How to Burn a Magnesium NeXT Cube

Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "How do you set a magnesium NeXT cube case on fire? It took this guy two years, *two* cases and the cooperation of Lawrence Livermore Lab's burn cell." A seriously bizarre tale, but worth a read if you're curious. And I have one of those cubes in my office... all sorts of fiendish ideas start.

Comments

Hm...

[steveo777]

Looks a lot like what we used to do with old Apple II's back in Electronics class, only there was more of a BOOM, and less flame.

Ahh, those were happier times.

Re:Anodized

[ct]

Was the Magnesium anodized?

from the article...

"The paint started bubbling, then burned away, leaving the black
anodized magnesium alloy. ("It's an alloy that is resistent to burning,"
the voice of the soon-to-be-ex-NeXT-employee came back to me.)"

//ct

Burning magnesium

[ackthpt]

I used to shave and burn (DowMetal) magnesium as a kid. Made my own sparklers with iron filings, magnesium powder and sulphur. :)

On a different note, there used to be a speed week or something up at the Bonneville Salt Flats which would end with a ritual burning of a VW beetle engine block (which is magnesium) and would probably be visible from Mars. Can't find a link tho.

Re:Burning magnesium

[markmoss]

Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. Wrong. Metals (alloys or otherwise) do not contain oxygen. However magnesium has sufficient affinity for oxygen that when it's hot, it will rip H2O apart to get more oxygen. That is, spray water on burning magnesium, you supply it with oxygen AND it releases hydrogen gas, which will drift til it mixes with some non-oxygen depleted air, and then probably ignite...

Re:Burning magnesium

[Faux_Pseudo]

VW engin blocks are fun. We got one once and put it on a fire pit at the beach. We were about 2 blocks away once it got burning and could still feel the heat and it was bright as day out there at 02:00.
"No officer that was here when we got here." "We thought about putting it out but couldn't get close enough."

Re:Anodized

[dhovis]

I can answer this as a materials engineer.

There is no need to mark it as being a flame risk. The possiblity that it would catch on fire is nil. Bulk magnesium is very hard to burn because it is a very good heat conductor. If you have a lot of magnesium, it is very difficult to ignite, because it conducts heat away. and you can never get any part of it hot enough to ignite.

If you have a small piece (Like a strip that they use for chemistry demos), there is nowhere for the heat to go, so you can heat it up to the ignition point much easier.

Why do you think they had to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab? It is not easy to generate that much heat safely.

Here's how it's done

[the_other_one]

1 - Set NeXT Cube up as a server

2 - Post Story link on /.

3 - Pictures tomorrow...

NeXT boxes

[BWJones]

Remember this NeXT poster?

"In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers.
Here are seven of them." The seven:

R/W Optical Disk
The power of Unix (with a GUI)
VLSI chips
Postscript (display and printing)
Digital sound
Multimedia e-mail
Object-oriented/visual development

The NeXT cubes that we used to use were something special. This NeXT poster essentially got it all right, years before its time. Hell we even had a program called zilla.app written by a true code master (Richard Crandall) that allowed us to do distributed computing across platforms (SGI at least). This was back in 1989 or 1990? I think. Wow great machines. I wish I could have purchased one for my own use like the ones in the lab we had back then, but the in our campus bookstore Cubes outfitted like that were something like $10k. But that would get you a completely badass system in all of its black cubeness. Geek coolness was practically sweating out of those things. A Cube with color, an optical drive, one of the sweetest monitors I had ever seen, and best of all a development environment that is still to this day, an amazing workspace.

Unfortunately at $10k a pop NeXT could not afford to keep making machines, but they did focus on the important stuff. (The NeXT OS reborn again as OSX and Webobjects which I wish I had spent more time learning). As the successor to NeXTstep I have great hopes for OSX (If you have not seen the development environment of OSX particularly the GUI developing environment of OSX, it is pretty sweet.) Here we have it folks, potentially the pinacle of UNIXdom. Time will tell.......

Anodized

[mr100percent]

Was there a disclamer in the box with the cube saying there was a flame risk? Sure, the flame is cool and all, but if only one was made of Celulose.

Was the Magnesium anodized? Would that impair its flammibility?

Re:Kind of Cool, But Kind of Stupid

[sracer9]

You wouldn't burn down Abe Lincoln's cabin would you?


Dunno. Is that made of magnesium too?

mirror

[mosch]

http://overtone.org/sass/cubefire.html is a mirror, if you're finding the main site to be slashdotted.

I think Don MacLean was there...

[sconeu]

And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The Day The NeXT Cube Died...