Love Me To The End

Chapter 8: Crushed

"This is a bale crusher, its job is to reduce scrap cars to cubes of metal. Someone asked if they could get put in one, and the answer was of course not. These machines crush cars as small as they can go, it's what they're for. But then we thought, what if we broke it, so it only did half a job?"

As he spoke, Scott showed me all the way around the huge, foreboding structure.

"We took apart the plates and completely reset them, so now when this thing crushes a car it just compresses it a bit. You still wouldn't want to be in there, though. So let me show you the second part of the equation."

He took us over to one of the scrap cars and motioned me to look inside. There were thick steel bars inside forming a cage around a single front seat. Sitting in the seat was a crash test dummy with a goofy face drawn on.

"The cage will buckle up under pressure, but because we know where the force is coming from we can somewhat control how it will bend. Hopefully the cage will buckle into a round structure which is much smaller than what we started with, but not crushed flat. We took the engines, steering columns and windows out of the cars so these are just the shell and chassis. If our calculations are right we can crush the car without completely crushing Johnny here."

He motioned towards the crash test dummy sat in the car, who was apparently named Johnny.

"Ready to try it, Chris?"

Chris made his way to the crusher controls, while Scott got back in the loader. He manoeuvred the car onto the top plate of the trailer and reversed back. The car sat between the two crushing plates with Johnny's cartoon grin visible inside.

Scott climbed out of the cab and beckoned me over to the table.

"We mounted a dashboard cam facing inwards to see what's happening in there. Check it out."

Sure enough, Johnny the dummy stared back at me from one of the TV monitors. The other displayed a wide angle shot from a nearby camera on a tripod.

"OK, Chris, let her rip!"

Chris engaged the mechanism and came over to the table to watch the experiment unfold.

The metal wings rose up and enveloped the car, revealing the huge piston arms pushing them up and round. The wings folded inwards, hugging the car with a cacophonous sound of twisting metal. The pistons at either end of the trailer began to engage. Though they weren't visible, I knew the steel walls were closing in, compressing the car into a cube with our hapless test dummy sat right in the middle.

Throughout it all the camera image of Johnny the dummy swayed and tottered about, but remained intact.

The process reversed, revealing a large cube of twisted metal sat on the top plate. Chris shut down the crusher and climbed up to the cube. Scott brought in the loader, between them they carefully secured the cube to the fork and lifted it gently down to ground level.

"Now for the moment of truth," said Scott. He picked up an angle grinder and began sawing at the cube of metal. After a few carefully placed cuts he picked up some jaws of life. Eventually he got the front off, revealing Johnny squashed tight into a small enclosed space, but otherwise intact. Scott and Chris carefully removed the dummy from the chunk of metal, laid him on the ground and inspected for damage. Aside from a few scratches, he'd come out pretty well.

The two men turned to face me like a pair of kids trick or treating.

Scott spoke first.

"So now we want to move on to human trials, but we need to start with someone small."