I've seen lists of OTC compounds and where to find them but I can't find any lists of non OTC compounds that can be easily synthesized from these OTC
compounds. I study chemistry in uni but we only get 3 hours lab time a week so I want to practice safe chemistry experiments at home to get more
experience. I've decided to start gathering a collection of various compounds in case I decide to do an experiment which involves any of them in the
future. The problem is I have no credit card so I'm going to start off my collection by gather OTC compounds and synthesizing as many non OTC
compounds from them as possible.
Can anyone recommend a good place to start?
hissingnoise - 9-1-2010 at 12:29
Quote:
The problem is I have no credit card.
Can anyone recommend a good place to start?
Credit cards are sooo useful, why not just get one, join PayPal and start with e-bay!
[Edited on 9-1-2010 by hissingnoise]Polverone - 9-1-2010 at 12:30
This is way too broad a question. If you want to get more hands-on experience with what you are studying, try to match your home experiments to what
you have been learning. For example, if you are studying acid-base chemistry, you can produce buffered solutions from household acids and bases and
examine their buffering capacity. Or you can extract pH-sensitive coloring materials from plants and validate their color-change endpoints against
known standards.
Depending on the complexity and reagent needs of the labs you are assigned, you might also want to explore variations on lab activities you have
already done. For example, one general chemistry lab activity I had in school was liberating iodine from an aqueous potassium iodide solution into
dichloromethane, by bubbling chlorine gas through the two-layer mixture. Some variations on this activity might be using different non-aqueous
solvents, using different oxidizers, or varying the pH of the aqueous iodide solution. This is all well-studied chemistry, and fairly safe so long as
you stick to small quantities, so you can run the experiments in advance of learning the expected results from books and journal articles. If you have
additional questions after running the experiment you should be able to look up what you did and see what other scientists have written about it.
If you come up with some activities you would like to try, but don't know how to handle the reagent or equipment needs, I'm sure members will be happy
to guide you so that you can do something interesting within your budget and skill level.entropy51 - 9-1-2010 at 12:57
One of my favorite OTC syntheses is formic acid from oxalic acid (wood bleach from hardware store) and glycerol (pharmacy). It's essentially just
heating the two together and distilling out the product, but there are a few tricks to it. I think this prep is in most of the organic lab manuals in
the forum library and on www.archive.org.
Another good example is the preparation of Br2 from OTC chemicals. Magpie recently posted a prep for that, but Br2 is best postponed until you have
some experience and a use for it.
By all means look at Woelen's web site which is part of his signature on his posts here.Rosco Bodine - 10-1-2010 at 05:40
Ingenuity at producing high quality and unusual reagents from mundane OTC source materials is essential for the pursuit of chemistry as a private
pursuit unconstrained by too much supervision, regulation, or even prohibition, which is an obstacle often encountered to what ought to be your
private pursuit.
It is partly the nature of chemistry and some other industrial sciences which are
sold supplies by wholesalers, that many distributors simply do not offer cash counter sales or retail sale quantities to low volume purchasers like
small businesses or individuals, who are a niche market which simply isn't served. And regulations are geared to keep things that way. There are a
few raw materials which can be used as a starting point for the synthesis of thousands of compounds, if you have the equipment needed for the
chemistry involved to use those raw materials in an off-label application. But making a list of such readily available raw materials which can be
used as intermediates is probably not a good idea, because it could lead to those materials being restricted also and there is already too much
regulation which seems to be steadily getting worse. The most useful knowledge can be intellectual property which is your secret kept to yourself,
and can be the same as tangible property which is most secure in your possession exclusively when you are the only person who knows you have whatever
it is you have. Obviously, nobody can supervise, regulate, tax or steal what isn't even known that you have, obeying a fundamental principle, that
the less other people know about your business, the better off you truly are. Most
of your individual scientists who have no corporate affiliation know this problem
involving security and sourcing exists, so you likely won't be obtaining any such list, for anyone having made such a list would likely not share that
list nor should they.SeaDonkey - 20-6-2010 at 12:06
Thanks Rosco Bodine, that was a highly informative post and answered a large number of things I was wondering. A large amount of the joy I get out of
chemistry is knowing how to use whatever is readily available so I'm not content with ordering every chemical I decide to obtain. Its way more
satisfying and fun devising elaborate methods of producing the chemicals you need with what you've got. Thats what chemistry is all about in my
opinion.
