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Phanatic posted:Kid's chemistry sets today are neutered. But the materials to make thermite are cheap as hell and easy to get anyway: ordinary red rust and aluminum. It should be said that you need aluminum powder to do this right, otherwise there's not enough surface area for the thermite reaction to occur fast enough. It won't work too well if you just dump some powdered rust on a pile of empty coke cans. RedneckwithGuns has a new favorite as of 05:34 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 05:19
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Shifty Nipples posted:I made sodium hydroxide with the chemistry set I had as a kid. I stripped a stripe of the glaze out of our bathtub pouring bucket-o-chems down the drain. Raw ceramic rubbing on your tailbone doesn't feel so great. No idea what was in that bucket but it couldn't have been safe. It looks like hydrofluoric acid and methylene chloride are the two most common choices for striping bathtubs.
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May 6, 2014 05:53
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MisterOblivious posted:I stripped a stripe of the glaze out of our bathtub pouring bucket-o-chems down the drain. Raw ceramic rubbing on your tailbone doesn't feel so great. Tell us the tale of bucket-o-chem.
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May 6, 2014 06:14
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DemeaninDemon posted:Tell us the tale of bucket-o-chem. It's where Completed "experiments" got dumped in a bucket. My parents didn't see any problems with that. Then there was the time I set out to create the best cleaning product ever using the contents of every bottle under the sink. Got a paddlin' for that one.
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May 6, 2014 06:19
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A White Guy posted:yeah, but it's likely not just pure Ergot fungus. True, but give me three days with the grass, a still, a vacuum chamber, and suitable filters and I could make something that'd either get you high, make you blind, or most likely, make you dead. I'm pretty sure it'd qualify as a dangerous chemical, actually.
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May 6, 2014 08:49
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RedneckwithGuns posted:It should be said that you need aluminum powder to do this right, otherwise there's not enough surface area for the thermite reaction to occur fast enough. It won't work too well if you just dump some powdered rust on a pile of empty coke cans. I was told by The Jolly Roger Cookbook that aluminum shavings/filings would work. Then again I was also told by other txt files in the BBS's /anarchy folder that LSD was relatively easy to synthesize.
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May 6, 2014 08:51
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MisterOblivious posted:Then there was the time I set out to create the best cleaning product ever using the contents of every bottle under the sink. Got a paddlin' for that one.
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May 6, 2014 09:15
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Bhodi posted:My (layman's) understanding is that it's not the case. Inner electrons orbit faster around the nucleus than outer shell's electrons, in relation to the number of protons present. Beyond 137 protons, the inner electrons would have to be going faster than the speed of light which can't actually happen. There's a wikipedia page about it and as far as I know, it's still a mystery. Dirac's like nope, we're cool, but we won't really know who's right until we can synthesize it. My (also layman's) understanding of atomic physics is that electrons don't exactly 'orbit' and move around the nucleus like a planet moving around a sun. Instead the electron exists as a delocalised probability cloud wrapped around the nucleus, meaning that the electron is somewhere in a circle a given distance from the nucleus but it isn't 'moving' in a conventional sense.
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May 6, 2014 09:46
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RedneckwithGuns posted:It should be said that you need aluminum powder to do this right, otherwise there's not enough surface area for the thermite reaction to occur fast enough. It won't work too well if you just dump some powdered rust on a pile of empty coke cans. That reminds me, in my old school there used to be a kind of urban legend going around that a rather inept chemistry teacher almost burned her face off trying to do a thermite experiment with a wrong ingredient that basically caused the whole thing to fountain up straight into the air. From researching it a bit it seems like the most likely culprit could be accidentally using something more energetic like magnesium oxide rather than iron oxide in the same quantity, but I don't know if that would produce such a reaction. Does anybody happen to know whether something like that is possible or if it's just made up?
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May 6, 2014 12:04
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Magnesium oxide wouldn't react at all. Magnesium is more reactive than aluminium, so the oxygen will stay stuck to the magnesium and nothing will happen. If you used magnesium instead of aluminium it would be more energetic though. Possibly enough to make it spit? If there was something in there that would produce gas when heated that would definitely make it fountain up. Not sure what the most likely suspect is there, unless he got the formula confused with gunpowder and added sulfur.
