This video is the scam…. Don’t watch it. He makes these ridiculous leaps to try to prove it’s fake.

Oily rags usually only spontaneously combust when the mortgage shorts out against the insurance policy.

Sad cause the risk of linseed rags is a real thing, but “proving” it by setting up a fake video doesn’t help the cause.

When I was a kid in the first year of high school (11 in the UK), our science teach spent half an hour explaining how thermometers work, he then had us all make one using a PE bottle with a straw and water. We had to then place our creations in hot water and record our results. Nearly everybody (including me I'm ashamed to say), wrote that the water raised up the straw when in reality it fell. He then explained that it was a ruse, because we hadn't considered that the PE bottle would expand more than the water. A brilliant lesson from a great teacher about the importance of recording facts and something I've never forgotten.

The only scam here is this video. I’m a coatings chemist, I know the chemistry. I know the reactions, and I know that oily rags catching fire is a real thing. It’s not very intuitive, so let me explain it. When you put a coating on, two things happen: it dries, and it cures. Most people think of these as the same thing, but it’s not. Drying is the solvent, which could be water, evaporating off. Curing is when the polymers in the coating cross-link and react. When Polymers cross-link, it’s an exothermic reaction, and it gives off heat. When the coating is still wet, that heat gets absorbed by the solvent and the solvent of evaporates. The temperature doesn’t climb too high because the solvent is using the heat from the reaction to do a phase change and go from liquid to vapor. Once all the solvent is gone, the polymers are still reacting. Without the solvent to absorb the heat, the temperature will rise. When you have an oily rag crumbled up, the solvent has evaporated, but it hasn’t dispersed. It’s still in pockets in the rag. Solvents have something called a flashpoint. Mineral spirits has a flashpoint of about 110°F, but acetone has a flashpoint of -20°C. Acetone is frequently used these days because it does not contribute to ozone depletion. So what happens when you have a bunch of acetone vapor around and a rag that is rapidly rising in temperature? You have the possibility of those acetone vapors flashing and causing fire. This is why you spread rags out to let the solvent vapors disperse rather than collect where they can catch fire.

This dude is spontaneously busted 😂

I'm not only a former firefighter but I have a big woodshop/shop... its not a myth but it doesn't just POOF catch on fire like that. Its more of a smolder and burn thing then an eruption of flames. Its all about how SMALL the container is and how much heat the vessel can hold and build up.

The pursuit of views plagues good content just as prioritizing profit is the blight of good engineering.

As the saying goes. Where there's smoke there is fire.

The amount of absolutely choking, foul smoke they pack into even a tiny bit of oil is very impressive. Ask my kitchenware how I know.

Former firefighter…..these things can happen. 10 guys on smoke break might help us make s’mores early, don’t worry kids the rags make the marshmallows taste better.

I watched this video and missed the smoke part - and I've actually had rags go up, and they smoke like a 80s mother at thanksgiving

I wrote a paper in college about hemp production in Kentucky. The hemp seeds would often be stored in a bin. And spontaneous combustion was not uncommon. So they constructed the bins in way to stop the build up of internal heat.

You know, my first job was working in the laundry department of a medical facility. Every night, the night shift would have to wash and then air dry the dietary grease rags. There was two fires that broke out. Both times, the night shift guy said that he washed and air dried the rags and that it was spontaneous combustion. Well one night I come in and check to see exactly what this dude was doing and sure enough, he had thrown the rags in the dryer and taped the switches down so it would run for hours on end. He did this because he would sleep in his car. Well I then saw him take the greasy, and now hundreds of degrees hot rags in a metal bin and leave it. Needless to say the guy was fired after that. Mind you this was a 50 year old grown man without common sense, and I was an 18 year old highschool drop out who knew better than this dude.

Spontaneous rag combustion is one of those things where you need the holes in the swiss cheese to align- the correct conditions with an exothermic reaction able to accelerate enough under it's own heat, the insulation to retain that heat, initial raised temperature to get that reaction going fast enough to self-heat and material capable of autoignition under those quite specific conditions. Those trash bags and likely the trash cans would've long shown symptoms indicative of being heated with portions becoming more plastic with increasing temperature leading to deforming, collapsing under their own weight, bonding to nearby material and forming holes under the kind of heat escaping that kind of runaway reaction. I've enough scars from droplets of burning polyethylene to know what it looks like when heated and ignited. The polyethylene trash bag especially has a lot of surface area relative to it's volume which would've lead to it being more prone to autoigniting before the fabric can.

I just love how the restoration videos find a hidden gem in the woods, and it's all covered in an even coating of red mud.

I'm here with another "I had oily rags catch fire and it looked like a Tatra with busted seals going uphill" story. It was so much oily smoke the workshop still smells of linseed oil years later.

Worked for Jeep in Old Paint / paint repair as a painter. We had pre-treated wipes that included chemicals like 99% alcohol, Methyl ethyl ketone peroxide, AKA: MEKP or DBJ, AKA: Deformed Baby Juice and a couple others. To give an idea how bad MEK was/is, out of 8 painters and 4 utilities that either worked in the booth or covered them, I am literally the last one alive. That said one of the biggest issue was spontaneous combustion. Although we had special grounded containers to prevent this from static, they would also combust from just the heat. Include that with painters who were from the main paint line filling in for overtime and who never dealt with this issue. They would toss wipes in any trash container including trash containers right next to 55 gallon drums of the same chemicals. Good times. We got the high risk of cancer as well as the possibility of fireworks going off in our faces. I saw it happen more times then I care to remember.

About 35 years ago, I was building some wood bases for some architectural models. I coated these with Watco Danish Oil and threw the oily soaked tee shirts in my kitchen trashcan about 5 o'clock that evening. The dinner trash went on top of the rags and about 2 AM I woke up with the smoke detectors in my house going off. Spontaneous combustion does happen.

I’ve personally had solvent soaked rags spontaneously catch fire, while at work no less. It happened after I turned my back to grind welds to the customer’s specs. I was busy grinding and being mesmerized by the glowing sparks shooting up through the air, as one does, to see exactly how or when the rags mysteriously lit themselves on fire...