If you’ve ever been at a loose end of an afternoon and decided to entertain yourself by dropping a watermelon from a high place, then you’ll know that such an act only ends very messily. That’s right, this circular squishy fruit, like most circular squishy fruit, doesn’t much like being dropped from a great height.
Unless you coat it in a super-tough protective spray.
Aussie YouTubers How Ridiculous, a trio of guys clearly with time on their hands, decided to see just how well a watermelon would fare when coated with the special spray, called Line-X, when dropped from the top of a 150-foot-high tower. Would it smash? Would is shatter? Would it crack?
In the event, it did none of these. The watermelon actually bounced like a giant bouncy ball, with a slow-motion replay revealing a fair bit of elasticity in the watermelon’s outer surface when it smacked into the ground.
To confirm the kind of carnage that occurs when a regular watermelon hits the deck from a long drop, the three buddies chucked one of those over the side of the tower, too. It’s fair to say there wasn’t much of it left after it landed.
Some watching the video may have started to wonder if there really was a watermelon inside that black-spray interior, or if it was simply a basketball or some other spherical object with a bit of bounce in it. So, keen to show no underhand shenanigans had taken place, the How Ridiculous dudes set about cutting it open with an ax. But with the ax repeatedly rebounding off the watermelon, they had to resort to using a circle saw instead.
Once halved, we could see that despite the watermelon’s outer surface remaining intact, its red fruity interior had become a mass of mush, as if it’d been dropped from a great height. Which it had.
On its website, Line-X says it took “decades of research” to develop its comprehensive coatings portfolio “that includes polyurethanes, polyureas, aliphatic, and hybrid coatings.” It adds, “Each coating differs at a molecular level resulting in distinct physical characteristics that are ideal for certain applications.” Among them, as we’ve just seen, watermelons.
