Will Tannerite Explosive Work In A Shaped Charge?

hey kids look i'm a mixologist just like a gun bunny as a skilled shooter [Music] this video is brought to you by sportsman's guide your one-stop shop for all your outdoor needs check them out at www.sportsmansguide.com hello my friends and welcome back to ordnance lab i'm jake aka the mad scientist aka low budget immatep which i rather like that's a pretty good nickname ever since i started shaving my head i'm i'm sticking with that one and of course we're gonna keep calling shawn discount jim carrey because you know it's pretty fitting but anyways welcome back to the channel and for those of you who are new to the channel hey welcome to ordnance slab because it's basically your one stop shop for you know things that go boom exotic weapons really bad jokes world domination to uh obsessed cats and really goofy labradors but then again that implies that there's some type of serious labrador and you know from my experience there is no serious labradors so today's video came about through the request of numerous viewers asking can tannerite form a shaped charge and to answer that question i don't know i've never used tannerite or monol as an explosive for shaped charges normally when we use shaped charges we use high detonation velocity explosives such as rdx ptn or tnt or our liquid explosive gemini which does very well you might have seen in the previous video where we used it in a wine bottle shaped charge and the soda bottle shaped charge and you haven't seen those videos i urge you to go check them out it gives you a really good idea of how well that explosive performs but tannerite or pomona is not a great explosive for this particular job because well it has numerous properties that don't make it an ideal explosive for shaped charges which we're going to cover in this video now as i say that tannerite is not a great explosive it has its uses of course tannerite is great for say moving earth because it's a very cheap explosive or not necessarily tannerite but the explosive ammonol because tannerite actually is a commercial name or trade name marketed by a private company for reactive targets you shoot it it's impact sensitive and then it blows up and then you know you shot it right hence the term reactive target you know go figure but ammonol the explosive itself because it has a lower detonation velocity than say rdx or tnt it's not the best choice plus the other big problem is the hydroscopic nature of ammonium nitrate it likes to absorb water and it makes it very difficult to grind down to a fine powder which also makes it difficult to get a adequate mixture with the fuel in this case aluminum and because of that it is very difficult to get a perfect homogeneous mixture without any consistencies which we're going to pack into a shape charge which we're going to show in this video so today's experiment we're going to test whether or not it works in numerous different situations and then determine well under this scenario whether it works or not but before we get into that we need to discuss some legality things because of you know lawyers and stuff and whatnot so sean's going to discuss why you can purchase tannerite without a federal explosive license but you can't say walk into a store and buy tnt which i'm pretty sure a lot of people would love to but you know it's just not the thing so let's cut over and talk to sean all right so jake invited me to come on here and talk about the legalities of tannerite one thing we want to make sure is i'm definitely not a lawyer even though i've been deemed an expert witness on explosives in federal court but that's a whole other story if we need expert witness services we can provide those nice little advertisement but anyways the way that things work with uh binary explosives is that there's no federal regulation on the manufacturing of it provided you're doing it for non-commercial reasons so if hey you and your buddies are out there going you know you got a shooting competition and you want to put three pounds of tanner right in the lawn mower and shoot it hey as long as you're doing that for your own private reasons totally legal to go out there and do that but if you were to transport it or store it or transfer it that's when you need the explosives license or you'd want to start using it for commercial purposes so like for fps russia one of my understanding is that the way that the atf started looking at him was that they were making tannerite without having an explosives license so you and your homeboy sitting out on the farm shooting tandorite on your own totally legal but if you were to go out there and youtube make a youtube video on blowing stuff up out there at the ranch and monetize it atf would require you to have a manufacturing license and again want to make sure you remind folks that hey your state and local regulations may be different like here in texas there's no state regulations on explosives you go to like florida you have to have an explosives license to be able to set off tannerite even now that shawn got the legality aspect out of the way we can move on to explaining the experiment and for this video so what we're going to do is we're going to detonate four shaped charges i made four identical or as close as i can to identical there's some variables in this the amount of glass i had to cut as well as say for example cutting the pvc i'm not the greatest at it you know i'm a chemist i am not a professional pvc cutter or a pipe fitter or anything of that nature so there's i'm going to say that there is some variables in each shaped charge namely the mounted glass because when we cut it sometimes it breaks off and is not consistent and as well as cutting the pvc we had to use a uh oscillating saw and there was a little bit of jitter which you know but it's minor i don't anticipate that causing much of a problem what we're going to do is first set off a baseline charge or our control group which is going to be filled with a 350 grams of gemini explosive now if you've seen in the previous videos which i mentioned before this does very well so we know this is going to punch through steel like a hot knife through butter awesome the next charge is going to use