Drilling Ferro rods.

[muddstopper]

My son asked me to drill some holes in a couple of ferro fire starting rods last nite. I wish I had thought of taking a camera with me while doing it. Just to say the light show was impressive. I had reservations about doing this as I didnt know how well the drill would penetrate and would the ferro rods shatter while being drilled, I didnt consider the flame ups. I used a old 3/16 drill bit just because i didnt want to chance over heating my good bits. Drilled pretty easily, but getting used to the burning chips flying everywhere took a little more time.

Thought I might should add to not try to blow the flames out, you might end up with singed eyebrows.

 

[BukitCase]

Mudd, at least ONE of your fellow TBN'rs has NO problem visualizing - My last two jobs were Instruments/Control in rare metals plants. Most metal fires you do NOT put out - you just get out of the way and wait til they run out of fuel. We dealt with Zirconium, Niobium, Titanium, Magnesium, etc, most of them from ore to finished product.

Sounds like your "fire sticks" may have a bit of more than one of those metals... Steve

 

[muddstopper]

Yea, I dont kknow much about them except that shavings will burn. drilling a hole in one was like trying to drill a burning sparkler.

 

[BukitCase]

Speaking of sparklers, the first rare metals co. I worked for had a chip processing/reclaiming plant and used to dry the wash water and reclaim Titanium fines - most of that material got sold to fireworks mfg's just for that purpose. They'd mix those fines with some sort of binder and dip the sparkler wires in the slurry and dry them (very carefully :=) ...Steve