Hyneman: One of my favorite builds was for a GE Plastics commercial. One of our mottoes: ' MythBusters-using tools and materials in ways for which they were not intended.' But let's be clear: Just because we are doing these things doesn't mean you should. That work has given us some real insights into tools and materials. We've developed many of ours during years spent designing special effects for movies and commercials. We don't stage anything on MythBusters it's all real. When we attached rockets to a second bamboo chair, it rose a couple of feet, then dumped Buster on his head. Here's another one: Did a medieval Chinese astronomer launch himself into space using a rocket-powered chair? We tested that myth by building a bamboo rocket chair powered by 80 pounds of black powder-the propellant used in medieval China-and then strapped in Buster, our crash-test dummy. Military rockets were off-limits to us, so we used three homemade rockets with 1500 pounds of successive thrust on a remote-control '66 Impala. There's no record of any such crash, but we couldn't resist testing the premise. Here's one example: The story goes that an Air Force sergeant in Arizona attached a jet-assisted take off bottle-a military-grade auxiliary rocket used to generate extra thrust-to his '67 Impala, and got up to 300-plus mph before crashing.

On MythBusters, our Discovery Channel show, we conduct scientific experiments to determine the truth of tall tales and urban legends.

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