Let me set the scene for you: it’s Saturday. It’s like 4pm. UFC 254 is on the TV. I’m about 2 beers deep and I’ve smoked a bowl and a half of grade-A homegrown kush. Me and 5 of my buds are just straight chillin’, living the life.
I honestly don’t even remember what we were talking about at the time this was said, but one of the guys spits out something about “3 tons of water in the back of his truck”. I look over at him and said,
3 TONS??? 3 TONS OF WATER IN THE BACK OF YOUR TRUCK??? THERE’S NO FUCKING WAY 3 TONS OF WATER FIT IN THE BACK OF YOUR TRUCK.
Why did I react like this? I have literally no idea. We all just laughed and continued shooting shit and watching the fight.
And then…someone asked if 3 tons of water could actually fit in the back of a truck. And I am telling you guys with everything in my body that is the dumbest question you can ask someone like me because, as an engineer, I am obligated to do the math.
But before we did the math, we did what I like to call “stoner math”. Questions like:
“well how much water is 3 tons…like is that a small pond?”
“a swimming pool? Could a swimming pool’s worth of water fit in the back of a truck?”
“how much water is in a swimming pool? Oh 7000 gallons? Oh, then 3 tons of water absolutely could fit…right?”
All those questions I just typed out took like 30 minutes to get through in real time. But let’s do the actual math that I did when I started actually trying to answer it.
First, we need to know what we’re trying to figure out. I think we started with “can 3 tons of water FIT in the back of a regular truck like a Ford F150.” So, we started running the numbers.
So about 240 gallons of water = 2000 lbs. Multiply that by 3 and you get 720 gallons of water, which is how much we said could/couldn’t fit in a truck bed.
Next, we need to turn that into a volume that is easier to compare to the measurements of the bed of a truck.
Finally, we looked up the bed of a regular 2020 Ford F-150.
All of those numbers < 96.25
So boom, 3 tons of water CAN in fact fit in the back of a truck bed…(not, not at all because the number of feet in the truck bed need to be bigger than the number of feet of water and we were stoned fucking morons that flipped the numbers and said “oh yea it absolutely can fit”).
And we continued watching the fight…until someone mentioned “oh, but can a truck support that much weight in the back?”.
Enter “stoner math” part 2:
“well think of like just 6000 lbs of cinderblocks or something, can a truck support that?”
“what about lead? oh wait lead floats in water doesn’t it?”
“…no it does fucking not Brooks. lead is like waaaay heavier than water”
“bruh I swear in high school we had to make lead float in physics class or something”
“yea, you did but the lead fucking sunk because that’s how you learned about density you fucking dumbass lololol”
“lololol ok fine but can a truck actually support 6000 lbs of anything?”
“well my truck is rated to tow like 7000 lbs”
“oh then for sure. 3 tons in the back of a truck? easy.”
And that’s how we solved it. Unfortunately, a truck’s towing capacity is NOT how much can it can support in the bed. That’s the payload, and:
So no, you cannot fit 3 tons of water in the bed of a truck and yes, we did waste like an hour of our life debating (and agreeing) that you could. Why is that “the craziest high story of my life”?
I have no idea. I was high when I tweeted that.
Good morning, happy Tuesday.
