Will this toy engine work at full size? (yes)

Summary by Krater

Steve Mould tests a life-sized pop-pop boat powered by a propane burner, and explains why large pop-pop engines scale differently than toy ones according to the square-cube law.

From the video

Answers: How does a life-sized pop-pop boat work and why do they scale poorly?

• pop-pop boat propulsion
• square-cube law scaling
• simple harmonic oscillator
• thermal protection and heat deformation

What it concludes

• As you scale up a pop-pop boat, the tank volume increases by a factor of the cube while surface area goes up by the square.
• Because surface area and cross-sectional pipe area scale quadratically while mass scales cubically, larger pop-pop engines become harder to push and less efficient.
• The square-cube law explains why the speed of a large pop-pop boat does not scale up proportionally to its size.