There was one time when I put a mold filled with liquid water in a cold container and made solid water.
that sounds super dangerous!
Extracted lsa from morning glory seeds in order to make my own knock-off lsd
Yeah, polar/non-polar extractions are about as far as my home chemistry got. But the LSA was good.
Amen, brother.
baking bread
This one is underrated. That shit is like college-level difficult
Weed science. No complicated at all, but there’s so much bro science out there…
Liquid gas column extraction of organic compounds? I’m told that’s something you should definitely do outside!
Oh no… Mine is super basic… Flower, everclear, freezer, air fryer.
Alcohol isn’t that great as an organic solvent. Are you using the air fryer to evaporate? That must be a fair fire risk!
Butane on the other hand is a good organic solvent and will evaporate at room temperature (just don’t evaporate it in a room or near any heat source).
I’m happy with it - i feel like the extraction i get is pretty good for the ease and safety of my little setup. I’m not trying to make enough to sell, just mostly making cheezits and candies for friends. When i do have a lot to process i usually do a dry ice shake.
For me it has been etching circuit boards and specifically making my own liquid tinning solution at one point. I mostly do hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide on larger stuff and ferric chloride on smaller prototypes.
Steel etching with Winsteard’s reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.
It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.
I helped create life and It was orgasmic!
Orgasmic chemistry!
Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
- sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
- streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
- also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
- a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…
It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.
Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.
A lot of those same steps/skills are used in growing magic mushrooms, if you’re ever looking for a new hobby
Made soap out of lye and a mix of fats and oils.
Stripped a cast iron pan using electrolysis, although that might be more physics than chemistry. I had to add Sodium Carbonate so that’s pretty sciencey!
Chemistry is just messy physics.
Biology is just messy chemistry.
Physics is just messy math.
Your list is in a messy order.
I once destiled water… from a but less impure water.
My great nephew as a teenager ran afoul of an old-school BBS archive website. He was certain it would be good fun to make a few incendiaries, Despite my attempts to dissuade him, he began to hide his enthusiasm, which had me worried he’d do it on his own. I figured it’d be wiser (and safer) to have someone with a bit of chemistry knowledge around when he tried doing dumb things.
We started small. I purchased some dry ice. Thermite was too boring. Elephant toothpaste was cool at first. Some petrol with polystyrene mixed in. Aluminium and acid cleaner. Then onto fertiliser tennis balls.
We eventually worked our way up to the Taj Mahal… Cyclonite. Hexogen. RDX. Unstable as the devil and more volatile than nitrated toluene, or TNT. The chemistry was very simple, but ridiculously foolish. I consider it advanced only due to the difficulty in ensuring we didn’t get to visit a hospital or get a visit from the bobbies.
Never again. It took several days because I multiplied the recipe, like a dunce. We should’ve just made TNT, it would’ve been safer, but he persisted and I indulged.
The night before the big day. At this point, we’d been faffing around a dangerous line for almost ten months, whenever he managed to wrangle some free time for more mischief. I’d managed to extract a promise, this was to be the last of it until after his national service. He agreed. Keeping it in the boot of the car had me especially anxious,and until we saw the detonation, I felt like a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The detonations in a desolate field were gratifyingly lovely though. He got the final trigger on an over sized charge, and his grin was worth the heartache.
He’s a pharmacist now.
wow I don’t know what most of these are but it sounded risky. I was reading your story hoping it wouldn’t end badly.
It was all in the name of fun… mostly. It was also one of the most memorable teaching experiences.
I thought I mentioned smoke bombs, but apparently not. They were a good litmus test to see if the boy could keep a secret. Following which were: Dry ice bombs. Thermite, Elephant Toothpaste. Napalm. Hydrogen gas explosions. (If you see a plastic bottle on your lawn filled with blue liquid, do NOT disturb. Call the non emergency police line.) Nitrogen explosions. (See 2020 Beirut explosion for visuals.) And a few other unmentionables that are much too easy to manufacture, one of which I saw in another’s answer.
RDX (Royal Demolition eXplosive) is the oomph behind the plastic explosive C-4. It is slightly more explosive than C-4, because it hasn’t been stabilized by anything.
All ended well and mostly good. Unfortunately I think I assisted the boy is believing breaking the law was fine so long as you don’t get caught. Now I can’t look at chemical formulae without my heart starting to pick up the pace. However, there were no injuries, no actual close calls except the spilled water when we started the dry ice. Following which the boy sat through several intensive lessons each on operations security, command structure and discipline, distractions, and safety. We learned safely, which is all that matters in the end.
So cool. And how do you know all this ? are you a teacher ?
No, not a professional anyhow. We’re all teachers of one kind or another.
I consider myself a hacker of the classical variety. Not a cracker, but someone who is driven to understand something until the puzzle pieces fall together elegantly. You can do all of this yourself, if you can make it through a decent chemistry book. Look for “A Molecular Approach”, Tro teaches the subject well.
Once you get to the point of understanding catalysis, you can make a detonation out of just about anything. After you can solve chemistry problems, all it really takes is a written reaction 2H + O = H2O to give you an idea of how you might go about making said reactions. The composition of Semtex is public knowledge, just ask Wikipedia.
Cooking & baking
I don’t do that much of that but I hear my guts can do some amazing chemistry on the food all on their own, not to mention the cells themselves.
I’m surprised that nobody has done an extraction of organic/aromatic content in an oil/fat ? Have you never backed some “space cakes” ? I haven’t but I’ve seen people doing it, and it’s pretty advanced chemistry when you think well
Baking
Colouring hair, baking soda+vinegar (to clean and showoff), crude fuel cell, cleaning a washing machine with borax and something (some soda?)
