Putting out a magnesium fire with water - GIF

[tonyfoale]

A co-worker emptied the chip pan of the engine lathe he was running one night when he was running to high rpm with too little feed. I happened to be about 50 feet away, but looking right at it when the magnesium chips all burned in about 3 seconds.

In the 1970s I had a business making magnesium motorcycle wheels. This was prior to general use of CNC and I had an hydraulic copy attachment to machine the rim profile. I was always telling my guys to use the waiting time during the copying operation to scrape out the swarf from the lathe bed. Some were lazy and we had a few mag fires due to swarf build up. Quite spectacular and so was my response to anyone who did that.

Once I was finishing the rim of a used wheel by holding some abrasive paper on the rim. This produced a small dust cloud of mag particles and this ignited and took my thumb nail off. That hurt for a while.