The Hydraulic Press channel, a popular YouTube channel that made its mark on the world by crushing anything and everything they could think of with increasingly-powerful industrial equipment, has decided to try its hand at live streaming on Twitch. The end result brought plenty of destruction to the Finnish factory where the channel is hosted.
Starting in 2015, the Hydraulic Press Channel had been a massive hit on YouTube, with almost 2.3 million subscribers and a total of 378 million views across all its videos. They've used their hydraulic presses to test the strength of helmets, to crush diamonds, and to see if it's possible to fold a sheet of paper more than seven times.
The channel started streaming in September, but on October 6 they decided to try their hand at testing how much pressure different metals could take before warping under the strength of a 150-ton hydraulic press. Everything went well with the experiment, so the staff decided to move forward with what the channel is really known for: crushing things as flat as possible.
They started by crushing a Brass cylinder, which gave a little under the pressure, but then started resisting. Then, with a large bang, a huge chunk of the cylinder broke off, and a shattering noise could be heard on the stream.
"That wasn't cool, we broke the window from the shop," said Lauri Vuohensilta, the owner of the channel. "It went through all the windows."
A frame by frame look of the video shows the metal cylinder intact one frame, and then shattered the next, showing just how fast the metal chunk was sent flying. Thankfully for the shop, the damage wasn't as bad as they initially thought: It broke through two of the three panes of safety glass that they set up in the shop.
"You asked today, do we ever have any accidents?" Lauri's wife Anni said to the audience. "Well, today we have."
The channel is well known for having things go wrong, which is part of the appeal of the videos. The risk makes the channel well-suited to live-streaming, though there is always the chance that things could go very wrong, all within view of a live audience.