Inspired by this thread of mine Can I create a Frag Disk? , I have to ask this question.
Can I create thermite? Is it legal to do so? If it is, how can I do it? Could I buy it? Do I need a license to handle it? What is a magnesium thread and why would I ned it?
Sure, all you need is some finely ground rust, and aluminum powder. Recipes are easy to come by.
If you lack a good source of rust, manganese oxide will work too.
If you start setting the stuff off in your back yard, you’ll likely get a visit from the local PD, who will wonder wtf you’re up to.
My chemistry teacher created thermite at A-level chemistry. You need some rust, some aluminium and a method of igniting it (the magnesium ribbon).
See here.
An old friend of mine, now dead, proudly told me of torching a go-fast car with a home-made thermite bomb. The device burned through the hood and the engine, all the way to a hole in the street. It’s a self-oxygenating process, and there’s no way to stop it once it gets going. He implied that he was paid for the job, but I don’t know the details.
There was a story I heard at MIT that, back in the days when a trolley ran up Mass Ave across the Harvard Bridge, past MIT toward Central and Harvard Square, some MIT students rushed out as the trolley stopped to discharge passengers, set off thermite charges, and welded it to the track. Sounds 'way too good to be true, but I’ve never tried to see if there’s any record of this.
Oh, yerah, and dont use thermite to try to free alien spacecrafty frozen in Arctic or Antarctic ice. Too much chance of doing irreparable damage.
For your YouTube viewing pleasure – Thermite Vs. Car and Thermite vs Liquid Nitrogen.
Certainly is plausible, seeing as thermite is what they use to weld sections of rail together, and MIT students have a long history of doing seriously wacky things.
Some googling, and it appears that some MIT students did weld a parked Green Line trolley to the tracks at night, somewhere in the 50’s.
I heard that it was just once, but about 10 years later, and for less than a half an hour.
My dad and my sister both went to MIT and indulged in their fair share of hacks. There’s a book documenting the famous ones and they mention the “trolley car welded to tracks” story. After a lot of digging they pretty much call “urban legend” on that one - everybody has heard of it, nobody has any actual evidence.
I smell a Mythbusters segment.
Paging Q.E.D.
I remember that same story, but the lack of documentation is suspicious. But now that we have the Internets, we can check easily, only to find this:
Classic UL description.
I’d like to do some lost wax casting; can I use thermite to smelt the metal?
A ‘trolley car welded to the tracks’ story could easily evolve from eyewitness accounts of Railroad torpedo explosions.
One of the byproducts of thermite is a stream of white-hot molten iron, is that what you mean?
Back when I was a civil engineer one of my fellow grad students was doing his PhD on a method of repairing railroad tracks in situ, the basic method was to clamp a ceramic form around the broken section, put a tub of thermite on top and light it off. The molten iron poured into the form and resulted in a seamless repair of the broekn rail. Knock off the form, smooth it out and you’re done. Sounds sort of like lost wax casting, isn’t it?
That’s also how they make Continuously Welded Rail. Here’s a cool picture.
Oh. My. Gods.
That was a pantysplash–if y’all don’t mind, I’ll be in my bunk…
[SLITHER] I think there’s something wrong with me…[/SLITHER]
It does - I just wonder what sort of material I’d need to use to make the mould - I’m thinking ordinary clay might not be durable enough.
BTW, what happens to the aluminium oxide? how completely does it separate from the stream of molten iron?
Oh wow! - it looks like you can do the same with the oxide of copper instead of iron; that’s even better for my casting idea…
The Wiki article says that paper fuses are insufficient to ignite thermite, but your video says the fuses they use are paper. Is the Wiki article wrong or is the video narration wrong?
The paper fuse is attached to a piece of tubing that they insert into the thermite powder - presumably the paper fuse is igniting something else that burns hotter (such as a mix of black powder and magnesium dust) and this in turn is igniting the thermite.
Or it may be that the fuse is entirely for effect - there’s certainly some creative editing going on there, as they’re showing the same fuse-lighting footage for every experiment, as well as possibly some potted soundbites (“The irreversible thermite reaction is started”)
Worth mentioning here is that ‘light the blue touch paper and retire’ - instructions originally appearing on boxes of retail fireworks - is a common idiom here in the UK and can be taken to mean ‘start it going, then run away!’, and is used in many contexts that don’t even involve fuses, blue, paper or otherwise, at all.