legit tannerite we bought this specifically for this test because we manufacture our own explosive buying this gets really expensive but you may have seen this before in videos where people pack it inside a lawnmower and shoot it and nearly kill themselves or they put it in a car and shoot it nearly kill themselves you see the trend here yeah you have to treat this like any other explosive if otherwise and you lose your respect for explosives they get the best of you and well you turn into a pink mist which is you know it's a real crimp on life so you got to be careful but anyways we're going to mix it up and then we're going to put it into a shaped charge and it'll demonstrate that it's not the best explosive for this uh style of uh shape truck well in real reality for any shape charge because it is in prill form and we're going to lose a lot of density by putting it in there as a prill for the last part of this experiment i have two shaped charges and we have a pre-mixed amount of ammonol explosive and now this explosive is what we normally use in a lot of our previous videos especially for expedia weapons such as pipe bombs and it's going to be unadulterated we normally enhance it for those videos for this one it is straight ammonium nitrate and aluminum and a proper ratio for the maximum amount of detonation velocity we've experimented with different ratios we found this to be the optimal mix so this is going to be the best performing in my opinion versus this because it's also ground down and that is a painstaking process of ball milling ammonium nitrate keeping it really dry to maximize the density and therefore fill this in right and fill it into the shaped charge because we're gonna have a little bit of a problem even with this i still have to pack it in here and then get a nice consistent fill which is not gonna be easy but hopefully it does work i was hoping i'm hoping we see some type of shaped charge effect but i'm not really you know holding my breath on that one so anyways enough talking let's head over to the range set off the first charge which is the gemini charge which is going to be you know very spectacular punch through the metal like no like no problem and then move on to the tannerite charge and then finally the mono charge and then compare see how well it performs or doesn't perform let's find out our baseline is gonna be a ship charged with gemini liquid explosive we're gonna fill this with 350 grams and then set it off against this plate of steel here and then take a look at the effect obviously it's going to work very well but we want to use this as the baseline so we can compare it against the tannerite charge so we're going to fill it up uh put a blasting cap in it and then set it off so let's watch this thing go off as always the gemini explosive delivers an impressive explosion that is pleasing in sight and sound as we review the video from the high speed camera we can see the detonation wave traveling through the shock tube as it heads to set off the blasting cap now that is pretty cool despite recording at just over 2000 frames a second it is tough to capture the explosion in extreme detail frame by frame no matter it is still pleasing to watch well as always the wine bottle shape charge never fails to impress me this hole is gnarly and we only used 350 grams of the explosive and yet it punctured the steel like it was nothing i mean look at that that is beautiful and only that it went further into the ground a solid seven inches or 18 centimeters so it means it still had plenty energy past the metal plate into the ground this is hardpacked clay it's not easy to dig up so it shows you the the power of these shaped charges now that we have this as the baseline let's move on to the legit tannerite shaped charge and then after that we'll do two charges with the ground down ammonol and see how it compares and we'll do it on the same plate so we have a comparison now once again i don't anticipate penetrating this or really shaped charging but we'll see i might be wrong hey sometimes i am it's like i have no problem admitting it all right so let's mix it up prep it and then set it off it's pretty funny i made pipe bombs hand grenades all kinds of explosive ordnance but i've never actually personally met sander i'd always been around when folks did it but this is my first time to actually make camera so first time for everything sean prepared the tan right for the first test we had to unfortunately censor some parts as we don't want to get flagged for showing how to make explosive devices youtube has pulled some of our videos for this so censored once the shape charge was loaded with tannerite we got into place all right time for experiment number two testing out the legit or clone correct tannerite because well it's legit 10 right we bought with our own money tannerite did not sponsor this video i have no idea if they're going to respond to this they might who knows i mean we get responses from other manufacturers when we test their stuff such as can kit and x products they actually rather enjoy our test with their the pipe bomb can cannon but this one i don't know they may like it may not but anyways so we filled this up with 400 grams of tannerite and as you can see in the photos that it's it's in there it's all the way to the top but unfortunately there's a lot of void space in there because well it's in pill form and then that is a wasted amount of space that could be filled with say it was a powdered version or liquid explosive or plastic explosive where i could fill every little bit and because of this that inconsistency is going to create probably a problem it's going to create a problem it's going to not i don't think it's going to generate the adequate uh consider consistent shock wave to generate the shape charge we did as best we can to keep this nice and uniform have the blasting cap dead center and we're going to place it right here next to the very successful wine bottle shaped charge with the uh gemini and see if it even maybe we might get some marks on the on the metal but i'm not very hopeful so uh we have 45 seconds of fuse that gives us enough time to get back to our blast site let's see if this thing actually works [Music] it is