building The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car, which finally achieved our goal: propelling a human over 200 feet on Coke & Mentos power! But we started with less spectacular results…
How Does This Work?
This is one not to try at home.
The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car uses a piston mechanism: a six-foot long rod sits inside a six-foot long tube attached to each bottle of Coke Zero. When the Mentos drop into the soda, the pressure tries to push the rod out of the tube. With 108 rods all pushing at once, that gives us a lot of power.
All that power is pushing against a wall braced with 3,600 pounds of cement blocks. So all the force is directed into moving the Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car forward. We get one big push for six feet, and then it’s all coasting from there.
Want to know what makes the soda fly out of the bottle? Will you explode if you drink Coke and eat Mentos? Click here to find out!
Don’t Try This at Home!
Seriously, don’t try this at home. There is a huge amount of power involved, and we don’t want you to get hurt.
What you can (and should) try at home is the Coke & Mentos geyser: you can get your own Coke & Mentos Kit, which includes nozzles just like the ones we use in our geyser videos, or you can click here to learn how you can make Coke & Mentos geysers with stuff from around your house.
Credits
The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car: Early Experiments by EepyBird: Fritz Grobe (the short one) and Stephen Voltz (the tall one). Music by AudioBody. Filmed in Buckfield, Maine, home of the Oddfellow Theater. Special thanks to the experimental research team: Mike Miclon, Matt Tardy, and Jason Tardy. And thanks to Coca-Cola Zero and Mentos for making this possible!
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