Steam from the steamed thermite... which you call pebbles, despite the fact that they're obviously cookies. Well skinner, you're a strange fellow, but you steam a good thermite.
Maybe swapping the salt solution with PVA glue heavily diluted in water would work better? Not sure if you want a faster burning mixture, but you could also try adding the thermite to rocket candy...melt that together with excess thermite, and you'll have a very angry incendiary!
I was considering perchlorate to make an impact sensitive brickette that could be flung or lobbed like the self lighting molotov. Think angry thermite frisbee that could be chucked in front of something or onto it and cause a splash of fire hot enough to burn through stuff.
Sand works for thermite. It's silicon dioxide, and at the temperature thermite burns, it's an oxidizer. Adding sand helps control the rate at which thermite burns.
@@useazebra Someone else said silicon (IV) oxide was an oxidizer. You just made the connection in my head that that's another name for quartz. Now I need sand thermite.
Just don't drop the result on water. This thermite makes aluminium sulphate, wich in water generates aluminium hidroxide and hydrogen sulphide, aka extremely toxic gas.
I once used re-loading powder and acetone to make a thick goo. Said goo was mixed with copper thermite to make a paste. Paste was formed into a sheet, sheet cut into little cubes...about 3/8" square. Once the cubes had dried (two weeks), I tried lighting one. It zipped around the room for a second, then exploded with a loud bang! Every cube did the same trick: the nitrocellulose burned first, providing propulsion. Once the nitro had burned off, the thermite exploded. BTW, copper thermite burns like flash-powder...the slightest confinement = Boom. Nice blue-green flash, orange smoke.
Save your money and dissolve a ping pong ball in acetone. Pongs are made of nitrocellulose. You beat me on the suggestion. Was going to say the same and it waterproofs the thermite. Opens the door to more experiments. ✌️
Also.. the Fe2O3 will convert to Fe3O4 in warm water. The salt is supposed to stop that reaction. Baking the thermite at 450F will also stop the reaction and reverse it. So the air dried thermite was contaminated with magnetite and the baked thermite remained pure. I did a lot of thermite experiments back in the day ... have you tried crushed quartz instead of iron oxide yet??
@@robertkerr4199 No, but I really want to. A couple other commenters mentioned silicon oxide (by various names) and I was hoping that maybe I can "isolate" some silicon metal that way.
My guess as to why the air dry was less aggressive is due to not being completely dry and the water content that was still in it was enough to slow it down but not stop the reaction. I would suggest trying some as the wet paste to see how or if it reacts and can get 1 more plot on reaction to see if water is the factor in slowing it down.
@@FreedomOfDegree Its easier then you think, couple drops of high concentration sulfric acid and wet themite lights super faster. Its also a safer trigger than a torch
@@FreedomOfDegreeOnce wet or damp thermite actually gets going, the sudden rise in temperature is going to convert all the water into steam very quickly. Be prepared for the possibility of burning thermite getting thrown about by the steam.
@@FreedomOfDegree basically every other thermite I’ve seen has to be lit with a magnesium strip or something because torches don’t get hot enough to start the reaction
Oh yeah... ok, so not to burst anyone's bubble, but I had this same idea like 2 years ago. I just thought _"huh, a powder is inconvenient, you need a container to hold it, and if you light it with a torch, it blows half of it away before it even ignites... how about I add some water and make a paste that I can wad up and put wherever I want, then just let it dry and burn it like usual!"_ then I corrected it slightly _"well, maybe not water since it reacts with the aluminum powder, so lets use alcohol or acetone instead (or any other mild organic/nonpolar solvent really) to make the paste so it evaporates faster and doesn't consume the aluminum as much."_ and ta-da, the invention was finished, and it works great, you can even ignite the paste once you have it where you want it, and the solvent burns off in just a few minutes. its really handy! and you can store it like this for a very long time, since it protects the aluminum powder from oxygen. just keep it in a sealed container. also, as a tip, the finer the powder you use (aluminum and iron oxide) the better it holds as a paste. the coarser stuff tends to crumble and fall apart if you bump it. You would think you would need something like salt dissolved in the water to stick the stuff together once it dries, but I've found that even a dry powder that is insoluble in water will, after adding water (even distilled!) will stick together, seemingly with "magic". I don't know why, but it works.
My suspicion about the air dry being slower is it seemed to have more cracking throughout it, meaning there's probably a lot of voids where there's reduced internal thermal conductivity and heat has to travel through radiation rather than conduction.
Hey this is a really cool vid, love it, hope to see more stuff like this in the future. One little side note, you are probable already know this but when aluminum powder mixes with water and salt it can have a tendency to heat up and combust. This is very rare especially when you are using course aluminum powder but it does happen and has happened to me before. This is a very easy way to remedy this and that is by adding 1-2 percent boric acid as a stabilizer. Anyway great vid.
@@Dukers2300 Black power is always hype. Though I've heard that when you buy moderate amounts of potassium nitrate (like for farming) you get put on a list.
