Making Castable/Moldable Thermite
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- Making a thermite that can be shaped is another step towards usefulness, and creativity. Using calcium sulfate primary, or Plaster of Paris, this thermite is moldable and yet burns nicely. Several different recipes are tested, with some surprising results at times.
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Silicone mold next time?
Might I suggest a food dehydrator for all your drying needs
Brother, I donate to you the knowledge of silicone mold baking sheets. Please make a Christmas cookie thermite gift tin extravaganza video. Merry Christmas 🎄
Time to create hot cement add gravel granite together with plaster mix to absorb heat. Controlled by reaction containing thermal runaway.
I’m literally finalizing a video on castable thermite now. You beat me by 35 minutes. I wonder if we had the same viewer suggest the idea to both of us.
Are you guys not the same person? I 100% thought you were
Did you upload it yet?
Or did YT censor it?
I was going to send you a link to this video as soon as I was done watching it XD
Just subbed so i don’t miss it, this is quite the long 35m lol
That might be my fault. I've been looking into this recently and I'm subbed to both channels.
This would make a fun science experiment to get kids excited for chemistry
This is the sort of thing my older brother found me doing in the garage growing up
Rubber ducky thermite. This is why I love UA-cam and why cable can never compete
Haha! Yes.
Love your enthousiasm.
Lol thank you!
My fav video so far! Thank you for all the hard work!
Thank you again!!
You know that moment when your thermite rubber ducky's head falls off and liquifies in a swirl of flames? Good stuff 23:52
the way it collapses into itself is truly something else
I think the paint slowed the reaction due to blocking airflow
This is awesome, we must think alike because I bought a box of plaster recently for this exact reason.
Great! Have fun and enjoy and make something crazy.
Cool video and great explanations of what you are doing. The casting thing caught my attention. Neat idea. I’d have never thought about doing that with thermite. Have fun and be safe!
You are correct on the assumption of the test with the battery body being zinc oxide. Please for the love of everything use a respirator and stay out of the smoke from that stuff though. It’s highly toxic.
Thanks!
Having seen videos of thermite on ice, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for that duck to explode!! 😅
The wax prevents oxygen from getting to the aluminium and it's taking heat away as it melts.
A little bit of wax is good to put in a ball mill, if you're milling aluminium.
Ratios I've got for the copper oxide version.
12g Al + 27g of Cuo + 12g calcium sulphate
Yeah, that was way too much. We've done something similar some decades back and although I don't remember much about the successful mixture I still remember very well that a minimal amount of wax was necessary and already sufficient.
Isn't exactly castable like the mixtures here, rather formable or moldable in a rather dry putty kind of sense.
Definitely not more than 10% wax, most probably 5% or even below that was what we used successfully, just enough to get it to clump and hold together once formed and cooled.
Might be important what wax is used as well, I don't remember what we used though. But they can differ quite a bit in their properties.
You could make it hotter by adding more aluminium so the reaction goes:
3 CaSO4 + 8 Al = 3 CaO + 3 Al2O3 + Al2S3
Also skipping the drying step and adjusting the proportions you can make a thermate like mix:
3 CaSO4*2H2O + 12 Al = 3 CaO + Al2S3 + 5 Al2O3 + 6 H2
btw, a great thermite igniter can be made by making a runny paste made from Mg/dark Al, CuO/MnO2, a little KClO4/KClO3/KNO3/Ba(NO3)2, nitrocellulose and acetone,
placing it on aluminium foil, and putting a fuse/sparkler in it.
- Someone isn't taking you seriously
- You SHOW THEM. You make a THERMITE RUBBER DUCKY.
- You bask in your epic Chadness.
Very funny and educational, gave me some new ideas on how to work with plaster. It would be really interesting to see which other oxidizing binders can be used, as messing with sulfur dioxide may not end well.
Fantastic video. I've heard about casting thermite on some occasion I suppose since I recognized the topic but I figured it's just be for like basic bricks etc. The thought of casting objets d'art out of it never even crossed my mind. Not sure if I'm watching brilliance or insanity. XD
Consider using a bit more water when molding with plaster. Since you are drying it out anyways it helps on flow.
