Anyone else here into Home Chemistry?
- Thread starter Jango
- Start date
actually no, but I always wanted to make the potato clock, if you can call it make
never got round to geting the lcd and probes etc
i'll need to stick that on the to do list
That's so cool, I made one with my little 'un. He spent ages trying to make his toys run on potatoes.
Plugging in the microwave might be tricky.
It's simple enough if there's no colours involved, but my attempt to achieve a factory standard uniform blue didn't go well. It was very blotchy.
If you clamp a couple of pieces of aluminium together then connect it to the mains in the obvious fashion you get a hell of a lot of sparks but the aluminium does melt together.
Iodine will turn aluminium black but not nickel if you get it hot, a zippo with carefully arranged bits of iron produces quite enough heat for this. Some plastics are transparent to IR, which makes identifying them by IR spectroscopy difficult, so I've tried burning them to work out what they were based on smell and severity of headache.
Nitrogen triiodide I believe results from stirring iodine crystals into anhydrous ammonia, pouring the result through filter paper and letting it dry. It isn't dangerous as far as I know, but I haven't made this as I don't want a contact explosive or to smell ammonia.
All you need is concentrated ammonia (880, for the fogies), & iodine crystals, both somewhat tricky to get hold of for the househusband. Soak the crystals in the ammonia for a few hours & filter, the paste left in the paper is the stuff you want. You probably remember, but it's stable as anything when it's moist and volatile as hell once it dries out. There's a lovely gif of someone setting it off with a feather around the internet somewhere.
not with the 12v Car battery it wouldn't.
You mean those of us who are chemists? Word of advice: don't sniff it. Not unless you wondered how painful having a red hot needle shoved up your nose would be.
Personally I do enough chemistry at work to ever want to do it at home. Not to mention the legal aspect of the kind of chemistry I do at work...
M
I gave up trying to blow myself up in the lab.
I've made nitrocellulose.
Iodine crystals are very easy to make from potassium iodide.
Wasn't there some lad who started playing around with tritium, and over the years managed to make weapons grade plutonium?
Now supposedly has a job somewhere fiddling with the stuff, started off in a shed in his back garden, they had to get a team in to dispose of all the radioactive waste lol.
Always loved this kind of stuff, everyone knows it's easy to knock something up from some simple household goods, always fancied a dabble but never got into it.
Polystyrene and petrol, isn't that some form of napalm?
Now supposedly has a job somewhere fiddling with the stuff, started off in a shed in his back garden, they had to get a team in to dispose of all the radioactive waste lol.
Always loved this kind of stuff, everyone knows it's easy to knock something up from some simple household goods, always fancied a dabble but never got into it.
Polystyrene and petrol, isn't that some form of napalm?
Well i heard he obtained the necessary bits how he could, and over the years refined it.
Could be an urban myth but to me it didn't sound like it, sure there was a big ruckus about it, seeing it was all done form his shed.
Ah here we go, radioactive boy scout, tried making a reactor at home
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
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