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May 6, 2014 12:10
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Perestroika posted:That reminds me, in my old school there used to be a kind of urban legend going around that a rather inept chemistry teacher almost burned her face off trying to do a thermite experiment with a wrong ingredient that basically caused the whole thing to fountain up straight into the air. From researching it a bit it seems like the most likely culprit could be accidentally using something more energetic like magnesium oxide rather than iron oxide in the same quantity, but I don't know if that would produce such a reaction. Does anybody happen to know whether something like that is possible or if it's just made up? Various different oxides are used for various reasons, perhaps it was manganese oxide? Using copper oxide or manganese oxide makes the thermite easier to light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite#Types
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May 6, 2014 12:10
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MisterOblivious posted:Then there was the time I set out to create the best cleaning product ever using the contents of every bottle under the sink Same. To this day I have no idea how we managed not to mix ammonia and bleach, because we sure as hell tried our hardest MisterOblivious posted:Got a paddlin' for that one. We were unsupervised from start to finish 
hackbunny has a new favorite as of 12:16 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 12:13
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When doing a demonstration of alkali metals in water in secondary school my chemistry teacher made a crucial mistake. He set up a shield to protect the students from flying molten metal, but didn't wear a faceshield himself. Naturally the potassium he just added to the water decided to pop out and land on his forehead, burning straight through his scalp down to the bone. That was an interesting afternoon.
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May 6, 2014 13:05
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I fondly remember being 9 years old (1989), deadsprinting 2 blocks home to get $10 and deadsprinting 2 blocks back to the garage sale up the street that had a chemistry set that my best friend (who lived 3 blocks away!) and I both wanted. I can't for the life of me remember what we actually ended up making, but I ended up having to re-stain a 10sqft portion of my parents deck and there's still a few spots in the backyard where nothing grows from dumping experiment results. My son is 6 and we did Diet Coke/Mentos (more physics than chemistry, but still) the summer before he turned 5, and I already have a chemistry set picked out for his birthday this year (7). Too bad there's nothing fun (read: dangerous) in them anymore, but at least I don't have to worry about him blowing up the house.
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May 6, 2014 13:06
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Well the The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments is freely online if you ever want to print that out and let your kids setup experiments using whatever is lying around as makeshift equipment or twisting coathangers to make support stands for beakers. I'm sure you'll get adept at identifying and treating chemical burns to their thumbs as the book instructs you to hold your thumb over the top of the tube when shaking. Then again I don't think anyone can just walk into a drug store these days and just flat out ask for half of what's in the book.
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May 6, 2014 13:24
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I had a chemistry set as a kid that definitely came with a bunch of sodium hydroxide, and pretty looking stuff that you definitely shouldn't eat like copper sulfate crystals. You can buy a lot of chemicals over the counter these days, they just aren't labelled as what they contain. You can get a kilo of pure sodium hydroxide pellets for cheap as it's used for unblocking drains, same with concentrated sulfuric acid. Ammonia is a pretty common cleaner too though that's not usually in very high concentrations. Solvents are really easy to get a hold of from any hardware shop too. You used to be able to get alum from a chemists too. Growing crystals from a solution of alum is really cool. People like to think that they're completely isolated from a lot of harmful chemicals but that's nowhere near the truth.
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May 6, 2014 13:35
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The Lone Badger posted:My (also layman's) understanding of atomic physics is that electrons don't exactly 'orbit' and move around the nucleus like a planet moving around a sun. Instead the electron exists as a delocalised probability cloud wrapped around the nucleus, meaning that the electron is somewhere in a circle a given distance from the nucleus but it isn't 'moving' in a conventional sense. I don't know if you'd call it 'moving, but electrons do possess angular momentum with respect to the nucleus.
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May 6, 2014 14:54
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Alum is sometimes used for pickling, in block form as an aftershave or as an underarm deodorant and it's fairly easy to get a hold of. Magic Salt Crystals are pretty neat and have the bonus of making your whites whiter and everything else it touches bluer. I think most kids would rather grow sugar crystals 
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May 6, 2014 15:05
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Alien Arcana posted:I don't know if you'd call it 'moving, but electrons do possess angular momentum with respect to the nucleus. Yeah I was about to respond similarly. It's kinda weird to think about it but electrons do exist as a probability wave like The Lone Badger said, but one of the variables that defines where that wave is and what shape its in is velocity. If you try to put the speed of light in for that it does all sorts of crazy things.
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May 6, 2014 18:27
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DemeaninDemon posted:Magnesium ribbon is great for lighting thermite. Don't you need a blowtorch to ignite magnesium ribbon?
