Any tit with a ball mill and some time to kill can make aluminum powder easily. For thermite it doesn't even have to be very fine.

Iron oxide can be made en masse by oxidizing steel wool, which has a very high surface area and therefore rusts through quickly and easily. You can use the electrolysis method or just dunk the stuff in white vinegar. The former takes longer but is less stinky...

Steel wool in a fire works as well.

Thats lot of Scraping and a lot of Etcha Sketches... Better off using as is..

http://www.geocities.com/polyvinylchloride05/al2.jpg
it is extremly noisy and file clogs up, but it is enough for thermite aluminum

And this is why I keep coming back!

Funnier than a woodcutting axe, and true too.

two suggestions for that AWESOME setup:

1) use sandpaper instead
2) drip water over it to reduce the clogging!

im not into doing pyro, but i couldnt help myself coming into this thread from hot topics

a lot of the time, i craft items with aluminium, and i make a lot of dust. i generally keep the dust, as i never know when i want to make thermite in the future. i have so far accumulated about a cup's worth.

though grinding aluminium on a file would take a long time... do it while watching tv or something

anyway, a bit off topic, would aluminium cans or foil work, or are there too many other impurities?

I've used foil for flash powder before. I think cans might be problematic, because there's all that paint and soda/beer residue on them.

Ever heard of hot water & acetone ? :p

Sure, if you really want to waste that much in materials (acetone) and time (washing) when you could just use something else as raw stock.

Actually, leaving the paint in your thermite mix probably won't do anything detrimental to it. I just wouldn't want to have it around in a flash mixture where it's an unknown variable, just sitting there in contact with your oxidizer.

Best aluminum powder is aluminum flakes. It's best for thermite, and it's best as enhancer for HE. And those flakes are silver looking. In my pyro cariere I was using only that flaked aluminum for about 30 years. Every time it was working perfectly. I never had to grind metals, never was in position to buy atomized aluminum. I do not live in USA, but in Croatia. All pyro activites were strictly forbiden in Yugoslavia. Comunists were to afraid that Croat people were able to make arms out of pyro devices..... But, when war begun we had no arms, except police and hunting arms. And we won in the war against Yugoslavia-Serbia.
Now I am not working any more, but I still know how flaked aluminum looks. Maybe grinded or atomized aluminum is black, same as magnesium. Probably is.
And i know "some" chemistry. I was fourth chemist in my generation in competition in chemistry knowledge 1969.....
And I made at least 50 kg of such thermite. It's much easier to ignite, sometimes even BP fuse can ignite it. My thermite never failed. It makes mixture runny as liquid, so very easy to mix, and visually inspect is it equally mixed.
That silver looking flaked aluminum was excellent for LE flash charges. Maybe, with potassium chlorate is a bit to sensitive-it explodes if you step on the charge, even if not very confined, just loosely wrapped in sam paper and taped once-all around, so all the paper is covered with one layer of duct tape. If used in COB it is thunderring.