2012 Questions on the McHenry James Bond Astro Spiral Jump

News, notes, questions on the McHenry invented James Bond Astro Spiral Jump Stunt
MSI
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2012 Questions on the McHenry James Bond Astro Spiral Jump

Post by MSI »

Jan 2012: New year, new thread! We are now 40 years out from the first run of the Mchenry Spiral Jump stun at the Houston Astrodome.
From Popular Mechanics online see:
which also mentions he has an upcoming feature in Popular Mechanics on the McHenry Astro Spiral Stunt.

Here are the other links on our site about the McHenry Spiral Jump
MSI
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Re: 2012 Questions on the McHenry James Bond Astro Spiral Jump

Post by MSI »

Jan 2012: Came across an interesting site 'CanadianNews' which included a link in their archive Those Magnificent Men & Their Flying Machines
which begins:
  • "Stunt drivers Jimmy Canton and Bumps Willert once toured the country performing death-defying feats with ordinary cars. And they lived to tell about it."
and included Bumps discussion of his spiral jump experience:
  • "Willert, for example, was cajoled into making the famed 360° aerial roll in the 1974 James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun. "I had a reputation as a pretty good car jumper, and the stunt coordinator for that movie was having trouble getting the stunt to work," says Willert. "The whole thing was designed by computer, and when they put a human-sized weight in the driver's seat and sent it off the ramp, it landed perfectly. But every time they put a driver in the car, they crashed big time."
    Willert, who was on tour in Europe at the time, studied photographs and films of the failed attempts and eventually determined that the problem was psychological. The corkscrew ramps were placed out of line to compensate for the sideways travel of the car as it spiraled through the air, and drivers couldn't deal with the landing ramp being out of line with the take-off ramp. "They'd always try to help the car get there by cheating to one side as they went up the launch ramp," says Willert. "That really messed things up, because you had to be at exactly 47 miles an hour and exactly on a line they had painted on the launch ramp. They had some nasty crashes. Eventually they talked me into doing the stunt for the actual filming. I admit, it was hard to keep it on the line painted on the launch ramp, when you could see the landing ramp sitting way, way off to the side. But I did it, and the first time I did it was the take you see in the movie."
    Barrel rolls were a standard part of any auto thrill show. It was considered the sign of a good stunt driver if he could roll the car, land it back on its wheels, and then drive merrily on his way.
    The 360° aerial roll was eventually incorporated into several auto thrill shows. Willert did the stunt 31 times and landed safely 29 times. "You knew as soon as you left the ramp whether it was going to work or not," he says, chuckling. "It was a spectacu1ar stunt when it worked, and a spectacular crash when it didn't." "
see the full article: One correction: from our link Questions on the McHenry James Bond Spiral Jumpyou'll find:
  • For the actual ‘traveling stunt’ the target speeds, etc were 40 +/- 1MPH and 1461 +/- 3 kg, and 13.85 +/- 0.03 m
brian
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Re: 2012 Questions on the McHenry James Bond Astro Spiral Ju

Post by brian »

Sept 13, 2012: if it looks like, smells like and rolls like a the spiral jump stunt...then it must be!
  • We actually were contacted by the Hot Wheels team about helping them with this stunt. We did provide them with some help/ideas on the stunt to help make it work. However it wasn't official as they didn't have time or budget to properly measure the vehicle properties so we didn't want to guesstimate things (the vehicle they used was a custom build dune buggy type vehicle with special shock absorbers, etc. so not something easily guesstimated).
    Had they provided us with proper measurements then we could have helped them refine the takeoff/landing ramps to make it a perfect astrosipral jump like that in the James Bond movie by application of our mHVOSM computer program to refine the design the ramps.

Oh well, maybe next time!
Then again they're 'Hot Wheels'! they aren't interested in perfection, they just want to have FUN!!

Hot Wheels sets a real-life record for a corkscrew jump in a car
from the site Motaramic by Justin Hyde[/url]:
  • At 92 feet, Hot Wheels says this bests any previous corkscrew jump, like the one Chevy did for a Super Bowl ad earlier this year, or the progenitor of the move, the James Bond stunt in "The Man With The Golden Gun." See for yourself from every conceivable angle below.
    Hot Wheels sets a real-life record for a corkscrew jump in a car
spiral2012.jpg
spiral2012.jpg (18.44 KiB) Viewed 12690 times
Also see interview and scenes from inside the vehicle during the stunt (and maybe a wee bit too much blah blah blah by Alex Roy...but at the end of the video some additional footage)

  • Hot Wheels Corkscrew Jump World Record - LIVE AND LET DRIVE
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