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May 6, 2014 18:50
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Don't you need a blowtorch to ignite magnesium ribbon? Not in my experience, a butane lighter works. Probably even a regular lighter if the ribbon's thin enough. The trouble with magnesium ribbon as a thermite fuse is that it needs oxygen and when it burns down to where you have it stuck in the pile of thermite powder it can get O2-starved and go out before it heats the stuff up to its ignition temperature. Your standard 4th-of-July sparkler is really the way to do. Seriously, when people use this for real for welding rail segments together that's what they use, it's just shorter and thicker and probably costs 10 times as much because it's all official and professional.
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May 6, 2014 18:57
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Phanatic posted:Not in my experience, a butane lighter works. Probably even a regular lighter if the ribbon's thin enough. So what's in a sparkler? Whatever it is, it sounds dangerous (and thus perfect for this thread).
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May 6, 2014 19:27
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DemeaninDemon posted:Magnesium ribbon is great for lighting thermite. Magnesium ribbon is great fun in general. I remember my Chem II lab back in High School had a sizable spool of it, something like 80 feet or so at the start of the lab. The teacher was a stereotype of "Burned out Hippie" and let us have fun in the lab when we finished our classwork early. I think there was maybe 10 feet of it left at the end of the semester.
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May 6, 2014 19:33
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Zemyla posted:So what's in a sparkler? Whatever it is, it sounds dangerous (and thus perfect for this thread). Pretty much the same stuff that's in thermite: metallic fuel (aluminum, magnesium, iron, what have you) and an oxidizer (some nitrate or perchlorate), and a binder to keep it together and slow the burn rate.
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May 6, 2014 20:09
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I once had an afternoon of drawing stick figures and dicks by dissolving styrofoam with a brush and some kind of solvent. Then I moved on to drawing stick figures and dicks in more styrofoam by melting it with a soldering iron (was small child, idiot, etc.). After I got tired of messing with styrofoam and solvents I tossed out the fuming goo-covered mess in the trash can, emptied most of the bottle of solvent on the pile to watch it melt and crumble, then moved on to burning little drawings of stick figures and dicks into cardboard with the soldering iron. When I threw one of the pieces of cardboard away I guess some part of it was still smoldering or burning slightly and I was confronted with a giant fireball shooting out of the (thankfully metal) garbage can full of styrofoam + solvent. I managed to kick the furiously burning can out the garage door, where it spilled its horrible contents and burned a nice plasticky uncleanable mess into the driveway, belching awful black oily smoke all the while. My dad put a lock on the garage door the next day.
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May 6, 2014 21:30
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The Lone Badger posted:My (also layman's) understanding of atomic physics is that electrons don't exactly 'orbit' and move around the nucleus like a planet moving around a sun. Instead the electron exists as a delocalised probability cloud wrapped around the nucleus, meaning that the electron is somewhere in a circle a given distance from the nucleus but it isn't 'moving' in a conventional sense. Kind of but the cloud's shape depends on the energy level of the electron--you get dumbbells, spheres, what ever the gently caress f-orbitals are. Rest is a-OK though. Please continue to think of electrons as probability clouds instead of particles flying around. It makes me happy.  Any deeper explanation than that and we're well on our way to quantum town. Population: who knows!
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May 6, 2014 22:14
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A White Guy posted:Especially fun about the Thermite reaction is that it produces molten Iron and Aluminium Trioxide (aka the stuff that Sapphires, Emeralds, Rubies, and moon rocks are made out of).
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May 6, 2014 22:22
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A White Guy posted:yeah, but it's likely not just pure Ergot fungus. Was also likely involved in the largest extintinction event known, the perm-triassic extinction. I really hope nothing like it happens anytime soon. Imagine that, H2S-producing bacteria receiving the right environmental conditions to go hogwild going and mass-suffocating life on earth. Falukorv has a new favorite as of 23:01 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 22:50
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DemeaninDemon posted:Kind of but the cloud's shape depends on the energy level of the electron--you get dumbbells, spheres, what ever the gently caress f-orbitals are. Rest is a-OK though. Please continue to think of electrons as probability clouds instead of particles flying around. It makes me happy. One of the first things we learned in (regular, non-AP) highschool chemistry was that electrons are vaguely-defined clouds due to uncertainty and they have weird loving shapes due to the energy levels and the exclusion principle. Granted everyone probably forgot it within a month but me and the other turbonerds but at least it was taught, and in highschool no less
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May 6, 2014 22:59
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Falukorv posted:Was also likely involved in the largest extintinction event known, the perm-triassic extinction. I really hope nothing like it happens anytime soon. Sort of like when O2-producing bacteria received the right environmental conditions to go hogwild and mass-suffocating life on earth.