Yes you are right on. You can't see it because of the time-lapse, but half way through I mixed in more water.
I feel like you may be neglecting the water of hydration of the calcium sulfate. It's likely going to react with the aluminum as well.
Also, SO2 is an oxidizer so far as aluminum is concerned. Including the sulfur.
Correct. I was counting on that but I think that this reaction (CaSO4 + Al) was what started in the oven with the CuO. If, that's what you're referring to.
the forbidden muffin
Duck around and find out...😋
God the dog barking after it went poof was great lol
use tiny, thats TINY amounts of wax. maybe even consider adding 3% nitrate if using wax as it causes lots of problems to start with. you want it at the consistancy of magic sand when hot and then compact it into the mold
also dont try lighting a flat sheet. start with cones with the sparkler in the point
Yes, way too much wax. I'm learning. Thanks!
this got me thinking ...if you made a body of a drone out of this ...or even mold in shape charges and magnets ...all drone has to do is land on armor and boom
When casting the ducky, you really only needed to push the ducky upside down into the wet plaster mix, leaving the bottom exposed, given that it is relatively flat. Would have made the process much easier.
You are absolutely correct. Nice catch.
Thumb up for rubber ducky idea !
I just love your channel! maybe The ratios need to be adjusted because the copper oxide is not the same molecular weight as iron oxide? Also, Next time you might save yourself a lot of headache if you just drill the hole in the top of the rubber ducks head and poured the castable thermite into it as a mold itself? Hope that helps in some way
Really appreciate your input. I'm going to address this again somewhere down the road and will look into things again.
If you need better penetrating ability you can add some aluminum beads or chips decreasing the Al powder weight accordingly. Bigger chunks will be reacting slowly.
Great video as always, I wonder if the reason the copper oxide one didn't work is because somehow the copper oxide converted into copper hydroxide? From what I have heard it doesn’t do so that quickly in normal water so Maybe the heating + water sped it up?
Perhaps also during drying on the oven as water was drawn off from the Calcium sulfate it directly reacted with the copper oxide too idk
Great points. Thanks. I plan a readdressing this at a later date and will look into your thoughts.
I think one design of paintable thermite I saw used pingpong balls melted in acetone as the binder.
You can’t find nitrocellulose based ping pong balls anymore. At least not easily. However. I can confirm making a lacquer by dissolving nitrocellulose powder in acetone, and combining it with the thermite until well mixed also works well. Dried quickly too.
Have you experimented with barium nitrate? Thermate seems to have some crazy capabilities, as per a video I watched were a guy puts about 5g of thermate on a 1/4 inch steel plate and it almost makes it thorough, it made many holes. The name of the vid is "Thermate TH3"
I haven't. Although I do have some.
When I tried plaster it seemed to give off copious amounts of chlorine gas.
I was using Fe3,04 and aluminum powder with a touch of tin
Interesting. Possibly coming from chlorine in city water?
I thought you meant using a thermite mix to cast the main product iron into a solid iron shape
Dope video as usual! Love that backwoods lighter, BTW!!
I got a mix of just plaster of Paris and iron oxide. I was able to get it going with just a propane torch like one used for soldering pipes (took a few minutes but the al eventual looked like it started to spark and I guess that got out of control and suddenly it went off and I was like 20 years back then I was under the input that it was not possible to ignite the mixture without extremely high heat like #kmno4 and glycerine! Or what's a sparkler made of like Magnesium and zinc or something?
Some thermites, especially CuO, will ignite at lower temperatures. Sparklers burn at around 2K F and its the Al in sparklers that does that.
@cranialconstruction2218 ah thanks man may inssk your like background are you a chemist or did you used to do EOD Work for the army or something how and why can you film yourself doing these things... I assume you have a license or something to play with these chemicals lol so a lot of these things you work with I either have or made.myself or bought but yeah like I initially got into chemistry to pull gold put of e waste but I found s 44 gram gram gold nugget I made nitric acid by using cano3 and kcl and a freezer and I'm able to make it and youbcan get kcl as water softener from the home depot or stores like that i have some ways yo make interesting things you can't buy I'm Canada like I can't buy Visco fuse thr most you can have length wise I believe as a civilian is the length of one on any fire work nut if your s chemist you know with a sugar and some chlorates you can get some cotton string or whatever and make a an excellent reliable improvised fuse!
