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Tech

Thermite vs. Hockey Puck: Which Would You Bet On?

You’d be surprised.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

Don't fuck with a hockey puck.

Sure, you can try, but you won't really get anywhere. YouTube user Carsandwater, whose main schtick is dropping a red hot ball of nickel on various objects to see what will happen to them, may have met his match with the humble hockey puck. His usual agent of destruction did almost no damage to the puck whatsoever, so he decided to kick things up a notch with thermite.

Thermite, which you may remember from Breaking Bad as being used to melt through a padlock, is a pyrotechnic composition of metal oxide and a powdered metal which serves as fuel. Once ignited, it burns at about 4500 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's often used to weld train tracks together. Train tracks. Hockey pucks, on the other hand, are mostly just vulcanized rubber. No contest, right?

Wrong. While the terra cotta flowerpot used to hold the puck is reduced to something with the structural integrity of a tortilla chip, the puck escapes largely unscathed—a little battered around the edges, and covered with a layer of char, but that's about it.

As one YouTube commenter says, "You guys didn't believe me when I said that hockey puck was made with Slovakian witchcraft." But as this point, that may be the most reasonable explanation.