Burning 50lbs of Thermite Made From 400 Soda Cans

[Music] [Music] all right everyone welcome back to Cody's lab so today I have a bunch of cans see I've been collecting these for several years now just basically been saving them I don't throw them away because I thought I'd make something out of them eventually and today I'm going to do that I've decided to turn them into aluminum powder for thermite so the first step in this process is to make sure they are very dry because moisture will cause major problems later on second I need to crush the cans so that they take up less volume this way they fit into The Crucible so that I can melt them down into a more convenient shape this also removes all the excess junk such as the paint and the plastic liner that comes with the can [Music] [Applause] so here we go I melt it down about 300 cans and I was able to make these two chunks of aluminum here now I need to make it into smaller pieces again for that I'm going to use this lathe so I got a carbide bit this will spin around and I'll just be able to cut it into thin ribbons uh it's even better it's coming off in chips and I'm trying to capture them using this plate here and seems to not be working all that well I'll just vacuum them up so here's the ball mill that my dad and I built a few years ago I'll post a link down in the description for that video but I'm going to use it to convert these aluminum turnings into even smaller bits so I'm going to add them in there along with some iron balls to do the crushing these aluminum turnings when they get smashed by the balls will break up into smaller pieces very simple pretty loud [Music] so all right let's see how it did I only let it run for about an hour I didn't want it to be a super fine powder yeah you see the the bits are still recognizable yeah I think that's about what I wanted let's get it out of there [Music] there we go anything it takes up much less space now so now this material is a variety of sizes and I would like to separate it out the larger pieces are more difficult to ignite and burn whereas the smaller pieces are far far more reactive if I can separate them I can make materials which burn at different rates and different difficulties for ignition see oh yeah look at that so here we are I've have segregated the powder into fine medium and coarse let's go make some thermite so for my thermite mix I'm going to start with 10 G of the fine aluminum powder add this to the foil dish on the scale there we go and to this I'm going to add 33 G of black iron oxide so this is iron 23 oxide or magnetite usually people use red iron oxide or rust I find the black iron oxide Burns better it's easier to light and it's easier for me to get I can actually just extract it from a stream bed using a magnet and then take that magnetite sand and crush it to a powder in my ball mill but red iron oxide does also work well we'll try burning some of that also let's get this mixed up I've got thermite made from pop cans and sand so here's our thermite mix I'm going to add this to a little ceramic Bowl to act as the reaction vessel and on top of that I'm going to add a little bit of this ignition mixture I made there we go now touch it off the torch [Music] there he goes oh my bowl broke it always happens there it is some aluminum oxide slag and liquid iron grab some tongs let's cool it off oh the iron was still melted there it is little blob of metal y so there's the Lumina it's magnetic iron nice here's a bunch of the thermite made with the red iron oxide with the medium coarse aluminum powder and to light it I'm going to add some of my black oxide thermite to it and a little bit of this mystery powder all right so I've just got it in a little glass cup see what [Applause] happens [Applause] yeah the red iron oxide throws material around more I assume it's got moisture in it love watching the powder fall into the reaction There It Is Well Done That was with the corser powder so the fine easy to light thermite was able to light the more difficult to light stuff so there you have it thermite made with pop cans that could be the end of the video but I do have some cans left and I got thinking converting these cans to powder that's a lot of Labor it is necessary to make a material which can be ignited easily but once reaction's going it can consume thicker coarser materials if I got the reaction going big enough and hot enough could I perhaps burn the can as a whole so take a measured amount of the iron 23 oxide the magnetite sand add that straight to the can and then crush it as is will this burn you know if I get a good reaction and added this to it it's just like a really large particle right well one way to find out so I've got about 10 lb roughly 4 and 1/2 kilos of thermite in here made with the coarse and semic course material along with a little bit of fine and then the cans are another 40 lb So in theory that's 50 lb of thermite something like 22 kilos I don't know if these are going to burn though so okay so I dug a pit in my yard as you can see I tried to dry the ground out by lighting a fire in it but it really didn't work so I'm going to try to line at least the bottom of the hole with some dry silica sand just so I don't end up with a big steam explosion or something okay I'm going to start stacking cans so it takes about eight cans to make 1 pound of the thermite so 50 * 8 that's it's about 400 cans total that I'm going to be burning in just a little while that was like fun I hope it works hey glasses glove I think I'm ready as I'm going to be let's see what happens and it's off sh [Applause] already it's already escaping outside okay gas coming off the cans probably the paint burning off of them me just a little campfire in my backyard I actually like that it's not going very fast just a nice gentle very energetic reaction oh yeah you can see the cans melting into the [Applause] mixture I was worried that maybe I'd like have like steam explosions from the paint and the liner going in but seems to be doing pretty [Applause] okay stir up the shovel a little [Applause] bit oh the radiant heat is intense I hope the camera's [Music] okay okay there's the last of the that can that I had in there I'm probably ruining my shovel that's hot that's very hot that's it though I got like steam coming off of my leg I can [Applause] see that's it though burned it up looks like there's part of a can left not anymore probably ruin the temper of my shovel I tried to cool it down but oh well big pit of lava got some sticks that fell into it I've got the glow of this very hot thing Illuminating me that was fun it worked brilliantly I couldn't have asked for better you can see it reflecting on my glasses it's been an hour and it's still glowing even if I turn on the light it's still you can tell that it's still glowing red hot here see if I can roast a marshmallow that's after an hour of [Applause] cooling it's so hot look how the the the sand is doing weird things like what is this like erupted through it or something oh yeah you see that how it moved you can also hear it crackling there's cracks forming yeah I'm just going to let it keep cooling maybe even till morning so here we are it's been 13 hours as you can see it snowed and it still feels a little bit warm it's crazy it's interesting is it's lifted up here a little bit off the sand wonder what caused that definitely see it over on this side as well well let's dig it up let's see what we get oh Tedy oh okay so this is my slag right here my iron is right there look at that that's pretty good oh it's warm you can see the snow melting when it hits it that's heavy oh no it broke that's some interesting colors though look at that so the metal is brittle my guess is a little excess aluminum in there maybe some other contaminants from the the cans that didn't get burned off yeah look at that it's got some interesting Crystal structures in there you see that it's very shiny let's see if it's magnetic yeah it is magnetic so basically I have a big chunk of impure iron uh the plastic and the paint from the cans my guess is it in Incorporated a lot of hydrogen into the metal and hydrogen causes it to be very brittle that's why it broke also the slow cooling caused the large crystals it's very pretty though look at that the rainbow coloration the thin oxide films let's see what the iron yield was so that's uh just under 20 lbs of iron let's have a look at this slag shall we so first of all we got the sand which is fused to the side looks like some glass with the sand melted mixed with the Lumina there's little bits of iron in here so not all the iron made it to the bottom let break that apart this material is basically Sapphire it's just poly crystallin and full of Bubbles and contaminants the dark coloring is probably iron oxide that dissolved into it there's little bits of iron here it didn't make it down to the bottom yeah so there you go thermite and iron from aluminum sooda hands hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time

Channel: Cody'sLab

Views: 957,711

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Id: N9rGAA6eF10

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2024