@FreedomOfDegree Potassium Nitrate? It's a food additive for making hot dogs/sausage & bacon. You're probably thinking of Ammonium Nitrate prills. That got a lot more attention after OKC. Mix those with 5% fine 300-400 mesh Al powder, and you get Ammonal, aka: "Tannerite" shooting targets. Mix AN with diesel or nitromethane, you get ANFO like in quarry & coal mining etc. KNO3 is "regulated" a little bit though. If you go into any big box hardware/home-improvement store, you may notice that the Spectracide KNO3 Stump-Remover (it oxegenates deeper into the wood for areobic bacteria & fungi to break the cellulose & lignin down faster) is now gone from the shelves. Because it was the main off the shelf source of KNO3, and subsequently, kids losing fingers to BP, or causing fire damage to Mom's kitchen from KNO3 & sugar smoke bomb & rocket mixes. But it'll never be bannable, as you can just filter it from rich black dirt & water, or just save a bunch of your urine in a bucket and let it evaporate & crystalize... 😊
Calcium sulfate has a thermite-like reaction with aluminium. I've used aluminium + plaster of paris by itself to make castable thermite before. It burns bright and vigorously but doesn't have the destructive power of iron thermite. Perhaps plaster would be a good binder for iron thermite. I see others have suggested silica, I tried that as well but found it nearly impossible to ignite without adding a huge amount of sulfur, and rather slow burning anyway.
If you put the Hate Paste into an icing bag you could extrude it into shapes or use it as an applicator to precisely bond it to specific spots. I also like LabCoatz' idea of adding PVA glue to act as a binder so it adheres to itself (and maybe other surfaces) better.
@@FreedomOfDegree second idea: make it more watery and you can cast thermite into shapes. You could also add something to slow the reaction and cast it so that can be attached to a string/chain and do like how you can swing around lit steel wool to throw sparks, but instead of just throwing sparks, you're throwing slag (that is also sparking).
@@mbterabytesjc2036 I don't think thermite explodes hard enough, it kinda just get's hot. In an ideal thermite reaction, 2Al + Fe2O3 => Al2O3 + 2Fe The oxygen is simply transferred from the iron to the aluminum. No gas is released, but a whole heck of a lot of energy in the form of heat.
@@FreedomOfDegreenow I wonder if one could make chips of one kind of thermite(something exotic, say vanadium?), bake them, mix up a second larger batch of “dough”(of, say, Fe Al) and carefully mix the chips in before baking….and what that would do.
So there are some realy cool combinations Fuels: Oxidizers: aluminium, bismuth(III) oxide magnesium, boron(III) oxide titanium, silicon(IV) oxide zinc, chromium(III) oxide silicon. manganese(IV) oxide boron. iron(III) oxide iron(II,III) oxide copper(II) oxide lead(II,IV) oxide Aluminium being common due to high boiling point and low cost.
@@InternetUser-lj7um a lot of the fuels seem like they will also burn in air. Probably would have a much more energetic reaction. I wish I knew more about chem. This definitely has something to do with reactivity, but I don't know it. Might be able to do one thermite reaction, then with the byproducts of it, do a second one. *edit: do a second one by adding another fuel.
@@FreedomOfDegreechip cookies here we come! That’s what I was getting at in my above response-having chips of a second more exotic thermite that will be set off by the initial cookie.
@@FreedomOfDegreeI hope you are familiar with @TheGayestPersononRU-vid ? They go over many fun exotics. I can only hope you make exotic cookies in the future…
Take a page out of Jack Parsons' book about the binder. If you want it to hold together, use something like rubber. Bondo might even work... it is, after all, designed to cover over damaged aluminum and hide iron oxide, so it'll stick. Just be upwind when you light it off.
Guessing the forced heat of the convection oven caused uneven drying rates and led to small fractures or separations in the substrate. More even drying through ambient temperature evaporation could lead to better cohesion and may still be retaining moisture.
When you crushed it you could tell there was still moisture in there. You basically have made clay. Makes me wonder if you can fire it. Thermite doesn't go off that easily. Still, there is basically no one who would welcome that into their kiln. There are other methods. I wonder if the more solid you get it if it goes faster. That's why actually firing it might be interesting. I also wonder what the grain size distribution of your powder is. You could process it like clay to make it more clay like. (classic methods for turning clayish dirt into proper clay by basically selecting for a grain size).
@@JasonMitchellofcompsci It didn't dry quite like clay though. It was much less strong. I also started with some pretty fine particles, it's just what I had on hand, and maybe other sizes would work better.
Dude, just look into Thermite made from aluminum and Plaster of Paris. A rate of 1:1 by volume, you can use it as powder or cast ist like normal plaster of paris. Cast it in an aluminum U-Channel and let it dry. Then dry it at 110°C in an oven to get rid of the christaline water in the Plaster. make a small hole in the open side of the Channel, stick in two sparkers and place the charge open side down on your metal sheet and you get a nice line charge of thermite that smells like rotten eggs when it burns
I wonder if adding bentonite clay powder (a.k.a crushed cat litter) to the paste mix would help bind things together? (an also act as a phlegmatizer to calm down the reaction rate).
