Made Of Indestructium / Real Life

They call it Tonka Tough for a reason.

Many, many products seem to be (or are) virtually indestructible. There's a good reason for this: in most cases, they have to be capable of withstanding continual usage, especially if they're marketed towards kids who may not have a good grasp on how to take care of their belongings. Of course, there's still a risk of the product breaking, so don't throw your toys off a cliff or run them over with a car — leave their indestructibility to be tested in accidents.

Note: For cases where an electronic device is stated to survive water submersion, unless stated otherwise, it's only in clean, fresh water (like rain or tap water). Saltwater and dirty water do not behave the same way and will corrode the electronics — it might not happen immediately, but it will harm your system.

Examples

Cars

• Pre-2000 Toyota cars and trucks (particularly the Hilux and Land Cruiser models) are well-known for being cheap, relatively easy to maintain, and too damned hard to kill; the fellows from Top Gear infamously tried (and failed) to kill a 1988 Hilux by, among other things, crashing it into a tree, leaving it in the Severn Estuary for a few hours, dropping a caravan on it, driving it through a shed, setting it on fire, and finally, placing it on top of an imploded building. After repairing it with simple tools, the truck still started each time and moved under its own power. Even some of their later trucks and cars are surprisingly durable, to the point where one customer drove his 2007 Tundra for over 1 million miles; the truck was later disassembled and examined by Toyota engineers, who discovered that the engine, frame, and interior had held up remarkably well for their age, with minor-to-no flaws. The downside to this is that they are very popular as improvised infantry vehicles, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
  • In March 2017, Toyota partnered with Tonka to create a life-size Tonka Hilux truck.
  • The 1997 Toyota Corolla also enjoys this reputation; car enthusiasts usually view it as bland, slow and boring, but incredibly cheap and indestructible.
  • Toyota's luxury sub-brand Lexus. They might not be as nice, or as fast, or as high tech as competitors like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi... but they're far more reliable, and because of this they depreciate far less than their German rivals. There's a 1991 Lexus LS 400 with a million miles on the odometer.
• Volvo enjoys a similar reputation, particularly their iconic 200 Series.
• Buick is generally the American equivalent to Japan's Toyota and Europe's Volvo in reputation for sheer reliability, with fellow General Motors marque Oldsmobile having enjoyed a similar reputation before GM consolidated.
  It helps that Buick's V6 engine, later developed into the GM 3800 V6, generally outlasts the cars it's built around and can easily survive over 300,000 miles of wear and tear, and supercharged L67 variants are common engine swap candidates.
  There's even one mechanic story about a GM 3800 surviving a several-mile trip to the shop with no oil pan or filter after a lousy oil change job from a different shop, leaking like a sieve, expecting the worst, and finding that the engine still had no traces of metal particles or shavings despite the lack of oil.
  • Buick also built a V8 engine, which was deemed too small for the US market, so they sold it to Rover Cars in Britain. The engine had a similar reputation to the V6, even if the cars they powered didn't.
• Chrysler's luxury Imperial marque in The '60s built cars bordering on this. They wound up being used to win so many demolition derbies that they were eventually banned from competition. Likewise, Chevrolets (the '57 models in particular) were known for their extreme durability. Many of those are still in pristine condition today, after over fifty years. The old land arks of The '60s and The '70s had the misfortune to be significantly more durable than the fleshy meatbags driving them. This often led to cars that were perfectly drivable after fatal crashes... crashes that killed the occupants precisely because the car's durability led to brutal whiplash upon impact.^note This is why race cars have a device that anchors the driver's helmet to the seat, which is itself anchored to the car's frame The invention of crumple zones made cars much more prone to being totaled in crashes but actually kept the passengers alive.
• The original Volkswagen Beetle had a reputation for being easy to repair and maintain, and was able to take quite a beating. One story often told by Volkswagen, and famously dramatized in an ad, was that a Beetle was discovered by a snow-plowing crew following a major snowstorm, and despite being covered in mounds of snow still started up and was able to be driven away.
• Most Soviet cars have a reputation of being an odd overlap of this and The Alleged Car. They’re slow, ugly, and about as luxurious as a gulag, but in particular the Lada Riva is a car famed for being able to be repaired without even proper tools and famously the bodywork (made mainly of recycled cotton) won’t even dent if it’s hit with a hammer.
• In Australia, early models of Holdens, Ford Falcons and Chrysler Valiants were engineered for driving in the harsh outback conditions.

Computers

• The government can't afford to buy armor when you're in tour in hostile territory? No problem, just make sure you always have your Panasonic Toughbook with you.
• MSX machines made by Yamaha appear to be completely indestructible. It's not unheard of them surviving decades in Soviet high schools with no apparent wear.
• There are military grade computers that can survive being run over, dropped in water, being out in the desert and still work fine afterwards. Some can even be in close proximity to explosions and still be completely functional. Many are fitted with Thermite self-destruct charges as that's pretty much the only reliable way to destroy it without also destroying everything else.
• A couple of illustrative details from ROLM Corp. Mil-Spec: Cooling air INTAKE temp Max was 90 C. Then there was the amusing "300 pound hammer" test.
• Tandem Computers made this their mission. Every single piece of kit in their machines had redundancy. Their computers exceeded five nines of uptime—that's less than five-and-a-half minutes of downtime a year. They even had the ability to upgrade their software without shutting any of it down. When the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, an entire basement full of Tandem Computers suffered blast damage. Just the basement, though: the computers had only fallen over. They were fine.
• The cases of NeXT computers were massive hunks of die-cast magnesium that also doubled as the CPU heat sinks, and they were darned difficult to damage so long as they weren't set on fire — and even that was difficult, as NeXTWorld senior editor Simson Garfinkel found out in 1993 when he tried to set one ablaze for a photo shoot.
• Vintage IBM keyboards up to the Model M are not only coveted for their tactile mechanical key action, but ludicrous durability due to construction around a steel plate and PBT plastics (which are more durable than ABS for keycap texture). Unicomp still produces modern variants of the Model M using the very tooling that IBM sold off decades ago. The kicker? The Model M is actually a cost-reduced version of their Model F and older beam-spring keyboards, the main difference being that the M uses membrane switching instead of contactless capacitive switching for the keys, yet many Model Ms still survive to this day!
  • It's also not unheard of for users to use these IBM keyboards as an Improvised Weapon. As someone once said, the Model M will break you before you break it!
  • It will also break your floor if you drop it.

