Silicone Microfuse - Light Thermite with ease! Adding Iron to the Periodic Table - ElementalMaker

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the elemental maker today I'm gonna show you the easiest way in the world to light thermite now as many of you may know thermite is notoriously difficult to ignite a lot of people use sparklers which they you know they work pretty nicely a lot of guys use magnesium ribbons that also works but what I'm gonna show you is an awesome little fuse recipe that pretty pretty darn simple to make and it it is excellent for igniting goldschmidt reactions or thermite goldschmidt Hans Goldschmidt was actually the the man who identified and patented the thermite reaction in a 1890 ish something about they're almost a ninety nine users turn of the century so I'm just gonna whip up a little bit of thermite just to show you how difficult it is to night now one of the primary things to do with the difficulty of igniting thermite is your grade of aluminum now this is some aluminum I bought in bulk a while back super super cheap it might have been like 50 cents a pound but it's atomized so if you imagine tiny little spheres as opposed to the aluminum powder that we made in a previous video which is flaked it as a very high surface area reacts much more easily so you can imagine you know trying to light a piece of paper on fire pretty easy trying to light a huge ball of highly compressed paper on fire not very easy and that's kind of how this atomized aluminum is so just gonna mix up 10 grams or so just to show you the deal so this aluminum I have here it's only purpose is to be used for thermite and other goldschmidt reactions so you know for my periodic table it's handy for reducing stuff a lot of reactions I use magnesium powder but it kind of comes down to what you got a valuable and how reactive the mix is gonna be plop a nice squat on their moody reactives away they wouldn't be able to ignite on their own and I'll show you how how difficult it is to get this stuff started so start at a low temp remove the acetone out of here because that's probably not good to keep you if they're light just in case it did ignite so you can see it is glowing red-hot and still will not ignite even cranking up the heat can't get that stuff to ignite now if we threw some magnesium powder on there and help jumpstart the reaction it would progress as usual but what I'm gonna show you is an awesome little recipe it's called micro fuse I found that years and years ago on one of the pyrotechnics forms and at the time I was just getting into element collecting so it's doing a lot of Goldschmidt reactions to try to isolate compounds or try to take compounds and isolate elements rather and having you know using the crappy aluminum as took my typical reducing agent it was pretty difficult to get going and I hated dealing with magnesium ribbons and sparklers and all that so finding this recipe the micro fuse was absolutely awesome all right so there's actually only three ingredients to this this composition one being sulfur one being silicon the other being a mysterious purple oxidizer that nobody knows the likes of and I'm only saying that because YouTube will probably flag the video otherwise and I don't want that to happen so if you have some chemical knowledge you'll you'll definitely know what a purple oxidizing agent is and if you don't you're probably not old enough to make this so the ratios are five parts oxidizer to one part sulfur to one part silicon so I'm gonna multiply this by 10 to make a reasonably sized batch now the big thing is this this purple stuff stains the hell out of everything so got to be careful with it so I'm looking for 50 grams perfect now 10 grams of sulfur uh-huh nearly had it on the dot the final part will be 10 grams of silicon now it's a super humid day and silicone reacts with humidity in the environment to cure last time I did this secured very very prematurely on me so hopefully that doesn't happen today I was trying to wait for drier weather but it's all that's in the forecast rain rain rain powder up the sulfur a bit there mix that with the oxidizer and I'm just gonna pour that in now we start stirring you're gonna get everything very nicely intermixed if you need to add more silicon you can you can also use solvents certain solvents aren't compatible with this oxidizer but a mineral spirits would actually be pretty ok to use I'm actually gonna add some much better looks like a purple black gooey mess in there which is exactly what it is odorless mineral spirits my ass pretty good mixed up that's that's pretty well mixed at this point and just grab a sheet of aluminium foil see what I did there it's not it's fancy like a British this wouldn't [ __ ] so I want smooth alright got some aluminum foil laid out we're just gonna take the mix plop it down on there ever so delicately and I'm just going to works to make this a reasonably square bit like cooking but no not quite we're not making scones here so we'll give that a few hours and it should set up nicely probably needs about 24-48 hours to fully let the silicone cure but at that point you'll have a super flexible fuse that has a very consistent burn rate and it'll be able to light anything you throw at it now I would never recommend making anything like you know big firecrackers IEMA teas you would definitely not want to use this it's not standardized enough it's not tested enough to trust to that level so for something like thermite or other super high activation energy requiring reactions this is excellent to use I also forgot to mention that adding the mineral spirits to it you're decreasing the viscosity of