So I have a thermite video itsna short onb my channel if you wanna see it nuts it's a nighttime and a freak out cuz it was like idk only 15 or 20 gms max and it was like the sun was out again for a couple second and inmaent back the next day and grabbed the iron i made and it was super cool writing well thanks for responding I appreciate it injnow you're a far larger channel bit idk I'm very good at coming up with things like you idk maybe the both of us could come to with some things or things of mine you've been stuck on and if we figure anything out idk it's good for views and videos ideas and idk any tips you have for me as a guy who only has like 25 subscribers!
Why didn't you use the rubber duck as the mold? The bottom of the duck had a ready-made pour hole.
Because the inside of the plastic duck was full of indentations that would have made it difficult to pull out later. I cut one in half before I even did this experiment as that was my first choice actually.
@@cranialconstruction2218 You could have used a mold release agent and pealed the rubber duck from the casting like a banana peal, no?
ca glue would work.
I haven't been able to find the good old silver sparklers. There a good place to get them at these days? All I can ever find is the new crappy one's that are wrapped in paper.
I only can find them online at times. Because crushed silver sparklers in a closed system will explode I'm think it's just like everything else. Banned.
@@cranialconstruction2218 That's BS. I know they explode... but so what? I'd bet money I can get the new crappy one's to blow up too. (I used to crush the silver one's and "confine" them and they would blow up... but it wasn't like an M80 kind of explosion. It was more of a slow, but still pretty decent explosion. Like, how many other things in this world can we all make blow up? Most people would be shocked if they knew. I'm sure there are many 1000s of chemicals and products with those chemicals that people could use either for fun or for bad purposes if they choose. That's not the fault of the chemicals though (or in this case, it's not the fault of the sparklers).
@@cranialconstruction2218 Oh yeah, you ever try to make them on your own? I don't recall which chemicals (or elements) are needed to make them. If I'm not mistaken, they may be a kind of thermite all on their own. (Just one that can be lit with a lighter).
Laughing at the backwoods rick sanches lighter haha
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be…thermite?
Pban might be a better option
With the wax one, add some sulfur
cut d day sparkler into 1/3rd and 2/3
place the 1/3 at base even with other sparkler then wrap two time with kitchen foil
this will make a hotter burn.
Didn't know that. Thanks!
Uh. I was recommended this.
Cool
maybe the copper reacted with the sulfur in plaster and change the dynamics...
10:00 😂 put the duck down!
What is the benefit of having the thermite castable?
Fill a vessel with an igniter iykwim
Make a statue from it!
To disguise what it is, obviously.
In some industrial applications, being able to form the thermite around or through metals to weld them together. Industrial castable thermite exists but its composition is unknown to me.
@@cranialconstruction2218 that's nice, but boring. Make a statue from thermite!
Try molten wax as a binder.
Oh you did doh!
Bravo..........casting molds.......we do like bronze molds........face coat ....then plaster sand blast sand ......pre heat mold.....cheers
No ducks given.
Damn, I thought you meant that you were going to cast metal items out of thermite. Was really confused why you were doing things the way you were doing them. lol.
Much appreciated!
Typically thermite over ice can explode, even worse over dry ice.
If the duck was regular thermite, possibly. But, it contained too much CaSO4 which just doesn't burn that hot.
You probably could've taken a thick syringe and injected the mix into the rubber ducky itself and used it as the mold instead of making the negative. Could be a quick way to do it if you ever wanted an army of thermite duckies lol
Remove your air bubbles! These can explode if there's trapped air pockets in larger batches, these need to be vibrated or put under vaccum. I used this method to make a Thermite-LOX rocket for a high school project, but did not think to remove bubbles, resulting in an explosion and a huge fireball.
Don't get galvanized poisoning. From breathing in zinc
Hey the ones that don't work.....put one that does works on top.....starter......magnesium and plaster ....... perchlorate ......hmmmmm......
saving this before the feds take it down
I wish your 'O's didn't look like 'D's on your whiteboard; really confused me for a moment. :P
I'll try and be more careful
Thermite clown 🤡 figurines