Shatter A Car Window With A Sparkplug In An Emergency

Shatter A Car Window With A Sparkplug In An Emergency

If you’re stuck in a sinking car, or outside your car and desperately need to get inside, you have plenty of ways to break that window, but one of the best might be right there in your car anyway — a simple sparkplug will do the trick with ease. This video from National Geographic shows you how it works.

Brian Brushwood explains in this video that if you break off a chunk of ceramic from around the sparkplug and use it against the car window safety glass, it will shatter magnificently. The direct force on a small area applied by the sparkplug ceramic is enough to punch through the safety glass, which is designed to absorb great force over a large surface area without breaking (which is why a hammer, for example, doesn’t work very well.)

I’ve seen people do this with the sparkplug ceramic, and others do it with the point of the sparkplug itself, but throwing the ceramic at the window is probably safer from the outside (since the glass is designed to shatter outwards if it breaks). We still think keeping a safety hammer and seatbelt cutter on your keychain or in your car is a better long-term idea, but this definitely works in an emergency. If you don’t have either handy, you can always use your car headrest .

Shattering the Shatterproof [National Geographic (YouTube) via Boing Boing]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


9 responses to “Shatter A Car Window With A Sparkplug In An Emergency”

Leave a Reply