Making Al powder yourself ?

Ball mills are discussed in fireworks discussions. Look for a publication by Sponenburg on amateur ball milling. !!!PAY FOR IT!!! THE GUY IS BROKE, NO MONEY. It covers size, media, rotation rates, times - everything you need to know.

*Safety Warning* - it is possible to make enough powder in a sealed jug such that no oxygen is left in the mill jug. The material inside is hot and not passivated. It can ignite and burn with a very, very hot flame. A knowledgeable pyrotechnician was very seriously burned by milled Mg. The flame was hot enough to emit substantial amounts of ultraviolet energy.

Al is not Mg - it can be just as energetic and the Al + O2 reaction is very, very fast and exothermic.

If you're milling down to under 10 micron powder, let the jug cool and let air in very slowly. Under 1 micron (400 nm?) it's a regulated munition.

Tsath' has a safety question.

He recently obtained some Al powder, although not for pyro purposes.

It is in the form of -3micron dust, really, really fine, feels so fine that a little placed between first and second fingers and rubbed between same, feels like the finest of fine icing sugar, or perhaps very finely ground flour.

He also has some very fine Mg, forget which, either 300 or 500 mesh (quick Q-how does mesh size measurement correlate with mm or micron size of individual particles of the bulk substance.

It doesn't ignite. That is, neither the Mg nor the Al autoignite upon contact with air, and whilst no effort has been made to ignite the magnesium there is of course little doubt that it would do so quite readily indeed. The Al, surprisingly, when a pile (and this, for safety reasons if nothing else, was a small pile, a little heap on the end of a corroded and blunt, rusty, otherwise useless) scalpel blade was heaped thereupon and held until glowing red hot in the hottest part of the gas flame of the household cooker, when bored, sleepless and with little to do but stare at the clock and chainsmoke rollups.

Surprisingly it did not ignite. Although when used in a thermite reaction it did indeed ignite and burnt in far from a slowish, steady manner, forget the mesh size of the Fe2O3, it is simply labelled 'red iron oxide' upon its tin and was purchased long, long before the aluminium or Mg made its way here. Years, probably. The thermite rxn, using an equimolar proportion of Al to Fe2O3 (with respects to the oxygen content of the oxide) and with a thin layer of the powdered magnesium atop it to make sure it reached sufficient temperature to ignite...ignite it did, and with a rapid !!WHUMPFF!!, blazing to a glaring, glowing white hot slag, with chunks in it that seemed to be perhaps sintered metallic Al in a semimolten, easily fractured state, maybe alloyed with some Mg, which was not mixed in with the thermite but simply poured as a layer on top of the charge, contained in a plastic pot that served simply as a disposable container. Initiation by means of permanganate, sugar and ignition by a bit of glycerine. That failed to start with so a quick prod with the flame of a brazing torch was employed, taking care to keep the gas line well WELL away from the reaction. Initiation was more or less instant. And when broken the chunks themselves ignited and burned with an incandescent white flame that was hot enough to leave behind visual phosphenes.

Indeed even looked at slantways, that reaction was hot enough to leave coloured phosphenes before his eyes. This, whilst not, unlike these compositions, explosive at all, reacted with the speed of a flashpowder type composition, liberating sufficient heat for the entire mass to glow white hot, and the bits of metal left behind to autoignite when prodded with the metal end of a spade, leaving burns on the metal of the spades blade, the blob/chunks of mixed metal/slag burning with a bright white flame, presume it was mixed iron/Al perhaps traces of Mg although with that being a thin layer at the top one would have presumed it to have likely been consumed in an instant by the thermite charge placed beneath it, the Mg was sufficient to be about a half inch deep over the top of the charge and a small amount of it pressed into a depression in the thermite.

So, it should, especially given the 300-500mesh size of it (300 I believe, the Al is the <3 micron particulate size powder) (the magnesium this is) should, will have been ignited for certain and if it didn't partially melt and take part in the redox rxn itself, then it should easily have been ignited, and partially thrown up a short distance into the air in particulate form, and should have been consumed instantly, should it not? there were certainly an initial cloud of crackling white sparks before the thermite charge itself took, upon which it went off with a speed comparable to flash powder (Al/chlorate or Al/pot perm or else Al/potassium nitrate) and a blinding, searing white flash, instantly reduced to a pile of glowing white and in a few places, red hot slag, intermixed with metal of whatever alloy or description, which cannot precisely be described as molten but almost granular due to admixture with alumina slag.