Data Storage

• Flash Memory is this, compared to other forms of data storage. Kid-friendly toys almost exclusively use it and stories abound of thumb drives being lost in the wash, sat on, dropped in freezing snow, found in desolate areas, etc.
  • Unlike earlier hard drives and magnetic tape storage systems, flash memory doesn't have to worry about losing information from magnets. Any magnet strong enough to disrupt flash memory would be strong enough to pull the iron out of your blood.
• CDs were initially marketed this way. They are incredibly forgiving, being still playable even after suffering all kinds of abuse, thanks to the error correction technology the discs use. There are still two things which can render them unusable, both due to operator error:
  • Excessive amount of scratches due to improper storage, no envelope, leaving them in the player for months and so on, until one quarter of the disc surface is matted out;
  • CD-rot due to improper storage, exposure to variations in temperature, degradation due to light and so on. Infrequently encountered in Real Life in reasonable stored CDs, there are discs recorded in 1995-1996 which are still perfectly readable. Note that this mainly applies to burned CDs, pressed ones (i.e. the kind you buy with music/data already on them) are more or less immune to this particular form of damage.
  • The way optical disks are built is that the underside can be scratched all to hell as long as they aren't deep enough to go to the data side. Otherwise some polishing will fix it and the disk can be read.
• Here's a list of what punishment Panasonic's latest SD cards can take.
• Similar to CDs, vinyl records were marketed as virtually indestructible, compared to shellac records which could shatter.

Guns

• A standard test for Glock firearms: build the prototype, drop it 3 stories (unloaded), pick up gun, load, fire. If it fails to fire, redesign. A similar method was used to test Western Electric telephones. Drop the instrument ten feet onto a concrete floor, and it should still be able to make and receive calls.
  FPSRussia has a Glock torture test video which starts out with the gun frozen in a block of ice, which he gets out by shooting it with another pistol. Then he tries to get all the ice out of the inside by hammering nails into wood with it, shooting it some more, and putting it in a wood stove for several minutes. The Glock was still fine, if a bit stiff. The only thing it didn't survive was having a pound of explosives detonated underneath it. Even then, there were still a couple of usable parts that could be salvaged.
• The AK-47 is memetically tough. In fact, all its good points are due to one aspect; its simplicity. Because it's simple, easy to take apart and clean (if you ever need to anyways) and has large tolerances, nearly any damage it takes is remarkably simple to fix. You could bury one in mud and leave it there for weeks - maybe even years - then come back and dig it up, and with just a little cleaning it'll be firing like new.
• Vickers .303 Machine Gun. When first presented to the British Army, they had to get special dispensation to use it without knowing how much punishment it could take and survive. Because when they ran a test firing run, the test facility ran out of ammunition. After three days. This passage from a history of World War I illustrates the point perfectly:
  The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed, proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100^th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on 24 August 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations, and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men's drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period, the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours, every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.
  • In addition, you could use the heat of the gun to brew tea. Since the Vicker .303 is a water-cooled machine gun, the water needs to be replaced to prevent the barrel from warping. Said water is at a perfect temperature to brew tea.
  • As this Forgotten Weapons video explains, when the British military standardized to 7.62x51mm NATO ammunition around 1963, a large quantity of .303 ammunition became surplus. One armorer training depot used this opportunity to conduct a test on the reliability of the Vickers Gun: one Vickers was taken apart to make sure everything was within tolerance, put back together, then had five million rounds of ammunition fired through it nonstop except for reloading and barrel changes over the course of seven days, then was disassembled again for inspection. All parts were still within tolerance.

