What happens when you put wet scrap metal in a furnace?
 

Maybe this guy needs to buy a lotto ticket or a change of shorts - maybe both.

Damn! That escalated quickly!

Yikes !

Well, at least hes warm.

I think when you add water to a fire that hot, you get an oxygen fire, because there's oxygen in water. I worked at a print shop once where we had a small table saw that we used to trim embossing dies made out of magnesium. Over time, the five gallon bucket that caught the shavings from the mag had filled up. A spark ignited it and we quickly had a white hot fire.

One of the idiots I worked with came running around the corner with a bucket of water to throw on it. I practically tackled him to keep him from throwing it on the fire, because I think it would have had results similar to what happened in the video.

We lifted the burning bucket by getting a mop handle under the wire handle and took it out to the parking lot and let it burn itself out. It made a hole in the asphalt.

Magnesium burns damn hot and is difficult to extinguish.

Solid rocket motors have fuel made from butyl rubber, aluminum, and magnesium ground up to the consistency of course gravel. And it burns good.

Magnesium is an alkali metal and the only way to extinguish is with a "special Class D fire extinguisher" or dry sand. The Class D extinguisher or sand will act as a smothering agent on the metal fire.

Most fire extinguishers are Class A-B-C.

That dude was extremely lucky :yesnod:


It burns under water too. They showed that in science class in 7th grade.

At my previous employer, I made the compressing "jack" that filled the solid rocket boosters with a wet slurry. The base plate was a piece of 8" thick steel plate that was 48" by 60" . That's over 6500 lbs just for that plate.

Once the booster were filled with the wet slurry, they were moved to building a few miles away from anything to dry.

Once they are lit/burning, the only way they go out is when they burn up all the fuel.

:iagree: We had a job where we had to weld magnesium. We were REQUIRED to have someone in the welding area with a Class D fire extinguisher ready to put out a fire when the welder was welding.

One of the large industrial plants I worked in had stuff that water made much worse and the only thing you could do was smother it with a dry sand. The building was off to one side and there were all sorts of containers around with a shovel and sand handy. There was also a large garage type building just loaded with that sand nearby.

Good thing it wasn't raining.

I worked in an office at one of the largest green sand foundries in NA. One day we heard a huge blast that shook the building. Later found out that as they were loading scrap metal into the furnace, evidently there was a crushed 55 gallon barrel that had a couple of gallons of water in it. Got everyone’s attention

Heh, dude backed up pretty quick. Imagine if he had used that half an atom of a brain before combining wet and molten metal.


Story time...

So there we were unloading a segment of an ICBM from a C-141 to a tractor trailer. The segment was at the pivot point of the aircraft and the trailer. All of a sudden, the sound of metal on metal screeching was heard. I began running and so did everyone else. In hindsight, I coulda saved my breath. If there had been a bang, I wouldn't have known it. Evidently, the aircraft crew member miscalculated the remaining fuel on board. When the segment reached the pivot point, the aircraft nose raised and thus the screeching.

I’m pretty sure he is doing it wrong. But I’m no metaloligicalistic man.