Originally published at: Eight metal spheres explosively hydroformed simultaneously | Boing Boing
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There’s a guy casually walking past who must have been very close at the time of the explosion. He must have a couple big metal spheres of his own.
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Me: It’s 2021 can we retire the car-alarm-as-punchline cliche?
Explosive hydroforming spheres: No here it is again just for you
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Yeah, that did not seem to be a well thought-out blasting location. What happens when things go wrong?
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I was hoping to see the transition by stepping through frame-by-frame, but it happens so fast that didn’t work… (though I did see they didn’t all go off at the same time)
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I am disappointed that the “videos making the rounds” tag wasn’t applied to this post.
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What are they going to be used for?
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That’s brilliant!
I’d love to have been at the meeting where that was first proposed as a manufacturing process.
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Well, that’s a quick and dispositive way to test the quality of your welds. 
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Googleing how disable car alarm
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Of course my inner pedant wants to point out that hide glue had been known for millennia by the 17th century
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Well, if they have any extra of the explosive that would probably work 
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You’d think people parking near the explosive forming plant would keep their car alarms off.
Car alarms are such a common nuisance noise in any case that people actively ignore them, which defeats the purpose of having one in the first place. No one is going to intervene, when the two hundredth activation of your car alarm this week turns out to be an actual car thief, because they’re too busy swearing about it to notice.
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I don’t want to be unsophisticated, but the article talks about how the charges are small. Think pressure cooker except a wee bit faster. No?
I have corrected this appalling omission.
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There’s a guy in Australia who makes vases by this method but with a mould on the outside. I saw his prototypes when he was figuring it out and I don’t think if the weld fails it is a big deal. you just end up with a hole and water leaks out and it is not really as nice looking. It doesn’t all just explode or anything and given it holds water they are not totally useless welds anyway (and he made his indoors) 
Search: fink vase at MAKE Designed Objects
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Colin does a good job of explaining the more common “slow hydroforming”, and why this is probably not as dangerous as it looks:
Essentially, it saves having to wait a few hours for a small pump to shape the tanks. I bet the explosive forming also causes work hardening of the finished tanks, and that they are meant as pressure vessels.
I’m disappointed how long it got me to get that joke.
One of my neighbours had this very car alarm.
Ah, nostalgia…