Military

• The Russian counterpart of the American M4 Sherman, the T-34 tank. One was used by fleeing Nazis and driven into an Estonian bog, then abandoned. Discovered decades later and found with no corrosion, no leaks, and with a little bit of work (and mopping up the inside), it started. Unfortunately, the ammunition they carried was a different story altogether.
• The Sherman, in ordinary running, damn near never broke down by World War II standards, with an average of 3000 miles between overhauls when most tanks would be lucky to pull 300. Many machines went through the entire war with one major maintenance overhaul. The differences were especially stark when the British ran a comparative test between the Sherman and their homegrown Charioteer and Cromwell tanks: the Shermans, despite lower road speed than the British tanks, regularly beat them during the day's running due to simply not breaking down.
• Battleships were built as tough as they could possibly be while still floating. As a result, they could survive an amazing amount of punishment, with only torpedoes and aircraft-launched munitions (that bypass most of the armour) actually having a chance to take them down quickly... And even then, they could still survive an amount of those that would sink a dozen lesser ships.
  • USS New York survived two atomic bombs! Granted, the crew would have died of radiation exposure, and it was determined too difficult to decontaminate the ship, but she was still afloat and mostly undamaged.
• The Essex-class aircraft carriers had a reputation for being indestructible. However, despite persistent rumors that they were more armored than battleships or even flat out impenetrable, most of their durability comes from their sheer volume diminishing the relative size of any given breach. That, and the USN was absolutely obsessed with Damage Control and the Essexes were in particular designed to function even if very grievously damaged. The follow-on Midway design was even more absurdly hard to sink. Unlike the Essexes, it did feature an armored flight deck like the British (see below) but also featured a thick armored belt and an additional layer of armor under the hangar just in case. The class also featured even more redundant bridges (including an armored conning tower like a battleship) and damage control stations. It’s almost a shame none of the class were actually hit in combat.
• British armored carriers, with their armored flight decks, were indestructible. Though just as vulnerable to torpedoes, they would No-Sell Kamikaze hits and survived bomb damage in the Mediterranean that would have imperiled battleships.
• After the first air raid on Berlin, the Germans constructed huge anti-aircraft towers in Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna, with four-meter-thick walls of reinforced concrete that could withstand any type of ordnance that existed at the time. In addition to several anti-aircraft cannons on top (which could be lowered enough to shoot at ground targets as well), they also included bunkers for thousands of people which were designed to protect even against gas attacks. During the final Battle of Berlin, the Red Army couldn't even make serious dents in them with direct fire from their largest field guns. After the war, attempts were made to demolish them, but it soon became apparent that the huge amount of work required wasn't worth it. Most of them still stand to this day. Many have been repurposed, the Hamburg one being a night club.
  
  The British only managed to destroy one tower, the Zoo flak tower, after several attempts. They first packed the tower with 25 tons of explosives which were detonated before the press. When the dust had cleared they discovered that the tower still stood. One of the witnessing journalists is said to have quipped "Made in Germany" after the explosives failed to take down the tower. They then spent four months drilling over four hundred holes into the concrete which was then packed with 35 tons of dynamite. They were successful that time.

Music

• Multiple companies producing gear for musicians make sure their products are properly constructed. Some examples include Fender showing that their guitars remain in tune even after being treated like they're expendable, or Danish TC Electronic (which produces Effects-Pedals for guitars and basses) doing everything in their power to destroy the pedals before they're painted. And yes, that means everything. This includes storing them over-night in a pressure-tank that could probably create diamonds out of coal, setting them on fire, then freezing them and vice-versa and more... The pedals that are constructed properly get to be painted. The rest are put in another enclosure, and go through the test again. And before they even get this far, they go through multiple professional gear-testers, who all have to vouch for how the Potentiometers and foot-switches "feel" to use.
• Fender guitars are known for laughing off being dropped on the floor from stage height, whereas Gibson headstocks (the part of the guitar that the tuning keys are attached to, also called the peghead) will crack or break off at the slightest provocation.
