Shaped Charge/Thermate Cut vs. Manual Debris Removal Cut

Originally posted by Pootie

Originally posted by ben91069
They did not clean the slag for resale, but I assure you it was recycled. They cleaned it because the slag is not necessary to study the steel as it is scrap.

Is it scrap or evidence? I would assume if they are saving it in a ware house it is evidence and should be left alone.

The columns would obviously be evidence, but due to the fact that these columns were cut with a torch, there would be no reason to save the slag.

Read what I posted again. The first picture = lots of slag (a feature none of the other "cut" beams posess). The first picture = 45 degree "cut" (desirable for demolition, fact).

Everything you said is true, but there are simpler reasons to explain all of these things. First, there is no reason to remove slag from scrap metal at all unless you need it cleaned up to inspect it or if it some finished piece of manufacturing. At some point if they wanted to inspect that particular piece, they would have placed it in a warehouse and removed the slag.

Second, the 45 degree cut was made after the collapse by a torch as part of the demolition and excavation efforts. How else would you remove a column of steel anchored a few floors down to a foundation? You would simply cut it apart in manageable sections. The reason it is cut at a 45 angle is two-fold; It reflects the heat from the cutting flame away from the operator, and it creates a strategic point of separation, so that the column can fall towards a certain direction (usually in a safe and predictable manner).

You could use the thermite shaped linear cutting device to cut at any angle I suppose but 45 degrees is preferred for demolition to allow the upper portion to "slide off".

You are forgetting one thing. Thermite is hot enough to melt steel, but without a pressure source of gas to "blow" the molten material through, you are not likely to get a clean cut on steel, but a nice region of melting and re-solidifying of the material. A thermite burn is not going to cut steel in a precise controlled manner the way a torch would.

The company that sells one of the linear cutting devices has no pictures of a cut beam from what I have found. You need a username and password to access their site. However, debunkers have always demanded that a thermite "cut" by nature would be SLOPPY and leave lots of slag. There is a LOT of slag in the first picture...

Sorry, I skipped over that post, but I will read it and make comment about it soon. The main reason a thermite cut would be sloppy is that there is no system by which the molten material is removed, which causes it to run and pool. A torch has enough gas pressure to blow the molten steel out of the cut so it produces the trails of slag just like in the first picture. That is what you are seeing is a torch cut. Unless a thermite cut has a way to do this, the column would never separate, but the weight from above would compress the molten region and cause a lot of deformation, with less slag.

NONE in the rest. The rest of the pictures show cuts made to remove debris and NO SLAG from the cuts.

Again, they happened to remove the slag to better study the evidence is all.

Originally posted by ben91069
Let me reiterate that slag can be sold as scrap but it is not the primary reason these beams were cleaned, just so you do understand what I am saying and are not tempted to put words into my mouth again that I am saying that the slag was removed just for its scrap value. Do you understand this now? Are we getting somewhere?

No, this is a huge runon sentence I do not understand...

Read as written you are contradicting yourself.

[edit on 4-5-2007 by Pootie]

Here, I will re-write it so you can follow:

Slag can be sold as scrap.
The beams were not cleaned of slag for the primary purpose of selling the slag for scrap value alone.
The beams were cleaned, primarily to facilitate studying them better.


[edit on 4-5-2007 by ben91069]

I have years of exp. cutting steel with a torch. Most all of the slag is blown away from the steel when cut with a torch. Any slag that sticks to the steel would be on the other side of the steel from the torch. That means in the frist photo any slag left on the beam would be on the inside of the box beam. The only way that beam could have been cut with a torch is if someone reached down inside of it with the torch and cut it from the inside and thats not going to happen. There's very little slag left on steel that has been cut with a torch. The cut in the frist photo was made with some type of cutter charge not a torch!!!

From what I've seen of thermate charges, it is quite a messy way of doing things.

The first picture shows an example of controlled demolition using thermate or so.
Any other pictures showing debris with angled cuts: thermate could be used too.
Why should workers on ground zero cut big devices at an angle way? The direct way
(perpendicular cut) should save torch-gas and time. Therefore: why should they do their
work in such circumstantially way? (I wrote that as a german)

Probably it was a thermal lance. Look at all the cuts, they were obviously made by a person using some kind of cutting tool. Yet there is too much slag on the first picture. A regular oxyacetylene torch would take forever to cut through those columns anyhow...

No way you get a cut that looks like that from thermite, though.

Well I guess they could of had some perps in with thermal lances to weaken the structure before 9/11. If they could do it out of sight I would imagine it would have been very quiet except for the occasional thump or rumble from 'controlled' localized failures. Seems like a wise thing to do if you're going to take a structure down of that magnitude. Jenga anyone?



The problem is we don't know which is which from the steel specimens without labelling it all up, some of this is steel cut in the clean up and some of it is not.


[edit on 28-3-2009 by Insolubrious]