pretty obvious that the explosion from the tannerite is far weaker in comparison to the gemini explosive even with more explosive loaded into the first charge it detonated with a rather meeker blast freezing the frame here shows a yellowish tinge in the smoke which is often seen in tannerite detonations this is due to the presence of nitrogen dioxide gas generated from the decomposition of ammonium nitrate this means not all the ammonium nitrate is being reacted with the aluminum and we get an incomplete and weak reaction the slow motion video also shows this in awesome detail let's rewind it and see it played back at a slower frame rate the charge did detonate but the poor ratio of ammonium nitrate to aluminum results in a weak explosion but did the explosion form a shape charge well let's see all right so you might have noticed in the slow-mo camera that it was a little bit dark and that's because we filmed it a little bit closer to the end of the day and we're losing a ton of light the sun sets here pretty fast during the winter time and it's not the ideal place to film slow motion slow motion cameras need a ton of light the faster the shutter speed the more light you need so the ideal time frame especially now during the winter time you have like six hours tops before it starts to get really dark but anyways as you can see on the plate no penetration as i estimated and i'm pretty sure that everybody well most of people who are watching this were like yeah well i saw that coming there's gonna be like a small percentage of people they're like oh it was gonna work no like like i said before tannerite because it is in prill form we're not going to get the max density within the shape charge and also you have a lot of void space and it's not i can't press it in there consistently so the chances of it forming a shaped charge was pretty minimal almost zero i don't want to say zero because there is a radial pattern so it did try to lens that focus or it did try to lens that explosive force onto the plate so it tried but unfortunately it wasn't good enough but now we can go test the uh hormonal charges that we made with the ground down ammonium nitrate and see how they perform all right so here's our next experiment we're going to be using the ammonol explosive and the shaped charge the same shaped charge as all the other ones except that this is our mixture which is mixed to the perfect ratio as we determined to get the maximum detonation velocity tannerite is mixed for more sensitivity towards impact where this is not this is for the optimal mix that i like to say and this should get the best performance that we possibly could hope out of this situation so what we're going to do is we're going to place it on this thinner plate of steel because well we saw that the tannerite charge didn't work so it's safe to say that this is probably not going to work either but if it does hopefully it'll punch this steel and if it does we'll move on to the heavier plated steel with the second charge so we'll place it here in the original position because you might have noticed in the other video it was in a different position or with the tannerite charge because we had to move it up the field to get more sunlight because well we filmed it too late in the day but right now we have plenty of sunlight so we're gonna do is we're gonna place this charge here red dead center and then we'll put the explosive in there of course we can't show the manufacturing part of this whole process because well we don't want to get flagged by youtube for manufacturing devices or instruction on that whole matter even though we go to great lengths to censor a lot of those parts so we don't get in trouble for that but hey they've pulled two videos already for that very matter so whatever so we're gonna show as much as we can without getting in trouble so we're gonna use approximately 460 grams i may have spoken misspoken earlier but it's 460 grams of of the total explosive in this charge as well as in the other charge why 460 well that's about as much i can get it here and it's also about as all the ammonium nitrate we have left for this experiment because we've been using it for other projects so let's get this thing ready and blow it up [Music] [Applause] [Music] despite being chemically similar to tan erect the powdered dimona explosive detonated with a far more powerful blast [Music] side by side its difference in detonation is very obvious the slow motion shows an impressive detonation wave notice the absence of the orange red tinge in the smoke a solid indication of a balanced and complete reaction we'll skim me alive and call me luggage as sean would say in his texas draw but uh hey i was wrong and i got no problem admitting it as you can see the plate punched right through or the shape charge punch right through the plate and has this really gnarly asymmetrical hole normally with the shaped charges you get a pretty symmetrical fairly symmetrical hole this one is uh looks like somebody punched it literally with a fist and like colossus but uh still successful now this means that the ammonol works and we had to go to great lengths to grind it down keep it dry mix it get the right ratio whereas with the tannerite we were not even we had nowhere close to this kind of performance now now that we see that this works let's upgrade to the thicker plate of steel and see how it performs [Applause] [Music] just like the first demonal charge the second charge detonated with the same level of performance a good sign the explosive may have achieved a proper lensing with the shaped charge reviewing the video in slow motion is gratifying as it demonstrates the sheer velocity and force of the explosion let's rewind it and see it play back at a slower frame rate it is clear as day to see the difference between the tannerite and ammonal charges so that was a pretty impressive blast we definitely felt it from our safety position but let's take a look at the plate oh look at that so we did not get penetration unfortunately but i wasn't expecting it to to penetrate this plate you could tell from the origin from the first plate that it did go through but it was pretty messy and it would you know often tell also how well it goes into the