The Maine guys known for creating colorful geysers from Diet Coke and Mentos candies say they’ve set a distance record for a vehicle with soda-and-candy-powered propulsion.



Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz created a single-seat rocket car powered by 54 bottles of Coke Zero and 324 Mentos. They say the Mark II traveled 239 feet, improving upon last year’s 220 feet with only half the fuel.



Voltz said Thursday they incorporated a simple piston-and-cylinder mechanism to get the vehicle moving. He says it‘s powerful enough that people shouldn’t try the experiment at home.





(Photo: Eepybird)



Their YouTube posting explains how it works:





The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car uses a piston mechanism: a six-foot long rod sits inside a six-foot long tube attached to each bottle of Coke Zero. When the Mentos drop into the soda, the pressure tries to push the rod out of the tube. With 54 rods all pushing at once, that gives us a lot of power.



All that power is pushing against a solid wall that’s attached to a sheet of plywood that runs under the rocket car itself — so the wall won’t move, the rocket car will. We get one big push for six feet, and then it’s all coasting from there.



The Buckfield-based entertainers shot to fame five years ago when they wore lab coats and goggles during their online videos demonstrating elaborate geysers set to music.



While these men give instruction of how to set off Diet Coke and Mentos as a “try at home” experiment, sometimes even those can go horribly wrong, as reported on The Blaze last year.