• The Soviet "Ural" electric guitar is best known for three things: its crappy sound, its enormous weight, and its legendary toughness. To use it as a self-defence implement against groups of hostile gopniks and play it as if nothing happened the next day, without any change in its (admittedly atrocious) sound was the norm in the day.
• The black-colored La Baye 2x4 electric guitar used by Bob Mothersbaugh of Devo for the solo on "Mr. DNA" has had all its strings break off and then be thrown in every imaginable direction (into an amplifier, onto the stage, and in Josh Freese's lap), yet even the headstock breaking is an easy fix. In fact, every guitar used for the solo has been "hurt" (in Bob's words) and always is back in action by the next show.

Phones

• Motorola's RAZR series. Able to survive anything, from dipping (returned to normal functioning after just one day drying) to being thrown from the third floor window — if you're lucky enough not to crack the screen. Metal case certainly helps.
  • More generally, this tends to apply to quite a lot of older phones - you can throw them from the third floor and they'll be fine.
  • The popular StarTAC line from the late 90's, the RAZR's spiritual predecessor, also qualifies. Motorola even stated this in the user manual; the phone would work even after receiving case-deforming hits.
  • A rancher called the cell phone company to report a lost/destroyed phone. He had dropped it in the pasture and heard his cow ringing.
  • There is, however, one exception. The HINGE on the Motorola is a bit troublesome. If it's open, it can be broken with sufficient force. If it's closed, nothing can harm it.
    • This leads to another weakness. If the hinge weakens, something trapped inside can quite easily break the screen by pushing against it.
• Nokia:
  • Nokia 3310 model cell phone. It might be your Childhood Friend for The '90s kids, but this phone takes beating, getting wet, can be used as ice hockey puck and the damn thing still works. It also can be put through a washing machine without any damage at all. If you were to drop it in the sea, you could take the battery and SIM card out and leave them in the airing cupboard overnight, and they'll all work just fine the morning after. A common joke in the early-2010s, at the height of the memes surrounding it's reputation for being indestructible, was that the 3310 could only be destroyed in the fires of Mordor.
  • A member of the crew demolishing the Seattle Kingdome dropped his Nokia 252 from the upper deck onto solid concrete — the only adverse effect was a cracked screen, a common weak spot for even the toughest Nokias, yet the phone still worked fine.
  • There are several stories of police and military personnel being saved because the bullet hit the Nokia phone in their shirt pocket.
  • The Nokia Lumia 920 Smartphone is also remarkably sturdy. In fact, someone once tried to find out just what it would take to make the glass-screen break. A giant hammer? Doesn't scratch it. Nail-gun? Nope. Dropping it from 50 meters above the ground? Nothing. Duct-taping it to a rocket on New Year's Eve and launching it from the top of a 100-meters tall building, aiming it to make sure it'll land on concrete on the ground? Still no scratch to the screen! The phone itself got a few minor scratches from hitting the pavement while on fire from the fireworks but that's all.
  • One Nokia model from circa 3310 era was advertised as sturdy enough to be used to drive nails.
  • Someone decided to try and charge their Nokia phone with 1 million volts, and it still works.
• Western Electric's telephones during the days when the Bell telephone company (which would later be led by WE's owner, AT&T) reigned supreme. One part of the quality control series was to drop the phone ten feet onto a concrete floor, after which it had to make and receive a call (although cosmetic damage could be excused). Part of the reason why these telephones were made to such high standards of durability was because Bell monopolized both the telephone and the telephone line market. They made most of their money from the lines, and so the phones didn't need to come with an expiration date in them to ensure you'd need to buy from them constantly. Once Bell was broken up due to its massive monopoly, the phone manufacturing responsibilities were transferred to companies whose only way of making money was to introduce planned obsolescence into their products. Many of Bell's original phones are still in use today, often with superior sound quality to modern phones.
• Smartphone cases deserve a special mention, as they are designed to not only last for long periods of time under tough conditions but also keep a fragile device safe while doing the same. Some brands take to this ridiculous extremes, one brand literally dropping an iPad with their case from 100,000 ft with no damage to the iPad or case.
  • Though perhaps not the the extreme of the above, Honeywell makes devices built for retail work. They are very rugged, and will survive many a drop.