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May 6, 2014 23:08
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When my institution does the thermite demo they use glycerin and potassium permagnate (iirc) as the initiator for the thermite. No fiddling with blowtorches and magnesium strips. Just two tiny dropper bottles of individually inert liquids.
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May 6, 2014 23:19
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Phanatic posted:Thermite gets way hotter than 1000C. 2500C is more like it. Yep. I've made and lit somewhere around 40lbs of thermite at goonmeets over the last few years. Melting holes in old engine blocks is fun. DemeaninDemon posted:Magnesium ribbon is great for lighting thermite. Road flares (the red ones) or marine signaling flares are better. Way better. You can also use magnalium (basically thermite mixed with magnesium powder to make it easier to light, then it lights the regular thermite) but that means buying things you can't get at Autozone. Perestroika posted:That reminds me, in my old school there used to be a kind of urban legend going around that a rather inept chemistry teacher almost burned her face off trying to do a thermite experiment with a wrong ingredient that basically caused the whole thing to fountain up straight into the air. From researching it a bit it seems like the most likely culprit could be accidentally using something more energetic like magnesium oxide rather than iron oxide in the same quantity, but I don't know if that would produce such a reaction. Does anybody happen to know whether something like that is possible or if it's just made up? I'd bet on copper thermite, as Kozmonaut noted. It produces a larger volume of liquid metal per volume of thermite ignited, so it has a higher propensity for spattering badly than regular thermite. However, you do NOT want to put your face over a container of regular thermite that's been ignited, in my experience, the shower of sparks and smoke (to say nothing of the intense wave of heat) goes 5-8 feet in the air if you're lighting a pound or two off. AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Don't you need a blowtorch to ignite magnesium ribbon? A blowtorch with a striker and a propane cylinder costs like 15 bucks at Home Depot. I can't even remember how many I own at this point because I tend to lose them and buy another because I need to fix something NOW, then find the drat thing the second I finish fixing whatever I was working on. ATP_Power posted:When my institution does the thermite demo they use glycerin and potassium permagnate (iirc) as the initiator for the thermite. No fiddling with blowtorches and magnesium strips. Just two tiny dropper bottles of individually inert liquids. That's probably the neatest thing I learned today. Thanks.
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May 6, 2014 23:44
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Few pages back but:Code Jockey posted:Haha I heard about this on NPR this morning. I live about ten blocks away from there. I drive by that house regularly.  I wonder what toxins I've been breathing in.
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May 7, 2014 01:20
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RedneckwithGuns posted:It should be said that you need aluminum powder to do this right, otherwise there's not enough surface area for the thermite reaction to occur fast enough. It won't work too well if you just dump some powdered rust on a pile of empty coke cans. Putting aluminum foil in a blender will do the trick though, we used to make thermite to set poo poo on fire with a few years back, friend I did that with is now making ridiculous jet engines, His current project is a valveless pulsejet wich puts out something like 500-600 pounds of thrust.
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May 7, 2014 02:16
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kastein posted:A blowtorch with a striker and a propane cylinder costs like 15 bucks at Home Depot. I can't even remember how many I own at this point because I tend to lose them and buy another because I need to fix something NOW, then find the drat thing the second I finish fixing whatever I was working on. Yeah those things own. Use them for lighting bbqs, fire pits, thermite fuses, other fires. Everyone go buy one or like 10.
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May 7, 2014 04:45
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Gamma Nerd posted:Few pages back but: Nothing too bad. Everything was generally sealed. I'd be more worried if you lived along Lake Washington. More sewage leaks than I can keep track of.
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May 7, 2014 04:49
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Phanatic posted:Sort of like when O2-producing bacteria received the right environmental conditions to go hogwild and mass-suffocating life on earth. Bacteria and funig can do some wild things under the right conditions. I read the notes of a Soviet article in which it was proposed to produce vitamin B by starving Pichia spp of iron.
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May 7, 2014 08:34
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Boiled Water posted:Bacteria and funig can do some wild things under the right conditions. I read the notes of a Soviet article in which it was proposed to produce vitamin B by starving Pichia spp of iron. That may seem strange but almost all B12 is produced by bacterial fermentation. Commercial sources of B12 process the product of bacterial fermentation with potassium cyanide and sodium nitrate and heat.
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May 7, 2014 19:19
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Bhodi posted:
I think the coolest bit is that tungsten carbide superatoms weigh 195.851 g/mol, and act virtually identical to platinum (195.084 g/mol). It's so close to being a perfect replacement.
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May 8, 2014 02:51
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My username
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May 8, 2014 05:09
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