On their own, without oxidizer, just what is it likely to take to accidentally ignite in particular the aluminium, or the magnesium (less interested in this because I know full well how flammable it is, but in the form of 300 mesh particulate dust its obviously going to be a LOT more reactive and a lot easier to ignite and start fires. Which is not desired, generally speaking, the thermite reaction was just done on the 'yay postie just dropped off his latest deliveries' principle, nice, shiny new chemicals to play with and to covet, in Tsath's gollum-ly manner

Not taking TOO much notice of the MSDS-es, because you know how MSDS sheets are. They always, always way overstate the dangers of things to the point of utter uselessness. When the theoretical dangers that may under certain, restricted conditions occur if prodded hard enough into doing so, are made to sound so utterly deadly they make dimethylmercury sound like babie's gripe water then its counterproductive IMO, because then people are likely either/and to take any and all warnings as guff, and ignore them all, despite their being valuable information mixed in with the flatulent gibberings and shriekings of terror and apocalyptic howlings of immanent worldly obliteration, or not even bother reading them. Hell, your average MSDS for say, household concentration of aq.NH3, for distilled H2O, or NaCl often read like the devil his own self penned them in the blood of tortured sinners mixed with water from the Styx, using a calligraphy brush carved from babies' bones and eyelashes ripped from kittens and bound thereto with glue boiled down from the spines of such archons of generosity and kindliness as Mother Theresa. And whilst I myself have been hunched over the bench-top since I was a kid, albeit starting out with little knowledge, and experimenting as the alchymists of yore, having very few and very old books of theory to learn from, and growing steadily in knowledge and ability, my knowledge is by and large, autodidactic (including 'book learning' mind you, and continued devouring of it, I do not just mean randomly combining reagents and seeing what happens, I just mean to state that there are gaps in my knowledge, owing to my having to wrest the gems of delicious information from the morass of irrelevancy and of garbage. This is (and I will introduce myself in whimsy if/when I am granted access to it, rather than here) but in short, its because my secondary school education was special ed (I'm Kanner's/classically autie, or [ew ew ew ew ew] as [vomit] the likes of Autism Squeaks would word it 'severely' autistic', and didn't have the opportunities that many in other schools must have had. I like, nay, more than 'like', absolutely love being 'severely' classically autie. It is a gift, not a curse. Sure, a gift with a few annoying features at times, but not the neurotype analogue of a pair of woolen socks from a relative one hates in the first place (wool...ew...just...*shudders* nasty...now thats one of the bad features)

Please do forgive my slightly long post here, it is the only one of its kind I intend, and because I have not access to whimsy, I wished to do a short introduction (yes, for me, its short, I'm somewhat hyperlexic, although born severely dyscalculic and following an unfortunate incident involving excitotoxicity and near fatality, have been left just shy of acalculic. So please, I humbly request, be patient when I screw up my math, or have difficulty balancing equations. The latter of those two things I did not use to have, but following the excitotoxicity, and its been 12-14 years (cant tell which, I haven't enough fingers to count on) since that awful and traumatic series of events, and only when on memantine have I been closer to functional. I just ask that people here rather than launch into a verbal assault, explain, if they can take the time to do so, WHY and WHERE I erred. For err I know I shall, and for people to know it is not merely from stupidity or worse, being owed to not really giving a shit and being a 'cookbook chemist' of the anarchist's cookbook kind of slop-guzzling whorespawned level.

Just make sure you open the mill and expose it to the air periodically and don't open it and pour it straight out into another container letting it fall through the air to prevent a lesson in pyrophoricity

@ Toady,

Toady, I work with nearly 1000 chemicals and your comments crack me up ROFL! and you are correct they have me afraid to shake the saltshaker lol.
You Sir have a way with words.
I will have to try powdering some metals, I have a little double tumbler and have access to lots of ball bearings of different sizes.
I will look through the suggestions, Thanks all.

aerosolize molten aluminum?

Chemically produced aluminum powder