Toys

• The Tonka Mighty Dump Truck was advertised as being virtually indestructible through the course of normal play, and damned near impossible to break outside of normal play. In one memorable advertisement for the truck, they had an elephant step on it, as seen at the top of this page. The truck was fine. Think about it... an eight-pound toy truck that could hold several tons of elephant foot and not break. This toughness extended (and still extends) to pretty much the entire Tonka brand, regardless of the toy. A British advert depicted a Tonka truck and a real full-size truck being pushed over a cliff - with the full-size truck ending up a crumpled write-off and the Tonka truck still intact.^note This is at least partially an example of the Square-Cube Law in action. Because the toy is so much smaller, it is not crushed by its own weight and actually has a higher strength to weight ratio.
  • According to Hasbro (who now owns the Tonka toyline), there are currently seven people around the world who, because of the Tonka guarantee, receive a lifetime supply of free merchandise because they somehow managed to destroy a Tonka toy through the normal course of play. Whenever a claim is made on the guarantee, Tonka sends out a team of investigators to make sure the toy in question wasn't destroyed intentionally (by detonating it with explosives, for example), or by extraordinary means that don't count as "normal play" (like accidentally running it through a machine press, for example). For Tonka, the Tonka Tough guarantee is Serious Business.
• Fischer Technik construction toys are made from super tough nylon, are either so hard or so flexible they can't be broken, and will usually survive 30 years of play and storage with only minor yellowing.
• LEGO bricks, and by extension its Duplo subbrand. Those things are Nigh-Invulnerable to your average 10-year-old, and when trodden on, will deal significantly more damage to you than you do to it.
  • Thirty-year-old white bricks will yellow slightly, but colored bricks will be indistinguishable from new ones.
  • Also very dog-resistant.
  • The BIONICLE/Hero Factory socket joints are an aversion because they are infamous for shattering with very little effort (especially when lime-coloured). However, the newer Hero Factory sockets beginning from the 2.0 line are pleasingly tough. Also, a lot of the earlier pieces, like those in Slizer and RoboRiders were fairly strong as well, and it wasn't until the designers changed the sockets' outer rim that they became so brittle.
  • Using your teeth to separate two bricks that refuse to come apart is a bad idea. Your teeth will break before the bricks do. That is why you can actually buy these things called Brick Separators. As for taking apart non-traditional pieces (like the early BIONICLE heads)? MOCists have designed several types of separating-constructions for almost every individual case.
  • Turns out a single LEGO brick can withstand 950 pounds of force before breaking.
  • Full-grown adults stepping on them will have no effect on the piece, no matter how small. Indeed, the tiniest square pieces are well known to be usable as substitute Caltrops for their ability to perfectly blend in with carpeting and inflict serious damage to the first bare foot that discovers their hiding spot.
• Fisher-Price Little People and Imaginext toys. Dave Barry once riffed that Fisher Price toys are so tough because they're made of a mysterious plastic-like substance from another planet. Furthermore he sees no reason why we can't make indestructible cars by enlarging Fisher Price toys and adding real engines and seats.
  • The playsets themselves are nearly indestructible as well, even to rambunctious three year olds.
• Most Hot Wheels cars count as well. These small 1:64 scale model cars that typically run for slightly less than $1 USD are deliberately designed to take a beating. No matter how many times you crash them, the most damage they'll receive is a few barely noticeable paint scratches.
• The Takatoku VF-1. By extension, all later VF-1 toys based on the same mold qualify: Matsuhiro VF-1J, Bandai's 1980s VF-1's, Bandai's early 2000s VF-1 reissues, Bandai's late 2000s VF-1 reissues and Jetfire.
• Bandai's mid-1990s Macross 7 1/65 VF-17 and VF-19 releases and their 2001 reissues.
• Tonka's Gobots toys.
• Most of Bandai's Super Sentai and Kamen Rider toys.
• Bandai's vinyl figures of Godzilla, Gamera, and the Ultra Series.
• Quite a few Transformers toys are well known for the fact that they simply refuse to be destroyed, including the 1987-1988 toy releases, which started using tougher, thicker plastic than many of the earlier Diaclone-based toys, and several of the later Beast Wars era toys, where the use of ball and socket joints as well as thick hinges meant that they could survive much tougher play. The main issue for those particular toys tends to be losing small, independent parts rather than damage or destruction of the toy. Other toys, however, are known to break at the drop of a hat, especially the ones that suffer from the dreaded Gold Plastic Syndrome (which fortunately disappeared after 2007).
  • The 1984-1986 releases were often made of diecast metal. Those waves' Optimus Prime and Megatron still have a lot of surviving specimens in decent quality. The Autobot Cars and Decepticon Seekers, as well as Decepticon Triple Changers such as Blitzwing and Astrotrain, are also incredibly sturdy. This can vary, though; the die-cast was tough, but the plastic was low-quality (meaning the die-cast could actively damage it) and the primitive transformations often left parts missing or stressed the aforementioned plastic. And with die-cast metal being phased out in 1986 to lower production costs, this leads to even more issues. G1 toys in some condition are innumerable; G1 toys in good condition are much harder to find. Shockwave is easily the worst offender, as the combination of weak plastics, metal parts, and complex mechanisms means he has a habit of shearing himself to bits.
    • Also lampshaded in Beast Wars when the Ark proves to be nearly impervious to damage, and the assembled Maximals make remarks about it being "die-cast construction".
    Optimus Primal: It's a lost art.
  • The younger-kid-oriented lines, like Fast Action Battlers, Gravity Bots, Cyber Slammers, the Throttlebots from 1987, and anything from Transformers: Go-Bots and Transformers: Rescue Bots are made of thick, solid blocks of plastic that are virtually indestructible.
• Various lines of Thomas & Friends train toys can stand up to a child's railway adventures. The ERTL models were made of the same material as ERTL's steel vehicle models; surviving crashes from a great height with little more than a few scuff marks. The TOMY models are also as durable as you'd expect from a good train model.
  • A typical TOMY model takes a beating: it can be dropped from a vast height, it can be submerged in water, it can be frozen, it can be used as an ice hockey puck and the damn thing still works.
  • The Wooden Railway models are also pretty hardy. Though the paint may chip or fade, the bodies themselves are very hardy, and restoring old Wooden Railway products can be a fun DIY project
• Both the 1987 and 2003 lines of Playmates Toys' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures.
• Tickle Me Elmo. There's an infamous video of one of the TMX models being set on fire. The toy continued giggling and doing its typical motions for several minutes even after the head and half of the body had burnt away.

