Jumping Shoes

Welcome to the weirdest wearables project I've ever worked on. I was approached by a TikTok star named Tyler Csatari who wanted help inventing something to let him jump higher than humanly possible. The result was a pair of steel-toe boots with air-powered pistons that can push you off the ground with a combined force of over 1400 pounds.

Here's the story of how we did that while keeping a close eye on safety.

• [Quantity 1] Air Tank: 2 gallon spun aluminum tank
• [Quantity 4] Piston: 1.5 inch bore, 8 inch stroke
• [Quantity 4] Solenoid Valve: High-flow valve with 3/8" inlets/outlets
• [Quantity 1] Safety Harness

Before you apply large amounts of force to any part of a human being, you really need to be careful to make sure you don't cause injury. Luckily we have research journals like the Journal of Sports Science Medicine which publish research studies about just this topic.

For the jumping shoes project I read this research paper where they measured the reaction forces in the feet of professional athletes doing a standing jump. The athletes in that study absorbed forces equal up to 17 times their body weight, which for a 150 pound person would be over 2500 pounds! However I don't want to get anywhere near that much force, even for a brief amount of time. I set as a design goal to hit an absolute maximum of around half that value. From there I calculated that four 1.5 inch bore pistons with an 8 inch stroke would be a good choice for the prototype, and to ensure safety we would start at low pressures and work our way up from there as we gained confidence in the safety of the system.

Humans were not designed so that accessories could be easily attached. When designing wearables, I find it's best to start with an existing garment and modify it. In this case I chose very rugged shoes that had steel protecting the toes and soles. I used a bandsaw to cut off some of the tread and attached a custom-welded steel bracket to attach the pistons to.

In order to push air into the pistons, you need an air tank and valves. I mounted these to a lightweight aluminum plate and attached that to a safety harness - again, using an existing garment as the base to mount things to. We needed a trigger button to activate the pistons, and for this I used a broken hand drill where I've removed the motor and kept the trigger switch as a convenient way to add an ergonomic hand-held switch.

We started by filling the tank with around 10 PSI just to ensure there were no leaks and that everything functioned as expected. Then we started filling the tank with more and more pressure as we did further testing and became confident that the device was operating safely. Ultimately Tyler was able to jump over 4 feet high, which is much more height than he can normally jump to. I have some improvements in mind that should be able to take these shoes over 6 feet, which would be higher than a world record.

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