Tutorials/Headless pistons

This tutorial seeks to teach you how you can get a piston without a head in Vanilla Survival and what strange things you can do with one.

How to Take the Head Off a Piston
An extended piston is composed of three blocks: the piston base, the piston head, and the piston arm that does not have a hit box and yet is completely solid. Removing the head involves carefully manipulated explosions and perfect timing.

In order to remove the head, the player must set up a mechanism in which the piston extends at exactly the same time an explosion occurs. The power of the explosion must also be manipulated, which can be done using other blocks between the explosion and the piston, such as cobblestone walls.

Once the piston is headless, powering it will ensure that it stays headless. As soon as it is not powered, it will retract, gain its head back, and it's when the weird things can happen.

Uses
The best use of a headless piston is to destroy blocks, including bedrock. When a headless sticky piston gains its head back, it acts like any normal sticky piston: it retracts the block two blocks in front of it. In order to retract, it must have a piston head, so it briefly show an extended piston head before retracting.

A property only found in headless pistons is that if there is a block where the head would be, the block is destroyed and replaced with the piston head and the piston arm blocks.

This technique can even be used to break bedrock or other immovable blocks. First, get a headless sticky piston facing the block that you want to remove, and directly next to it. Next, place any movable block on the other side of the bedrock. Finally, de-power the piston and watch the magic happen: the block on the other side replaces the bedrock and the headless piston gets its head back.