Video Games

Nintendo's systems (both console and handheld) are famous for this. It's often joked that they are made from "Nintendium". Nintendo has gone on record as saying that, in the case of the Nintendo DS, they would refuse to develop any DS prototype further until it could survive a 1.5 meter or 5 feet drop ten times without any loss in functionality, as mandated by Satoru Iwata himself. A similar philosophy probably went into making the other Nintendo consoles as well.

• The NES:
  • Have you ever tried to destroy any cartridge of the Famicom, the original Japanese version of NES? They have even thicker plastic and are able to shrug off a truck riding over them, unlike the (comparatively) flimsy American cartridges. The console itself is no less tough, although in this case its flat, streamlined shape helped as well. Nintendo cartridges in general survive washing machines just fine. The most that'll happen is the label coming off; dry them and they'll work just like on day one.
  • Nintendo of Japan finally stopped repairing the Famicom in 2008 — 25 years after the system debuted in 1983 — after they ran out of spare parts and couldn't make new ones within a reasonable budget. In other words, they expected the console to last a quarter of a century.
  • The NES Controllers are made tough so that they can handle frustrated NES players. Their long cords could theoretically allow them to be used as makeshift flails.
  • The cartridge batteries. Twenty years later, it still remembers all the save data from back then, even after 15 or more years without being used. And the spiel in the instruction manual for pretty much every game says it should last five.
  • The console has been proven to be so resilient to damage that it's even found its way onto Extreme Championship Wrestling.
  • Averted, however, by the Famicom Disk System add-on, which has been known to have drive belt issues— and since the storage medium was floppy disks, naturally you had to be careful with them so you didn't accidentally erase the data.
• The SNES cartridges are legendarily tough, but the SNES system can take a beating as well. Water dropped in the system? No problem. Accidentally dropped it down a set of stairs? Still works. Run it over with a car by accident while moving? The SNES shrugs it off with ease. There are many reports of SNES units surviving house fires, including one that, along with a Super Mario World cartridge, survived one that destroyed the rest of the house it was in!
• In his design paradigm for the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi decreed that among other things, a good handheld should be durable because it will be carried around a lot. The tales below are testaments to his success:
  • Nintendo's early testing included throwing Game Boys from a three story building.
  • There are many stories of them surviving being thrown from apartment windows, run over by cars, flushed in toilets...
  • There is a Game Boy that survived a bombing in the Gulf War (which is currently the main page image). Now, the original screen was bacon-crispy and had to be replaced, but the circuitry survived. It's still running, playing Tetris, and was housed in Nintendo New York for the world to see for over two decades, before it was removed in 2023.
  • A pair of Something Awful users decided to test whether the old Game Boy cartridges live up to the reputation, using a spare Pokémon Red cartridge ^note Rather appropriately, the chosen methods of damaging the cartridge corresponded to several of the elemental types of Pokémon. Throwing and hitting it didn't even leave a mark. Dirt jammed into it while it's in the Game Boy? No problem. Covering the contacts in alcohol and running magnets over it? Didn't bother it. Dunking it in water finally made it fail to start. So they dried it out by burning the cartridge for several minutes burning a hole into it in the process. Also failed to start. So they waited an hour and came back to it. Presumably, the Nintendium just laughed at them as it started right up, none the worse for wear.
  • In a letter from a 1999 issue of Nintendo Power, one boy had lost his Game Boy Color in the garage, only to find it 3 months later sitting in a puddle of used oil. After carefully disassembling and cleaning it, it was able to work like brand-new, if a bit worse for wear. The editor recommended to all readers to not allow your systems to be submerged in any liquid for safety's sake, but also that this sounded entirely plausible.
    • Another letter from a different owner in a later issue had them claim that they had left their Game Boy Color out in the backyard to be exposed to the elements and the changing seasons for a year. They found it, cleaned it, and managed to boot it up and resume play on their copy of Pokémon Silver, and yes, the save data was still perfectly fine.
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly did an article about the then-new Game Boy Advance, in which the writer and their friends did all manner of abusive things to it, including flushing it down a toilet. After drying out for three days, the white GBA resumed working as though nothing ever happened, earning it the nickname Jesus from the staff.
    • This is referenced in the original video for the Foo Fighters' "Times Like These", in which (at 48 seconds) a girl throws her GBA at the band from the top of a bridge, and it lands a ways from Dave Grohl, unscathed.
    • Its first Product Facelift, the Game Boy Advance SP, has an equally strong reputation for being impossible to destroy, the only weak point being the hinges. Nintendo was apparently using a prime lode of Nintendium for that generation.
  • Unfortunately averted by the cartridges themselves; while the casing is as tough as you'd expect from a Nintendo cartridge, the save batteries have a habit of wearing out after about a decade, meaning that the game is essentially unplayable until the battery is replaced and the save data is most likely lost.
• The Nintendo 64:
  • One person shot a Nintendo 64 at point-blank range. There was a big gap in the casing, but it worked just fine.
  • On an episode of Carlos Mencia's show, Mind of Mencia, a dwarf was smashing old electronics with a large sledgehammer. Everything was smashed to bits in one go, save for a Nintendo 64. It took two strikes before any visible cracks formed in the case, and a third strike before the casing began to dent.
  • One story told that once, a ceiling fell on a Nintendo 64. The only thing that happened to it was that the reset button got stuck. Other than that, it was as good as new.
  • Averted, sadly, with the Nintendo 64 control stick. It was built in such a way that the plastic quickly wore itself down from the rotation (the original Mario Party being a frequent offender), resulting in a loose stick with extreme center play. It's also possible after the stick is sufficiently worn out for it to be accidentally pushed down into the controller, where it gets stuck and can no longer be used at all. On the other hand, it uses optical encoders instead of potentiometers like later Nintendo controllers, which are significantly more durable and precise due to their contactless nature. It's a shame that the mechanical gimbal and pivot assembly can't hold up compared to the sensors.
• The Nintendo GameCube, that goofy purple lunchbox:
  • The top of the disk case is a weak point, but with the open button taped down, the system will survive most anything.
  • One unit was demonstrated to survive being bludgeoned with bats, thrown like a ball, and towed on pavement by a moving car. It still worked.
  • There are also stories of people using a GameCube and controller as an Improvised Weapon in self defense against a knife-wielding street mugger, with no lasting damage to the GCN.