What is the variable in regards to temperature? Slower burning allows for more effect when cutting thick metals. It may also provide a way to heat etch metals based on the amount applied.
@@chewbitwing1844 Well, assuming a complete reaction, the amount of energy released is constant. If we have a fast reaction the energy doesn't have time to dissipate and the temperature locally would be higher. Similarly we can insulate the reaction and achieve a similar temperature with a slower reaction.
Great science toaster! 😂 Great video! A mate of mine just moved and gave me a bottle of both iron oxide and aluminium for thermite and I was wondering what I could do with it. I now know! Thanks. I'll sub too, see what else you come up with
Water might form aluminum hydroxide and reduce the effectiveness of the thermite balls, maybe try pressing them with a binder or a different solvent that won't react with aluminum.
@@eve_squared I was banking on the aluminum forming that passivation layer, but my aluminum is a very fine powder. I did consider pressing them, but I don't know if at some pressure they might spontaneously ignite. Could be an interesting thing to test.
@@FreedomOfDegree if you did try pressing them maybe just damping the mixture with something oily like kerosene may help form them and maybe also prevent some auto-ignition. Otherwise I was thinking a powdered binder of sorts might help. Zinc Stearate might work, though I haven't personally used it.
_Death turds_ ? *P.S.:* I hope you are wearing polarizing sunglasses when you do this. Burning thermite strongly emits in the ultraviolet, and being without protection is like looking directly into the Sun, except that your eyes will not feel “hurt“... until they _are,_ and perhaps permanently.
What you could do with this method of "hard Thermite" is make a funnel/cone shape so the burning Thermite & molten Aluminum oxide runs out the tip of the "funnel" and keeps exposing more to combust. If you look at most industrial use of Thermite, (like train track welding) there's always a funnel or a mold of refractory material to concentrate it and direct it where its wanted. I mean, if it was "Red Dawn" and you were surreptitiously placing a soup can of Thermite, made laboriusly from ground up Pepsi cans & rust scraped off the chassis of the old 1970s Ford-F150 on blocks in the back yard... And you risked the Drive-In movie theater prison camp, and a firing squad to do it. Or, Lea Thompson or Jennifer Grey had to flash their boobs at the Spetsnaz & Hungarians... (and you couldn't even look because you were doing the low crawl...) To actually get that soup can on the deck of a Soviet BMP or T-72, one they somehow managed to drag ALL THE WAY INTO COLORADO for battle & occupying your town... You REALLY want that Thermite to "drill in" and not just make a flat blob on the surface. So the hard mixes baked into useful shapes has potential.
I have to say, I am kind of interested in seeing that paste form in action. I don't know if it would work at all due to the amount of liquid in it, but it's worth a shot!
Okay, I was under the impression that you needed a higher ignition temperature than you can get out of a propane torch. I always see people using magnesium strips to get thermite to catch. Is it the salt? That doesn’t make sense. Is there some other contaminant in your aluminum or iron oxide?
@@ozzymandius666 A couple others were saying the same thing. I'm not sure thermite is the best choice because in an ideal thermite reaction, no gas is produced. Secondly, I don't know the calculus required to figure out how to pick the right shape. But if someone more experienced than I were to figure it out, I'd be super excited to see it.
@@FreedomOfDegree : Interesting. I would never have guessed that drying it out would affect its properties so dramatically. Good discovery! (Edit) Oh, one more question😬. Do you recall the mesh size of the Al powder?
@@FreedomOfDegree : I’m not sure what the 5u designates. It could be the vendor’s shorthand for the aluminum powder’s particle/mesh size (a common size for aluminum powder used in thermite is 1-5 microns and the abbreviation for microns is μm), but the 5u could also have some other significance, or it could be unrelated to the jar’s contents…who knows. Most of the thermite recipes I’ve seen call for a 1/3 ratio of aluminum to iron oxide, so perhaps that’s why yours seems to burn so fast? I’m not saying you’re doing it wrong by any means though. Your mix is awesome. I find your drying process an especially interesting approach. Videos like yours experimenting with chemistry are some of the most entertaining videos left on RU-vid. Please be careful though. No amount of views are worth hurting yourself over.
@@______IV I'm used to cooking by volume, so I worked out that 1:3 by mass is about 1:1 by volume. I do try to be "safe enough." I only mixed up as much thermite as I needed. I also made sure that it was a small enough amount that if it did go off, it wouldn't be too bad. I basically never take off safety glasses when I'm working with tools or things that might suddenly assault my eyes.
You realize that you are basically making stars for pyrotechnics right. Changing the chemical comp one way or another results in different colors...You just reinvented gunpowder, congrats lol.
Fe203 and Al should be two to one, not 50/50. Ive messed with a ton of thermite and true fe203/al thermite made correctly doesn't light that easy.. Your mix is off.
@@SnareX it was my real reaction. I made a honest mistake putting the extras so close to the reaction and it caught me off guard, as well as the thermite burning so fast and hot which I also didn't expect.
What about using isopropyl alcohol instead of water? That will evaporate and dry out quicker, no? Also use something like a 6 ton hydraulic press to compact them!
