[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Pyromanics get in here (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 8/16/2008 3:15:25 PM EDT
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Does anyone know of some type of solid fuel that is really hard to put out and makes a decent yellow flame? I'm thinking something along the lines of a Trioxane fuel bar, but it needs to have an intense yellow flame not a one blue like trioxane and a small film canister sized quantity needs to burn for like 5 minutes or so. |
Magnesium. Very bright and it won't go out for a while. |
Nice exothermic reaction when you try to douse burning MG.  I think the hydrogen is liberated, and burned. It can get violent, so be careful if you do that. Also, MG is very hard to ignite, you'll need a decent blow torch, minimum. Oh, and the flame is extremely bright white, not yellow, and you shouldn't look directly at it.
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You don't need a blowtorch to light magnesium. They use magnesium for emergency firestarters, for pete's sake. How many campers carry a blowtorch with them?  Just get some magnesium shavings or a ribbon and hold a regular lighter to it for about ten seconds and it'll ignite. Don't look directly at it.
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I ad one of those Magnesium fire starters and I threw it into the fire because it was old and I sure did get a show...It was as bright as a Welding arc...  ..I lost my night vision for an hour after it finished burning..Which was about 15 minutes..The whole camp site was lit up like the center of the sun..Good thing there wasn't anyone closer than a few miles..I bet there were UFO reports that night! 
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I'm only speaking from my experience. I had about a 1.5' by .5" MG rod that I used to light chunks of. I couldn't exactly use a match or a lighter. So back at ya. Oh, a pile of MG shavings is going to be consumed in seconds, and a solid chunk will burn much longer, which is what the OP wanted. There was also no mention of camping.
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Sort of. Louis Fieser, the inventor of Napalm, was asked to make an incendiary device to be used for clandestine purposes. There was an outer shell made of celluloid and it was filled with Napalm. It burned the way you would want it to. He describes it in detail in his book The Scientific Method. To make the Napalm, refer to his patent. If you're really interested in this and want more info, send me an IM. |
Once took a box of matchheads and made a fine dust of the matchheads then mixed the dust in vaseline as a teenager. Good thing I lit the concoction on the pavement.
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Kerosene soaked rag. |
That is basically what is used currently in this particular application. I was trying to find an alternative that didn't require dumping gasoline/kerosene on a rag and getting it all over the place. |
Hexamine maybe? Kind of a waste to burn hexamine, tho. Does it have to be a solid, or can it be a paste or gel? Maybe there's a porous solid that you can absorb the kerosene with. |
Hexamine would be a great choice, but I agree it's kind of a waste since it's expensive. |
Mautz' fire ribbon. This is essentially jellied alcohol, much like Sterno but it flows more like toothpaste. |
I know this is going be plagued with the ghey, but here it goes..... A very good friend of mine, whom I've know since grade school, is a very accomplish baton twirler (ghey I know). Anyway, apparently the cool thing to do in the baton twirling world is to twirl batons that are on fire. Typically the baton has asbestos rags on the end which are dunked in a mix of kerosene and gasoline and then lit. Here's where I come in. I was talking to this friend of mine and her mother today and they were wondering if there was a better alternative because gas/kero isn't the easiest to deal with, doesn't last very long, and burns dirty (soot gets all over white costumes). So being the highly motivated engineering student that I am, I thought that if a solid with similar burn characteristics to asbestos rag/gas/kero could be found, a baton could easily be fabricated to hold the film canister sized flammable capsules on the ends. |
Diesel fuel in a sponge? |
tag |
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Preferably an MS Paint diagram. So, have you figured out who's fucking with your glowsticks? |
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Hmm. For the application you're looking at, it seems like you're stuck. Anything that's not a liquid petrofuel and will be able to maintain a flame front despite the turbulence from the "twirling" is going to be way too energetic to be safe OR to last very long. The reason gas/kerosene mixtures work well is that they're wicking to the flame front by capillary action, but getting their O2 from the air, so they're encouraged rather than retarded by the air rushing past. Everything else I can think of is going to have the same sootiness problem. I watched this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WhFsmQWViA ANd nothign I can think of would be any better than whatever they're using there. In fact, I can only see dangerous consequences to trying anything more complicated. |
Gasoline & sawdust? Or gasoline & styrofoam (home-made napalm) heavy on the styrofoam, to make it a thicker consistancy.... |
That video is now on my favorites list
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cool!  Hessian-1
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I wonder if C-4 plastic explosives would work. I've read that it requires a detonator for it to explode, but will burn slowly when lit with a normal flame. From wiki: "Because C-4 burns slowly when it is ignited with a flame rather than detonated with a primary explosive, soldiers would sometimes during the Vietnam War era use small amounts of C-4 as fuel for heating rations while on long patrols.[1] While many soldiers used C-4 safely in this manner, there are several anecdotes about soldiers attempting to put out the fire by stomping on it—causing it to detonate." |