

Boing Boing Video clip on YouTube

I've always been fascinated by thermal lance since I saw it in the movies being used in safecracking (since then the Mythbusters have confirmed the plausibility but kinda sorta debunked its feasibility in a heist).

Theo Gray, whose book Theo Gray's Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home - But Probably Shouldn't was featured on Neatorama Spotlight, did something even better: a thermal lance made of bacon!

From Theo's highly entertaining Gray Matter column in Popular Science:

A thermal lance, typically made of iron instead of bacon, is used to cut up scrap metal and rescue people from collapsed buildings. It works by blowing pure oxygen gas through a pipe packed with iron and magnesium rods. These metals are surprisingly flammable in pure oxygen, releasing a huge amount of heat as they are consumed. The result is a jet of superheated iron plasma coming out of the end of the pipe. For sheer destructive force, few tools match a thermal lance. But iron isn't the only thing that's flammable in a stream of pure oxygen. Bacon is fattening because it contains a lot of chemical energy tied up in its proteins, and especially in its fat. You can release that energy either by digesting it or by burning it with a healthy supply of oxygen. The challenge isn't creating the heat; it's engineering a bacon structure strong enough to withstand the stress of a 5,000°F bacon plasma flame.

Bacon, is there anything it can't do? http://www.popsci.com/bacon