the mix and what that allows you to do is one more easily mix it and put it into this sort of shape you want but if you have a large bore syringe you can actually extrude this stuff into a nice cylindrical fuse so I don't happen to have a fuse or a large bore syringe here but that would be a pretty nice option with this stuff because what I do I'd let it cure and then just cut it into little little strips works great but extrusion would probably be a little nicer give you a more uniform product so today is tomorrow and it's fully cured so I'm gonna cut this into some strips just using a ruler as a nice straight edge and pieces usually suck but they look like [ __ ] but it'll still work so it's pretty flexible stuff the embedment want to test something I've heard it's waterproof I've never actually tested that so let's light a piece and drop into the water good noises they need some B now let's see what this will do underwater that seemed to extinguish pretty quick you see the permanganate ions getting in the water there yeah I don't know about that whole water proof claim I mean the the nice thing is it is a silicon base so if you get the fuse wet and let it dry it'll burn no problem but I don't know about it burning underwater get another test just to see seems to go a little bit I bet if you got a thick enough fuse that would probably burn underwater without too much issue Oh dirty bubble look at that alright so I guess the only thing left at this point is to actually fire up some thermite so let's do a little piece here move all this out of the region all right got our thermite got a little piece of micro fuse just going to stick that in there and get it lit let's see if she works fingers crossed up good signs come on bad boy wow I'm blind got a little bit of a gun this uh this aluminum is notoriously hard to ignite I think it's like 30 micron atomized which is pretty much as crappy as you can get and there's not a large thermal mass there to really sustain ignition once it gets going drop another chunk in there maybe add some more thermite on top of it and here's to go and blind these Wow well I can't see for [ __ ] don't stare directly at thermally only idiots do that so yeah my pile there isn't big enough and the aluminum is probably sinking all the heat away from it it's really sustained ignition but let's mix up a larger batch that thermite I'll stick a mic refused in there and you guys can see her in the works wow that plate is ungodly hot yeah I think that's what's happening the thermite probably isn't able to sustain because the aluminum is just wicking all the heat right out of it aluminum as everybody knows is an excellent thermal conductor so that's probably the issue just gonna whip up a much larger batch of thermite close enough oh I'm excited in PBR can't cuz [ __ ] Mirko that's why all right what the hell's more American than a PBR que and filled with thermite maybe chuck norris riding a tank but aside from that that's a close second stick confusing there get buried nice and beat block and let's get a tester out give her a light hopefully my camera's far enough I had the fuse is going cameras right in the way of the smoke please don't melt my camera I'd call that a pretty successful reaction Wow god the heat coming off from that is just unreal that'll make a nice iron sample for my periodic table already got a little chunk iron but I'd like that more so as you guys could see the silicon micro fuse ignited the thermite no problemo pretty awesome [ __ ] and it's dirt cheap to make which it's probably cheaper than buying magnesium resins and it's much easier to ignite you you know need a blow torch to light magnesium ribbon with this you just use a normal lighter done got there am I going and here's the slag from the thermite I'm pretty interested to see if I got any big chunks of hyoeun in here I can see a lot of little globs of iron here's a little chunk get a magnet double-check oh yeah very cool I'm probably gonna just fill a little vial with these and add them to my almond collection yeah a lot of iron in there that's one big piece Wow holy [ __ ] yeah break this up see what the hell's in it well I've been banging away at the slag for a bit got a pretty fair amount of pure iron chunks out of there see I think this is the biggest piece sadly that won't fit in my display bottle so only the pieces that fit are going on display pretty sweet I earn that I made that'll go beautifully on the periodic table so here's the cylinder iron I had up there previously and I'll keep her up there but now add the beautiful sample we made nice bit there we go a little bit of the tangent of the video but I think that looks pretty good up there some iron that we made right on the periodic table alright guys so as you saw the silicon mark refuses an awesome tool to add your book of tricks super cheap to make super simple three ingredients and it works every damn time no blowtorch require no sparklers no magnesium ribbon just the lighter in this stuff you're good to go so I hope you guys enjoyed if you like what you see on the channel please don't forget to subscribe and thumbs up this video it really helps the channel out and if you have been following for awhile and enjoy what we're doing please consider donating on patreon so I can keep these videos going really means a lot so I appreciate anyone and everyone who donates thank you so much and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: ElementalMaker

Views: 134,298

Keywords: thermite, lighting thermite, magnesium ribbon, thermate, iron oxide aluminum, goldschmidt, reaction

Id: mhCH77ZSskE

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018