Thermite: Could've changed my Life

This post is about a slice of my life that I've told nobody about. But for some reason, I felt like making it a part of my blog for record ^_^ Nothing personal to it, so I don't mind telling it to the world.


About 6 years ago, in 2004. I was still a secondary school student, searching for the horizons, and at the same time, experimenting with Pyrotechnics, the art of making incendiaries, fireworks, and at it's most destructive state, explosives. Simply put, playing with fire.

I was a kind of kid who had no fears (except the fear for cockroaches I suppose), and Fire.... was my favourite subject at that time. It always kept me intrigued..... a flame.... it felt just like a living thing... like a monster, that, when you feed it, it grows. And it constantly needs food, you have to keep feeding it to keep it alive.... but feed it too much, and it becomes uncontrollable.... too little and it dies....

Then it moved along to explosives.... the coolest destructive technology up till today, of course that ignores the sci-fi vaporization technology and cryonics which is capable of freezing people within seconds, that's another story altogether. I spent tonnes of hours and money researching and experimenting... and the materials weren't cheap either.... but I still kept at it.


Well, soon enough, I was notorious in my school for playing with fire and setting of smoke screens from the classroom. Most people didn't know it was me, but heard of the incident when a classroom suddenly burst out in smoke after school. I was in Junior 3 back that. And it was fun ^_^


2 years later though. A group of people came in contact with me. For a job for me. To make things simple. Lets just say there was this store they'd been eye-ing. It sold pretty valuable stuff, what the stuff was I won't say =) you can keep guessing.

The shop however, had a metal grill that locked down the shop every night when it was closed. And they needed me to find a way to get rid of that troublesome thingy. They thought of blasting it wide, but I told them blasting it would make everyone think New Year arrived early. So I came up with the alternative method.

Thermite.

Thermite is a basically a mixture of a powdered metal and a metal oxide put together. The most common and easily obtainable combination is Aluminium and Iron Feroxide.... in other words... rust, yea... the brownish coloured flakes that peels off your car when you leave it for a month beside the sea =)

With the right proportions of Aluminium powder and Iron Feroxide mixed together, you now have a compound that when ignited, burns at temperatures up to 2500 degrees Celsius, can melt nearly ANYTHING from steel all the way to concrete.... given enough time, that is... And it also burned as bright as the SUN! (Assuming the sun was the size of your fist that is....)

However, obtaining the material was expensive. I couldn't just take some junk car left to rust and scrape all the Iron Feroxide I needed (besides, normal rust and Iron Feroxide is a tad different, but lets not get technical); nor could I get aluminium powder by what? grinding coke cans???

But there was another problem. Setting a compound that burns at 2500 degrees isn't just a let's-strike-a-match-and-throw procedure. It required something HOT enough to start the reaction.... which brings us to the introduction of Magnesium ^_^ So Magnesium is a soft metal, with ignition point 630 degrees... blar ... blar .... .... (Okay... this accidentally turned into a God damn chemistry class =.=")

Then, we come back to the question of 'expensive'. So this group of people.... offers to pay for all the materials I need to prepare them the perfect formula and everything, and of course I had to be their partner in crime since no one else would be able to handle the stuff I came up with ~.~....

Summarizing, they were inviting me to help them out in a theft, where I was to use my knowledge in pyrotech to melt down some padlocked iron grilling that's in their way. And I get a split of share in the end.

I was in a dilemma.

I was short on cash. But then again, I hadn't had a mind so corrupted to do such evil deeds.... yet.... So I contemplated the situation.... and thought it over and over. "What would I do with the money? How much could I get? What could go wrong? What if something went wrong? Am I sure about this? Do I really need the money?" And worst of all.... "What if I got caught??"

So after serious consideration, and looking at the fact that the group of people seemed pretty half-arsed and wasn't 100% sure in what they were doing.

I declined.

They wanted all the information I knew about how to come up with the thermite formula. I told them they needed aluminium powder and rust, and that's all I knew. I lied. But, it could all be found on the internet, so don't blame me if you didn't search hard enough.


But after that day.... questions kinda popped into my mind once in a while.



"What if I had done it?"

"Where would I be today if I had chosen to do it?"



I will never know the answer.

Ever.

_