  • In an X-Play segment called "Webb of Destruction", Morgan Webb attempted to destroy a PlayStation 2, an Xbox and a GameCube. She performed three destructive stunts: dropping a weight on each system, hitting each console with a sledgehammer, and dropping each system from a height. After each stunt, the systems were tested to see if they still worked. The GameCube's lid quickly snapped off, but this had no effect on its functionality, and it was the last console to be able to play games, or indeed to start up at all. Take a look.
    • The show references this further when it mentioned the next Death Star will be made of the hardest material known to man: used Game Boy Advances.
• The Nintendo DS:
  • The DS has a slightly less reputable history, most especially the DS Lite, which was prone to hinge problems. The joint just below the R button can weaken and snap very easily, leaving a broken R button (which most games use as a major button) or a free swinging topscreen. Then, it only takes one clumsy drop just right for the screen to snap out of the right side and the wires on the left to be strained enough to render the topscreen almost unusable. All editions of the DS were prone to the L and R buttons occasionally going haywire. By the time of the XL, these had mostly been rectified, which carried over to the 3DS.
  • GB, GBA, and DS cartridges have all gone through their share of washers and driers and continued working without an issue. In many cases even the cartridge labels are still intact.
  • As detailed in one installment of Iwata Asks, the DS game Walk with me! Do you know your walking routine? (Personal Trainer: Walking in North America) came packaged with a pedometer called the Activity Meter. Tsunekaz Ishihara lost his while walking his dog, only to find it a month later, covered in mud and submerged in a puddle. Of course, it still worked perfectly.
  • It's been demonstrated that even if the upper screen is removed entirely, the DS is still a perfectly functional Game Boy Advance.
  • Another DS was known to have survived a trip up Mount Everest, up to altitudes that caused other electronic equipment to stop working.
• The Wii:
  • The Wii Remote originally had a rather weak wrist strap, which led to a number of Remotes getting embedded in walls or TVs. Nintendo quickly updated its production with sturdier straps, but not for the Wiimote's protection: for the protection of everything else! Notice that in all those humorous pictures of embedded remotes, it is always the wall or TV that is damaged, not the remote. Later models of the Wiimote come with a rubber sleeve that is perhaps best described as a bumper.^note The amount of TV damage is probably not helped by the console launch happening around the same time easily ruined flatscreen TVs started overtaking CRTs, which were covered in glass that may as well have been bulletproof.
  • Referenced in Pokémon Black and White. After the first battle, your room looks like a tornado just hit it, but if you examine the Wii, you'll find that there's not even a scratch on it.
• The Wii U, despite being a commercial failure, is also Tonka Tough as well. This video demonstrates the durability of the Wii U gamepad by dropping it from various angles. The end result: Nintendo still has it.
• The Nintendo 3DS:
  • Your 3DS fell out of your pocket and slammed right on a concrete sidewalk? No problem! You will need to inspect your 3DS for a good minute before you locate the tiny dent of the direct impact point. You will not even lose data if it was on standby because it will have shrugged off the fall without even turning off. You may have damaged the sidewalk, though, but that's the city's problem.
  • And it has been tested that a Nintendo 3DS can survive, with no damage, being kept in the left jacket pocket of the coat of a driver that hits a stationary vehicle at 35 miles per hour. However, the PlayStation Portable can as well.
  • A 3DS was set on fire and then extinguished with water. It still runs.
  • A NeoGAF thread details the story of a user whose 3DS went through a laundry machine and survived practically unscratched after few days of letting it dry inside a bag of rice.
• The Nintendo Switch:
  • One YouTube channel did a drop from 1000 feet in the air. Thanks to the left Joy-Con taking the brunt of the landing impact, the main unit managed to survive.
  • While the complaints of screen scratches on the Switch may dent Nintendo's reputation for durability, it should be noted that making the screen digitizer surface out of plastic instead of glass makes it effectively shatter-proof. Adding a tempered glass screen protector easily handles scratch resistance while not interfering with the dock, not to mention that you can easily peel it off and replace it with another if it does crack. Now go out and see how many people use smartphones with cracked screens because they couldn't afford the repairs, and you can thank Nintendo for making a practical portable device that can survive a drop.
  • A Nintendo Switch managed to still function to the point a triangle-shaped hole was fully cut through it.
  • However, one area that the toughness does not extend to is the joysticks on the Joy-Cons, which have been known to suffer from drift — even the Switch Lite apparently suffers from this, and there was a class-action lawsuit over the issue.
• amiibo are seemingly indestructible as well. When ScrewAttack did an amiibo cockfight (amiibos fight each other in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, and the loser forfeits their amiibo to be destroyed), two of the items used to destroy them (a sledgehammer and a blender) actually broke while trying to destroy one. Other testers have reported the amiibos surviving prolonged submersion, oven temperatures, and being run over by a car. IGN also reported a Kirby amiibo being immune to anything short of "pliers, a hacksaw and a lot of willpower".
• An impersonator of Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime explains - in a manner that suggests that he can't decide if he's Billy Mays or the Power Thirst announcer - the hard work and dedication that goes into making Nintendo products so durable in this video.
• Nintendo Power once did a special where they published reader-submitted stories of Nintendo games, systems, and peripherals going through all manners of abuse and surviving anyway.
  • Arguably the best story in that section came from a Hawaiian reader, who'd had his original Game Boy half-melted by close-range exposure to lava. The buttons and control pad were slagged, but the machine would still turn on and the speakers still worked.
• The durability of Nintendo consoles is referenced in the Neptunia series, a video game series featuring Moe Anthropomorphism of video game consoles and companies. The character Blanc, who is meant to represent Nintendo home consoles, has the highest defensive stats of any playable character; her younger sisters, Rom and Ram (who collectively represent the DS family of systems), are not so durable, possibly as a reference to the more fragile nature of the original DS and DS Lite.
• This doesn't just apply to Nintendo. Atari 2600 cartridges are also incredibly durable, to the point of being submerged in a lake long enough for the label to be demolished (making identification of the game impossible), fished out sometime in the mid 90's, and still remaining perfectly playable.
  In 2014, Microsoft excavated the legendary E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges crushed then buried in the New Mexico desert back in 1983 for the documentary Atari: Game Over. They still play.