ground if it's going to go any further it only went a couple centimeters into the ground which meant that it was pretty much out of energy once it went through that metal plate this one it went it left a nice almost circular mark uh an impression into the metal and it warped it on the backside so still it did lens it did form a shaped charge but it was not powerful enough to penetrate this plate but you can obviously see compared to the gemini the gemini had no problem going right through the monol did not so it's safe to say that yes a monol did work in this case uh i mean yes they're improvised shaped charges and you know a more refined shaped charge say a 3d printed one or a machine one might do better but in this case it does work but not ideally but still that's pretty impressive especially since this is a pretty thick plate of steel and was able to do that and it has you can see the leftover glass that's that hit the middle and then resolidified so yeah still pretty impressive well so what did we learn in this video well that tannerite is not the best explosive for shaped charges it is good for lawn mowers absolutely uh it's great for people who are trying to eat themselves out of society or at least lose a leg or worse i mean as you as i mentioned before there's a common commonality in all these videos where people use tannerite to blow up cars or blow up lawn mowers you either nearly die or i'm pretty sure somebody has died in the process yeah so one of the things that we even though we do make fun of tannerite as peasant dust or whatever that's more of just a joke for us to flex on the pores as people like to say but this is right here like don't don't underestimate the the danger of it if you're too close to it they recommend i believe 100 meter standoff per um pound or something like that we don't really read the instructions minimum for that yeah like this is something that you do want to have that far away the um if you sit there and shoot it too close you kick up rocks and all kinds of stuff it's just again it's make sure that you are using caution to avoid those darwinian consequences but even though it doesn't work for that uh jake's gemini which is similar to that does actually work pretty good you can see that it heated this thing right here out of existence what was that 1 8 steel yeah so this is 1 8 steel and when we mixed up the ammonol it worked out great by grinding down and this is the points i also want to point out in this video is that one tannerite does not work in a shaped charge fashion and that to make it work you have to grind it down and that took a while it took several days of grinding because the problem is though as you grind it and it goes to a powder even in a sealed container it was starting to absorb water so i had to grind it in sections then dry it grind some more then dry it and it was three days it's a lot of work it's like buddy kneading and he's always sitting there doing that but you can see that it worked um really well compared to the tanner right that work you put into there to do it yeah so i mean it managed to completely bend this one eighth into a u i think that's pretty impressive but and even though it's destroyed what ah yes it's like it's got a lot i could be like vanna white or whatever uh with an ounce of what we have available for our prizes so for the thousands comment we're gonna give this one away uh once again there's a you know we try to give out a gift for the thousands comment help us defeat the evil algorithm but increasing engagement and we figured that our viewers might enjoy this because we have no use for this anymore um we have plenty of ornaments around here from all the stuff we've blown up so we'll engrave it we'll try to put your name on it at least put it agreement or if you don't want the engraving we'll just send it to you just let us know yeah but the thousands comment we'll track you down and send this on your videos don't try to lick it or anything yeah yeah yeah but this one we're gonna have to keep it's too big it'd be cost too much to send it but uh it also we can reuse this plate for some other shaped charge test because we still got plenty of steel but you know it has an excellent comparison of the the uh the mono charge that did not penetrate but it did warp the plate that's a lot of steel to warp yeah that's still pretty impressive versus the gemini which punched right through and like i said you always want to opt for the highest detonation velocity for explosives this is an excellent example you're going to punch through something right it's like if you're going to do like earth movement or whatnot right so like lower detonation velocity exposes are very popular for the in the in the land engineering side of things where you're trying to move a large amount of earth they tend to be cheaper too you know price per quantity if you want to delete a grid square you don't go out there and get like shape charges and whatnot yeah that's just not efficient you got to use the right explosive for the right job and then employ it correctly which is very important so things to consider here is that one tannerite being yes a weaker high explosive still needs to be uh treated with you know utmost respect it can cause some harm as seen in previous videos but not ideal for shape charges so it doesn't work of course could there be a way to make it work in a shape charge possibly but we've shown that it's not the best situation for this particular explosive but it can be eventually converted via into a powder and then mix adequately to uh form a correct shaped charge but it's not the most effective shape charge yep all right well hey hopefully y'all found this video interesting and we'll make sure to like and subscribe and we'll see y'all next time here at ordnance lab thanks for watching if you like this video be sure to hit the like button hit subscribe if you want to see more and stay tuned for another episode here at ordnance lab you

Channel: Ordnance Lab

Views: 588,643

Keywords: shaped charge, backyard science, will it, homemade tannerite, high explosives, ordnance lab, shaped charge explosive, shaped charge slow motion

Id: f7Zl6ZxDZao

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022