Originally published at: Watch inner tubes inflated until they burst | Boing Boing
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Well, exactly what it says on the box.
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I like that kind of truth in advertising… it’s nice!
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Oh, the…
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“But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!”
“But I don’t want to cure cancer. I want to explode inner tubes.”
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I think you should still pay attention when pressurizing your tires. It’s the tire you’ve got to worry about, not the innertube. The tire will explode long before the innertube. Plus, hardly any tires have innertubes anymore.
An exploding tire nearly killed a local guy some years back.
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When I was about 10 or so I made the mistake of using my dad’s compressor to fill up the tires on my bike on a very hot day. The tube exploding nearly took my eardrums with it.
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Oooh, I remember doing the same thing when I was 14 or so, except it was at a gas station. So after being deafened and covered with whatever powder the tubes are covered with, I had to push my bike home about 7 km. Good times!
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I’m always slightly nervous when putting air in my car’s tires.
I think of both Hunter Thompson, when he fills the Cadillac tires to 100 pounds, and a photo from LIFE magazine depicting a woman whose husband was just killed by an exploding tire rim. I saw it as a boy and it really stuck with me.
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Fortunately, split-rim wheels are pretty much the only way for this to happen anymore and are pretty much exclusively used on heavy trucks and equipment. And then they are required to use a cage for inflating and depressurizing. Of course, if you’re looking at filling up the tires on grandpa’s old truck that’s been sitting out in the back 40 since he got too old to feed the hogs and the rims are fully rust-brown, ymmv.
And Thompson’s entire life was a cautionary tale, so… don’t do that. 
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I was briefly tempted to look up the calculus for calculating the rate of change of the diameter of the toroidal tube given a constant flow of air. But the moment passed.
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It would depend a lot on the exact way it grows anyway. Can’t we just assume a spherical torus?
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In a vacuum
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that depends. is having a ball the same as having a blast?
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I suspect there at least a bit of Rule 37 going on here.
I did the same thing, except I was replacing an inner tube and I thought “I want to see how strong tire patches really are”, so I patched the damaged tube, inflated it until it popped, and after it exploded my ears rang for 4 days. Tire patches, when properly applied, hold up nicely.
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Why isn’t it just called just a tube? Is there an outer tube I could have been using instead?" 
Moving at 99% LS.
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