Miscellaneous

• Timex watches, especially those manufactured in the 40s, 50, and 60s, were advertised as being nearly impossible to break, and they were. In one memorable commercial, they strapped a Timex watch to a boat's propeller and took it out for a spin in a swimming pool. Sure, the watch's band separated after about 10 minutes, but the watch itself kept running as if it had spent a peaceful day in a dresser drawer. Their slogan wasn't "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" for nothing.
• Hats made by Tilley Endurables are exactly what the company name implies. One of their favorite stories to tell is about a zookeeper whose Tilley hat was eaten by an elephant. Three times. He just waited for it to come out the other end, washed it, and kept using it.
• Lawn-Boy lawnmowers are renowned among hobbyists for their durability, particularly models with two-cycle engines. There are plenty of decades-old examples that still run like they're brand new, and it usually takes very little effort to restore a non-running mower to working order.
• The ZERO Halliburton metal briefcases. Originally designed to survive trips through rough Texas oil fields, they're dustproof, waterproof, shockproof, and fire resistant. It won't stop a bullet but it can stop pretty much everything else. If a Halliburton case is good enough for the Nuclear Football, it's good enough for whatever crap you're carrying around.
• The products from Williams Electronics are not as tough as any of the other objects on this list, but they were able to create the illusion of such: Williams had a patent (and, unlike most of their other ones, they still own it) in which if a mechanical part broke down, other mechanical parts' duties are redistributed such that it would appear the machine was still working fine. This was particularly handy with their pinball machines: Parts break down frequently, and Williams got an edge over its competitors due to this principle's sheer lastability, allowing operators to continue to make money for years, even decades, after their machines had come out, with little to no maintenance. This trait would come back to bite them hard: By The '90s, there were so many still-working Williams pinball machines in existence that Williams had trouble selling to operators, as most were already satisfied with what they had. The model simply could not function under the shrinking arcade presence in the west either, and Williams had to leave the market in 1999. Williams's system is still in use in their gambling machines, however—learning their lesson with pinball, Williams instead rents out its slot machines and video poker machines so they could continue to make money for as long as the machines remained in working condition.
• Numatic's "Henry" series of vacuum cleaners are reputed to be incredibly tough and to have extreme longevity; the company themselves brag about Henrys lasting decades in use, claiming "11 million made and most still in use today", and the independent Which? magazine ranks them as amongst the most reliable, if not the most reliable. ^note The reasons for this are simple: 1. Many Henrys are built for and used in commercial premises like hotels and restaurants, so they need to be built to withstand daily usage and being carted around everywhere; 2. Henrys are built to such simple designs with so few mechanical parts - more or less just a motor connected to a hose with a bag on the end - that there is very little that can actually go wrong with them; 3. The human name and presence of a cheerful smiling face on most models makes people instinctively less likely to mistreat them - it's not just "the hoover", it's "Henry".
• The classic Zippo lighter's basic design hasn't changed in almost eighty years, and it hasn't had to. Sure, torch-style butane lighters may look nifty, but leave one of those babies in your jacket and spin it through the wash or bounce it off a concrete floor and you'll have a nifty-looking paperweight. Zippo? Still works like new. The only thing the company won't guarantee is the finish, but they're so confident in the lighter's construction that everything else is covered by a perpetual warranty, regardless of how many owners it's had or what caused the damage.
• It's become a Dead Horse Trope joke that if airliners were made out of the same thing flight recorders are made out of, they'd survive crashes. Of course, this isn't really true, but people still think of them as being impossible to destroy. They're just steel: their strength is from their compact design more than material, and they're tucked away at the back where they're unlikely to take the brunt of a crash. Further, they often are found heavily, heavily damaged and require significant work to make them functional enough to get the recordings out of. All that needs to survive is the tapes, and even those are often damaged and valuable data is lost.
• Design requirements for nuclear waste containers are impressive. They must survive a derailed train running into them and many other extreme scenarios. Good thing too, given that this is cancer in a box. However, they may not survive extremely high-temperature fires. Let's hope they are wrong about this. One thing they can't survive is time. The best designs might last 10,000 years if kept in a perfect environment, but that isn't even halfway through the first half-life of most of the forms of waste they hold. In that regard, another design goal is to be able to keep away people of centuries or thousands of years in the future if the memory of those sites, and especially what's stored on them, is lost to the ages -by the use of symbols, the design of the surroundings of said sites, designing legends about the evil lurking there, etc-. Given human curiosity, cultural changes, and how said legends could either change or be replaced by others developed around said places in the interim (if there were humans still around, that is) is quite a challenge.
  Flasks designed to carry used nuclear fuel for reprocessing are most definitely made of indestructium.
  Western nuclear reactors are clearly intended to be as close to this trope as humanly possible. For example, they are designed to be able to survive someone flying an airliner into them.
  One reason for this is that most Western nuclear reactors are water-cooled, for which the water must be in its liquid phase, but the coldest temperature a reactor can feasibly generate electricity at is 300 degrees Celsius. That water is pressurized. Heavily.
• Nerf foam is impervious to nearly all blunt attacks, and can't even be torn apart by hand, so it's really only vulnerable to some sort of cutting technique. And fire.
• For most of human history, diamond has been effectively indestructible under the cutting tools available. No wonder that one of its oldest names, adamant, is the root for the names of some of fiction's most indestructible metals. On the other hand, that's a measure of its hardness, or the difficulty of scratching it. It's much easier to destroy through blunt impact, being fairly brittle.
• A company called Pelican makes padded and very sturdy containers for various uses. One of their ads tells how a US Special Forces team in Iraq blew up a damaged helicopter to keep its contents from falling into enemy hands. They used two Maverick missiles, which can be tank-killers. A few days later, the team went back to the helicopter and found their Pelican-made case intact with only minor burns and a broken latch. Its contents (lots of sensitive electronics and a block of C-4 explosive) were unharmed. The ad sums up: "Frankly, we don't want to know what it would take." Also, Pelican's slogan is apparently, "You break it, we replace it... forever." To drive that point home further, a similar incident involving a U.S. Federal Agent finding a Pelican brand crate from a car destroyed by a direct blast from an Improvised Explosive Device. Not as much as a scratch was found on the case considering the circumstances. At one point, the warranty said it covered all perils save for "shark bite, bear attack, or children under 5."
• Sheer Tex creates tights that are designed to last without snagging, ripping or running, and many can even survive being stabbed. Downplayed, as they can be damaged by a machete.
• Apple achieved indestructibility with the iPod Touch. People have even shot them at point-blank, and the screen worked everywhere except for the bullet hole. And maybe even there.
• Those plastic sheaths that most small electronics are packaged in nowadays might as well be forcefields. Hope you have an acetylene torch handy next time you need a USB key!^note Or a can opener. Whichever is closer. They're referred to as "clam shells" due to the general design: plastic mold folds shut like a clam shell, then is sealed tight. They also sell "openers" for these hellish devices, which are effectively razor or exact-o blades in a safe holder. These products are often packaged in a clam shell. That's why a lot of electronics can now be bought on Amazon in "frustration-free packaging", which stands for "normal boxes".
• GoPro cameras are designed with intense physical activity and conditions in mind, but sometimes they survive conditions that most wouldn't expect: There are several examples of cameras falling off of skydivers during freefall, surviving the landing, and continuing to film the whole time. One GoPro survived being covered in lava and, while somewhat damaged, still managed to record all the way through.
  • In another instance, a GoPro survived being dropped out of a plane, landing in a pig pen, then having a pig come along and try to eat it recording the whole time! Watch it here!
• NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft sent to study our daystar from very close, is protected by a reinforced carbon–carbon shield able to withstand the 1,370 °C (2,500 °F) at perihelion. It's expected that once the probe runs out of fuel and is unable to point it to the Sun the former will be vaporized by the intense heat leaving little more than said shield, that will happily keep orbiting the Sun as if nothing had happened.

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