5 Ways to Make a Gang of Children Lift a Car Off the Ground

5 Get the Strongest Children

Cars are 2,000 to 4,000 pounds, which is going to be difficult for any amount of children to lift. Even if we limit this to the slightly easier task of lifting two of a car's tires off the ground, conventional children will still struggle mightily with this.

Therefore, before we get started, you're going to need to get the strongest possible children. Which is difficult. Children don't respond that well to conventional strength training, and few have the appetite for the 15 daily chicken breasts and creatine shakes necessary for such training. Anabolic steroids are another option I'm going to recommend strongly against, due to the health risks they pose, and of course their illegality.

Also their cost.

The same goes for exposing them to gamma ray blasts, radioactive spiders, or basically anything from Issue #1 of any Marvel Comics brand. No, instead I'm going to recommend that you use actual science, in this case natural selection.

Leave your children unsupervised in an enclosed space for an hour or two, then come back to find which ones are physically dominating the others. They'll be the ones carrying a conch or some other totem, or simply the ones physically on top of the others. Those are the children you'll need.

4 Go at It from the Side

The heaviest parts of a car are the engine and transmission, hundreds of pounds each, difficult for any number of children to dead lift. But if you coach your children to lift the car from the side, those heavier elements will be in the middle of the car, giving the children a mechanical advantage.

Strongmen use this technique all the time, and this guy seems to think a person could take a Honda Civic off its side wheels if he could half-squat 500 pounds. Now that's still quite a bit, and I don't mean to brag, but I cannot do that.

And I suspect a 500-pound lift will prove out of reach for even the burly children we've selected. It will still probably take 20 of them working together to lift that much, by which point they'll have run out of handholds. So while we're on the right track, some further thinking is required.

3 A Simple Machine

Let's tweak the rules a bit and give the children access to some simple tools. Nothing electric or hydraulic, just simple machines, which, despite their simplicity, can still dramatically increase the lifting ability of even very strong children.

We've already been essentially using a lever by lifting the car from its side. A longer lever could work, but there will be issues finding one strong enough and complications with the fact that the far end of the lever will have to move a great deal and children are so troublingly short.

So what else is there? Well, there's the inclined plane. That's easy enough to construct (children love playing in dirt), but as anyone who's tried pushing a car up even the gentlest of inclines will know, this isn't at all easy. Also, it doesn't really count as lifting, does it?

Really, of all the simple machines, a pulley seems to be the most promising, particularly if used in a block and tackle configuration. Unfortunately, I think a block and tackle can only be purchased in salty maritime environments, and if a grown-up with 30 to 50 children and a bunch of rope is seen in such a place, the sea authorities tend to look pretty closely at what's going on.

So what else is there?

2 A Car Jack

Well, there's always a regular car jack. This isn't much more than a simple machine itself, typically using a simple screw with a gear that turns a rotational force into a lifting force.

Obviously a regular jack can only lift a car a half foot or so, which doesn't really meet one of our guidelines. To lift a car completely over a child's head, you'll need to instruct the children to brace the car at intermediate heights while they remove and then raise the jack.

Note that this is incredibly dangerous, so make sure you do it where no one can see you.

1 All the Small Things

OK, so your poorly designed jack stand (just more children bound together) collapsed, and you're getting a lot of suspicious looks from the people passing by your day care/garage. Still, we're getting close, so let's combine everything we've learned, add a couple more small things, and see if we don't finally reach a tipping point, as it were.

First let's lighten the load as much as possible. Toss out every part of the car not necessary to retain its "carness." Seats, spare tire, upholstery, everything. Ideally it should be just a big lump of bare metal at the end. After that, let's, why not, fill the thing with hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas adds about 1.2 grams of lift per liter, which means filling an entire car with it will make it ... like ... 6 or 7 pounds lighter. Huh. Well, I guess it couldn't hurt.

Secondly, we'll use the principal of aerodynamic lift by buying an aftermarket spoiler and installing it upside down.

Actually, fuck it. Get three or four spoilers on there.

Any forward momentum should cause the car to be fractionally lighter. But how do we get that forward momentum with only child power? Simple! We take our inclined plane, put the car at the top of it, and then get the children to give it a push.

Meanwhile, 10 of our most physically powerful children will be trying to lift the car as it rolls down the ramp. (They'll need to be on skateboards for this.) And, why not, put a couple more kids on skateboards with the jack. Couldn't hurt.

At this point I should caution that there's a chance that this still won't work, and that for a variety of reasons ...

... you probably won't get another chance.

So, just to be absolutely sure you get the car up in the air, have the children put another inclined plane at the bottom of the first one.

Congratulations! You have lifted a car in the air using only child labor! And although you're really going to want to see what happens when it lands, you're probably also going to want to be somewhere else pretty quickly, too.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and the owner of several failed businesses. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.