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Firearms Folklore: Mystery Backwards Bullet. Newspaper reports of a shootout in Seattle include a picture of a gun that appears to show a bullet lodged within the chamber not of the gun the shot the bullet, but the gun that was shooting at it! You heard that right - the police officer's gun was apparently the recipient of a visitor, shot right up the barrel and into the chamber that had been recently vacated. Talk about your one-in-a-million shots. Is it even possible to recreate this one?

Adam and Jamie get two guns like those in the story and line them up in the indoor shooting range, including mounts that will prevent them from moving. They rapidly find out that even when using a laser to line things up, things aren't always as easy as you would expect. But after some last-minute adjustments, they finally start to get closer to what they need. But then it becomes even more of an issue, because the firing gun has a larger-bore bullet than the receiving gun. That could be an issue.

After a few tries, they are just about to give up, because shot after shot they end up with nothing other than metal shavings. It seems that though they are right on in their attempts, the bullet is just ending up as scrap metal when it hits the other gun. Perhaps they are too close and there is too much force when they make contact. But if they can't make it happen this close, there is little chance that they will be able to do so at a longer distance. Then they fire one last shot and they get a virtual replica of the picture in the paper. Though the bullet isn't much more than small hunk of metal, it is indeed backwards in the chamber. It takes Jamie ten minutes of prying to get it out. Plausible.

Firearms Folklore: Sniper Scope. This myth comes from another newspaper report, this one from decades back when a veteran received a medal when he shot an enemy sniper by focusing on the flash seen when light reflected off his scope. Is it really possible to make a shot like that, and kill an enemy sniper through the scope? The first step is to make a head from ballistics gel, and then set it up 100 yards away on the firing range, and then see what can be learned.

Adam and Jamie go through a crash course in sniper shooting, and then they take a shot (pardon the pun). Both of them hit the end of the scope, but neither of them manage to get through to the eye of the "sniper", much less penetrate further to "kill" him, so they bring in the ringer to see if he can do any better. While his shot looks like it might be better, in the end, all he did was destroy another scope. It appears from examining the wreckage of the scopes that all the lenses in the scopes are just serving to redirect the bullets before they get to the sniper. While this will prevent him from shooting with any accuracy, and it will probably spook him, it's a very difficult shot to make, and probably not one you can do with skill. Plausible.

Firearms Folklore: Fused Bullets. Moving even further back in history, we head to the civil war for this report of two bullets on the battlefield that supposedly hit in mid-air and fused themselves together. Unfortunately there isn't really much more than that, and nothing interesting other than the fact that they just fused together. Would this really happen if they did happen to hit?

The first try is to set up a couple of guns, somewhat like they did in the Mystery Backwards Bullet segment earlier. But because of the unreliability of these types of guns, they can't get them to fire at the same time, so the high-speed camera just shows the musket balls crossing in mid-air. It's time to try something else. Rather than shooting two at one another, the coin holder, as used in Gunslinger: Hole in a Silver Dollar segment of the Exploding Lighter episode, will be used to hold one of the balls, while the gun fires the other one. And it works the first time! Plausible.

Hammer vs. Hammer. It seems that Jamie is in trouble. All sorts of letters have been pouring in about the way that Jamie bangs hammers together, saying that at best, he is likely to chip off pieces of metal, and at worst, the ends of these two hard tools will explode. What better to do than see if either will really happen? So the build team gets some hammers and tests it out!

The first round is with a couple of new hammers with wood handles, and as they hit each other... the wood handles snap. The second round is with new hammers with metal hammers, and as they make contact... the metal handles bend, so nothing happens. Time after time, it seems like nothing at all is happening. So more tests are run to see if the swinging machine is swinging the hammers at the same speed as humans, and it is indeed doing so. So they ask Jamie for his opinion, and he says that maybe they need to be hardened by adding some carbon to them.

So barbecue master Tory fires up the grill, the hammers are heated, and then some carbon is applied and... nothing. The hardened heads do absolutely nothing, but the non-hardened handles bend. It looks like this one is just fans giving Jamie a hard time. Busted.