[593] Gallium vs. Titalium - Abus Padlock Meets a Gruesome End

this is the lock-picking lawyer and today we're going to do something really fun now this lock is an Ibis titanium model 9050 it's the exact same lock that I featured in video number 589 and in that video I picked the lock open and then I took it apart to show you what was inside but today I'm going to attempt to crush this padlock with my bare hands and I'm going to do that with the help of some gallium now gallium is a really interesting metal with lots of cool properties probably my favorite is it's really low melting temperature it's about 85 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 degrees Celsius what that means is that this can be a solid at room temperature but then if you put it in your hands your body heat will melt it now I've already melted this in advance so you can see we have a liquid right here now there are lots of uses for this in industry mostly for semiconductors but one really cool property of this is that if you put it in contact with most aluminum alloys it will infuse into the aluminum micro crystal in grade and prevent the metal crystals from forming strong bonds with each other that means that if I put this gallium on this lock and give it enough time this lock will become so weak that I should be able to break it apart in my bare hands so that's what we're gonna do right now I'm going to get some paper and put it under this lock so hopefully I won't make too much of a mess and then I'm going to put this gallium right on the lock and then scratch up the aluminum surface so the gallium can come into direct contact with the aluminum itself now aluminum if you just leave it out in the atmosphere will very quickly form a boundary layer of aluminium oxide which will prevent this reaction from taking place so after I put some of this gallium on the lock I'm going to take one of my lockpicks and try to scratch this surface up a little bit so the gallium and aluminum can form an alloy together okay that is more than enough gallium now let's get a lockpick and scratch up the surface and hopefully spread this gallium around a little bit now usually gallium will wet most materials meaning it will stick to it but that doesn't seem to be happening here with this aluminum hopefully that will change as it starts to react with it make it something that will scratch that just a little bit better got a little razor blade here okay this gallium isn't really staying in one spot or is I'm sorry it's not spreading out as I hoped it would but that shouldn't be too much of a problem for us I've got this scraped up pretty good and with the way gallium infuses into aluminum it shouldn't matter exactly where we put it on the lock because even if I put it right here on the corner eventually that gallium will infuse throughout the entire lock make one final attempt to spread this out and it doesn't seem to be working maybe I'll just leave it alone for a while okay this is something that's gonna take at least a few hours so now that I have this scratched up and the gallium is on this we're gonna cut the video and I'm gonna come back in just a little while okay it's about an hour later and you can see that the gallium has already made a pretty significant impact on this lock you can see that it has migrated from where I left it in the middle of the lock over to the left here and it seems to have eaten away the top layer of aluminum here so when we try to push it back toward the center of the lock because I have a funny feeling this is about to fall off I want to make sure the gallium spends all of its time eating away at this lock well maybe that's as good as we're going to be able to get there we go okay we seem to have a lot more surface area of contact between the aluminum and the gallium now and we have this mixture of aluminum and gallium right here I'm gonna get something and we're going to try a little experiment with that okay okay I just got this little vial of water and I'm about to show you another interesting property of gallium now scientists are actually experimenting with the alloy that you see right here the mixture of aluminum and gallium for use in alternative fuel cars what happens is when you mix this aluminum gallium alloy with the water it actually breaks the water down the aluminum reacts with the water see if I can get a little bit of this and it creates aluminum oxide and hydrogen so let's see what happens when we put this in the water here you can see a lot of hydrogen is bubbling up out of there and this actually doesn't destroy the gallium at all you can recover the gallium after this reaction is done which is one of the reasons why they're experimenting with this as an alternative fuel interesting little side note but not what we're dealing with today right now I just want to see this lock get destroyed so let me spread this out again and then we'll give this a little bit more time it's about 10 minutes later and I wanted to show you a bizarre phenomenon that's occurring on the face of this lock and that is that the gallium seems to be traveling around the lock underneath the surface and let me just show you what I'm talking about you can see it's almost like there is a liquid underneath the surface and if we just scratch it a little bit you can see that gallium aluminum alloy underneath we're also reaching the point where this gallium is dripping off the padlock let me see if I can pull some of this off from the side and if I just put it anywhere on the face it rapidly travels back to where it came from so I think I used probably way too much gallium here but it's travelling in some places under the surface of the lock like right up here if I break it up you can see all that gallium just underneath the surface it's a really bizarre thing I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it even all the way down here toward the bottom of the lock we're seeing the same thing so let me give it a little bit more time and we'll come back to it when we have more results it's about four hours later and I've taken a couple of precautions first I have moved the lock onto a large piece of craft paper and second I decided to wear some rubber gloves not because there's anything dangerous about gallium but because I don't want to take the risk of contaminating anything else in my work area so let's take a look at this lock as you can see the front of it looks pretty gnarly but there isn't much in the way of liquid left it is a little bit slippery and I suppose there is some liquid gallium but hardly any we move around to the side you can see this rot has infested the side looks like the bottom and oh definitely the the bottom or the back of this lock as well so I don't know whether the gallium simply seeped around the edges underneath the surface or it infused completely through the lock body but let's take a look I just had a little piece of that lock break off okay clearly it has well it's infused well into the lock body so let's see if we can break this apart let's start by trying to get little chunks off and I guess right here was was the exception let me get a small screwdriver and and see what happens with this Wow I can see oops I can see the metal breaking very very easily and yeah this metal is very very weak it's pretty much just crumbling without a whole lot of force this is pretty incredible what this gallium has done to the aluminum let's see if we can break enough of this off that the lock will actually open up okay not quite as soft as it could be debating whether or not we should give this more time or maybe just try a different way of breaking it open I suspect if we hit it with something it would open relatively easily let me try and grab this piece of wire see if we can break the botton whoa we broke the bottom really easily here I guess it just depends on where in the lock we strike that we find the weak points under what happens if I just pull on the shackle or try to twist it no it's not coming apart quite that easily oh there we go Wow a big chunk of this we'll look at this I just peeled the whole lock apart and how's that for a cut away on what a lock looks like on the inside you can see all the parts pretty darn clearly I wonder if there's anything in that core that's aluminum hopefully I'll be able to salvage that at least and the rest of this wow this is just breaking apart very very easily I've never tried eating away gallium I'm sorry eating away aluminum with gallium or compromising aluminum with gallium but clearly you can see that this is a very this lock is just destroyed if I had hit this with a hammer in the very beginning I suspect this just would have shattered so tight Allium versus gallium I think you can see which was the winner here this lock is well and truly destroyed of course this is not a practical way of opening a lock anything that requires five or six hours of of soaking clearly isn't something you would use to open a door nevertheless I think it's a lot of fun so that's all I have for you today if you do have any questions or comments about this please put them below if you like this video and would like to see more like it please subscribe and as always have a nice day thank you

Channel: LockPickingLawyer

Views: 3,078,662

Rating: 4.7980061 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: jeghGhVdt9s

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/robobobatron]

i was very concerned the whole time he was gonna stab his hand with that screw driver.

[u/Mcamp27]

Upvote just for the time stamp

[u/starskyyy]

Once the guy is taking it apart... /r/oddlysatisfying

[u/allfamyankee]

Very entertaining

[u/swedishplumber]

Wtf is goin on here? I thought gallium was an inert metal that had a low melting point