If items in a fireproof safe are purposefully set on fire with a fully closed and locked safe, are contents outside of the safe generally safe from fire?
The safe can be placed in a secluded spot and on stone.
Your fire is gonna be significantly limited by lack of oxygen. See how long a tiny candle flame stays lit under a cup. A bigger flame will fizzle out even faster. The paper in the safe won’t even have a chance to burn, just singe.
Well if the safe is airtight then the fire will stop as soon as the safe is closed because there needs to be oxygen for fire to spread
There are other oxidizing agents that xan maintain fire.
If you fill a safe with rocket fuel and ignite it, the safe is not guaranteed to contain the result.
It’s my rocket fuel, and it was either the safe or the toilet, alright
the fire will die as there will be no oxygen in the safe.
Additionally, in general, what digital signals (if any, reliably) are able to penetrate a locked safe?
For hard-drive and chip-storage destruction, its hard to beat a drill or a hydraulic press. Holes, or snapping the storage-medium in half will generally do. From there to recyclers or landfill, either is less toxic to the environment than burning the stuff in a PC or phone.
Probably yeah. A fireproof safe will be airtight, so the system can only produce as much energy as whatever reagents you put inside.
Ok, that’s a good point and something appreciated insight.
Notice that a battery fire will produce it’s own oxygen.
What you want, if it needs refractory-cement, Kaowool, or whatever the insulation in the walls of fire-safes is, is called a Forge or an Incinerator, maybe a Kiln or a Heat-soak Furnace, and no, an off-the-shelf Fire-safe is far from sufficient without abusrdist-levels of modification.
The heat needs somewhere to go, and those safes, the plastic home-and-office-grade ones anyways, are designed to take external pressure, not hold it in. In-fact, part of why they work is that the oxygen get’s sucked-out by the fire outside -they generally aren’t air-tight, save maybe the “flood-safe” ones … which I still would be surprised to see protect anything versus prolonged submersion.
Even if you used an electric heating-element and seal the gap you need for that perfectly, you’re going to out-gas the plastics and insulation, destroying the integrity of the safe and contaminating the area with toxic fumes, long before the contents are singed-enough to cause much damage without additional oxygen. Once you’ve got an open flame, your electric heating-element is fucked, so while you could maybe BS a fire-safe to suit your purpose, its one-time-use and closing/locking it is working against you every step of the way.
If it has to be cheap/free, and low-technical-difficulty, there’s Primitivist channels on youtube that will show you how to make a forge from clay and/or clay-brick and mud.
I guess if heat-alone would do what you want, a dutch-oven over an open fire could do, or a charcoal-chimney-starter if the items are small-enough. For PID-document destruction, I use a fire-pit, or rather, I use bills and reciepts to light kindling, but I usually have enough of both that you could almost call the wood in the pit an after-thought.
