I was watching a breaking competition on some sports channel a few months ago, when I saw the coolest thing.
One of the competitors had a stack of five bricks in front of him. He struck the pile, and split the top piece in half. Then, he struck it again, and split the bottom piece in half. Then, with three bricks left, he struck the pile and broke the middle brick without damaging the top or bottom ones!
How on earth did he do that? I don’t by the ‘mystical fu-powers’ line, and it was a legitimate sporting event so I assume it wasn’t rigged. So how does one perform such an incredbly controlled break?
It sounds very clever, but (unless I am wrong, this is only a guess) It could be as simple as varying strengths of brick.
The bottom brick is weakest so it breaks first, the top brick second weakest. And then the middle brick weakest. When the brick above it (strong) is struck, the force breaks the middle brick (weak).
I have always just used 4 matches for a similar trick. You just need to realise that even bricks allow a little flex before they break.
The break is legit enough but there are matches placed between the bricks where you want them to break. Hit the top piece and because there are a couple of matches under it it will break without damaging the others. With matches under the middle brick it will break on the second strike without damaging the second brick or the forth.
Not sure how he managed to break the bottom brick in between though. I suspect that if you used ‘matches’ of different widths and had perfect control you could do that simply by ensuring the bottom brick was placed on a thicker match than the second. With more room to flex it will break with less force than the middle brick provided the force is applied over a longer period. If you imagine standing on the stack and gradually increasing weight then the bottom brick should snap first as it has the biggest gap under it provided the gap under the middle brick is small enough to allow it to flex down and rest on the fourth brick. With a quick blow after that the middle brick will break provided the bottom brick is already broken and hence supported fully in the stand.
I could explain that a lot better with diagrams, but one thing I am sure of is that there is a simple explanation.
The matchsticks are a well known ‘trick’, as are preparing the materials.
The one thing that I have never seen, and probably never will is the breaking of UNPREPARED bricks and wooden planks.
The focus breaking of planks or bricks require that the material is dried/baked so that it is very brittle. They are baked until almost all of the moisture is gone, and are much, much more brittle. Baking off some bricks more than others may allow you to control which bricks break first.
Here’s a fun little test. Give a posturing karateka a brick pulled from a construction site, one that is damp. Ask him to break it. Sit back.
The final question is: did the martial artist indicate which brick he was going to break first (a la Bloodsport )? If not, it’s like rebounding a pool ball around the table and when it finally drops into a pocket, acting as if you meant it to drop into that one all along… admit it we’ve all done it…
I have no experience breaking bricks with my hands, and I’ll admit that I’m generally suspicious of lots of martial arts and martial artists, but I can say that there is definitely a technique to breaking bricks.
I took masonry class in high school and one of the things the teacher had was a wheel-barrow near the back of the shop full of bricks that we were allowed to go practice breaking with our trowels any time we wanted.
Let me tell you, on the first day, none of us could break a brick. By about halfway through the year though it was almost like second nature to stand back there and talk and casually break bricks with the slightest of taps.
So, my point is, any tough guy probably couldn’t break a brick with his hands on the first try, but someone might be able to do it with enough practice.
You should come to my school soem time. Although we only break bricks when we do public demonstrations, we just go to Home Depot and buy regular bricks. We’ve never baked or dried them in the sun. Also, we regularly break 2x2s on each other’s abs. These are also unprepared boards from Home Depot.
What Drizzt Do’Urden said. Turn up to our Kwoon any evening, bring your own bricks or standard sawn planks. We just purchase ours from the local building suppliers. Hand any of the senior students a wet brick from a construction site, ask him to break it, sit back and… watch him break it.
Jim if you’ve never seen someone break an unprepared brick or plank then you’ve not been looking very long or very hard. It’s not even very difficult. If you are an average guy I could teach you how to do it 95% in about 15 minutes. Of course I wouldn’t recommend that a novice use a flat punch for breaks after that little training but they could be trained to do so in that little time.
Fair play if you can walk the talk. My personal experience (particularly with bricks) is that they are almost always heat treated to make them more brittle.
That said of course it is possible to generate enough power to break solid objects, and I understand it takes dedication, focus and practice. However most of the board breaking that I have witnessed was for ‘show’ to demonstrate a technique, and the boards were very brittle.
anyway.
I personally never went in for all that breaking, so maybe I did missed something.
It’s not only possible, but surprisingly simple to break a stack of pine boards “off the shelf” – no drying required. I’ve done this. I’ve also broken undried bricks. And I’ve never known anyone to dry either in an oven.
I wrote two scientific articles about this – one in Scientific American back in April 1979, the other in American Journal of Physics in 1982.
My brother did it many, many times, as did several of his students. Plain construction bricks brought straight from Lowe’s or HomeDepot. Thin cinderblocks and decking boards too. No blue smoke. No mirrors.
Our school did pine board breaking (undried, fresh from the lumber store shelves), with punches and kicks, and it was quite fun and easy to do once you got the mechanics right.
We did discover that grain direction and uniformity make a huge difference with the ease at which a board breaks. When breaking multiple boards, for example, we are careful to choose boards so that they don’t stack “cross-grained” with each other.
Every now and then we would come across a board that would defy all efforts at breaking, due to knots and squiggly grain. I hated those :eek:
All the times I broke boards at Demo’s and at testing, they were fresh from Home Depot, and the last few times they were “wet” enough to still make your hands sticky.
Bricks were made of cinder material, or flagstones. Also from Home Depot.
I was working on being able to break a brick without cracking the egg I held in the breaking hand (hammer fist technique, for the most part).
Breaking boards is pretty much a gimmick. It’s not as hard as most people think. Our school didn’t use spacers, so we usually didn’t get past 3 boards stacked one on top of the other.
I was working on unsupported boards, before I stopped. I love breaking things.
Sit back.