Alright everyone, Cody here and today I broke a socket extension while
trying to take a tire off of a vehicle.
You see, I probably had about a thousand
foot-pounds of torque on there when it broke and I'd like to fix it to such an
extent that it can handle about a thousand foot-pounds again.
Now you could try welding this with an arc welder.
I've done that before, but it just never holds. So I'm going to try doing this with thermite,
let's make up some thermite and see if we can do that
Alright here's the iron oxide
I've got some borax potassium dichromate and some graphite here as additives
This is the aluminum we're using and see here, it's fairly fine
I made it myself by taking an aluminum rod such as this
I turned it down in the lathe and into little aluminum chips and threw those
in a ball mill overnight and this is the result
I'm going to go ahead and put this in with the iron oxide here.
Mix that up
I have my thermite right now. Alright, now that I got that mixed up i'm gonna go ahead and
test it to make sure it works properly
by putting a little bit inside of an eggshell in the ashes there i'm going to
go ahead and light it see how it does
Alright, got my match ready
Here we go
Didn't see much did you
I think that stuff will work just fine
Let's let it cool naturally how I would have it cool inside the mold and then
we'll test the hardness
There it is, I fished a sample out of the ashes, all ready to break it away from the slag
and see how it looks. There is our button in the middle. It looks good there's no bubbles
you can already tell it's pretty strong doesn't shatter or anything
yeah hit it as hard as I like, I can't dent it
so I think that's pretty good
the alloy is just what I need
all right let's see if we can weld that wrench
there's my mold you see I've got the tool in there and see it down in there a
little bit of a gap
at the bottom of this mold, which is made out of sand and clay
you can probably see better on this side
the idea is to fill this cavity up with thermite and when it burns it will make
molten metal it will go down and try to come out this hole, that way it will
give a good bond and perhaps melt that in with it and give a good weld so i'm
going to put in a piece of aluminum foil here to stop
stop it from falling down just yet, so I want the thermite to be well and reacted
before it comes in contact with the steel
so let's put the thermite in now, shall we.
Alright there's the thermite
hopefully it's enough
let's go ahead and set it off and use a blow torch to ignite it
fingers crossed
ironically a match actually works better sometimes
there we go
wooow that's hot
there's the molten metal
whoa
- See that smoke
oh that was
I should not have been standing that close. Ok
I'm alright, but wow that was a lot of heat. Think it turned most of the sand into
glass right there
it's still too hot to get near it
a lot of the thermite actually splashed out, I don't know if you can see
it's kind of weird
and I'm gonna let that cool off naturally and
and then probably in half an hour I'll break open the mold and see what it looks like
right here it is
I think it's mostly cooled off now still feels warm but I think for the most part
it's not glowing anymore
let's go ahead and break it open shall we
I'm very curious to see what happened
you can see it got that thing kind of hot
is that metal or slag
you know what, it didn't weld it
not at all
look at that
dammit
what did it do in there
I guess I will have to arc weld them together
big lump of steel there
a bunch of slag
well, that's disappointing, was kind of cool to make though, you know what i'm going to
do then I guess is go ahead and grind that, and it did melt it little bit but
just didn't flow in and melted enough
yeah what I plan to do is, I grind it out
bevel it and then just weld it with a regular arc welder and it does work, it
just won't be as good as it was before
as for this
piece of the very hot high carbon steel think i'm going to make a knife out of it
something like that I guess
I mean it's some pretty good steel
right
well
hope you enjoyed that I'll see you next time