You burst my bubble, I've got tons of Iron Oxide that's about 95% Fe2O3. It's black like Graphite. It's the scale that forms on billets as they cool, comes off in 5" squ. sheets and I pulverize it in a small ball mill in the lab. I've saved up several pound of it and now you say I need the red stuff.
It has to do with the extra oxygen atom. A friend of mine re-created my thermite using the black. he didn't get one speck of iron. The slag was not even magnetic. it burned great though.
I'm just the monkey that runs the Spectrometer.
Pull up a chair and be my friend.
Seriously, can you do some gov't work without getting in trouble?
I've got barter
(I bet you get that a lot here).
Jerry, pretty incredible, but something tells me that building a new furnace every time you fire it up won't catch on. Also, the frantic 911 calls by the neighbors when someone fires off a three or four hundred pound charge to cast an anvil will tend to keep down the recidivism rate.
Actually, I reuse my crucibles several times, (usually). The lid, on the other hand, gets fused to the crucible by the slag. You lose a little capacity, as there is a layer of thermite slag, but this helps to bolster the crucible, and is a great refractory in of itself. You might have to re ream the tap hole though, and use new flower pots, but that's no biggie.
That may have been their goal to start. It seemed to turn into a rather Heated Dicussion for the most part. That thread right there was the main reason I never joined that group.
That's a shame.
I signed up for that forum and followed thier directions, but never got activated.
One thing that I loath though, is a self proclaimed "forum guru". If I ever come of as that, or fragile egotism, kick me in the rears. This place seems very different from that though.
basically my idea isnt to produce metal from thermite but to use it as a heat source to melt metal in a crucible. some of our neighbours are into making fireworks (illegal) and letting them off! so a bit of thermite wont hurt ! i guess it appeals to older people as we grew up with fireworks.my eldest (30) child has never seen "domestic" fireworks in her life altho i did save some skyrockets for over 25 yrs and let my kids let them off!!
That's what I use it for. The real high heat refractory alloys. You can even use it for making "ferro chems" out of pure elemntal forms for conventional melting/alloying.
You need to have an antechamber or put the chems in a HOT crucible, as *most* chems will burn up if you put them directly in the charge. You also need to allow for off gassing. You can always remelt the ingot to get rid of any bubbles.
Please keep us posted.
EDIT: I thought I would post a couple of pics, if you havent seen them, of part of my furnace and crucible. I use 2 flower pots, with the inner one's bottom cut out. I like the resistance to cracking due to extreme thermal shock of this design.
Notice I have a pie crust, rounded lip. This allows the liner to shrink, without cracking and protects the flower pots from the hellish thermite flame. You can see the lid, which I don't spend much time on as it gets dbroken anyway. Remember to always recycle you refractory. It gets better with time. I have an old blender I run the broken stuff through. Use a plastic pitcher though. Pack the charge as you go. This is essential for a good, slow, hot burn.
xlchainsaw, you can see one of my 2 melt doors in the bottom. I bring it to your attention as it's from your part of the world. A piece of the Henbury meteorite I used as double duty for a ferro nickel source.
How do you make that picture bigger?
