Sciencemadness Discussion Board

What do you guys think, is this a cool project idea or what? making tert-pentyl acetate from OTC reagents only

Cou - 21-9-2019 at 13:58

ok i know theres more detail in a procedure than this, it's just an outline.

You could make tert-pentyl acetate from these OTC ingredients:

*rooto drain opener (sulfuric acid)

*everclear (ethanol)

*pool tablets (sodium bromide)

*magnesium fire starters

*calcium sulfate (Dessicant)

*acetone

*home depot muriatic acid

*vinegar (Acetic acid)

*baking soda (to make sodium acetate for distilling off glacial acetic acid)

ok so i could make ethyl bromide by drying everclear w/ sumnthin like magnesium sulfate, then mixing it with sulfuric acid (from drain opener) and sodium bromide pool tablets to make ethyl bromide

then make grignard reagant with the ethyl bromide and magnesium shavings from magnesium firestarters at walmart, and diethyl ether from dehydration of ethanol with home depot sulfuric acid

then add acetone x)

then use home depot muriatic acid for hydrolysis to get tert-pentyl alcohol x)

then i could make glacial acetic acid from vinegar and do fischer esterification with acetic acid and tert-pentyl alcohol to get this cool ester:




dunno wat it smells like, google doesnt bring anything up

maybe i could do this one day cuz i am member of a makespace with lab equpment. i rly wanna try this sooooo bad omg i wanna find out what it smells like

edit: i found out on pubchem it smells like bananas

[Edited on 21-9-2019 by Cou]

[Texium: fixed multiple atrocious spelling errors in thread title]

[Edited on 10-8-2019 by Texium (zts16)]

j_sum1 - 21-9-2019 at 14:43

These things are easy to say but a lot more tricky to pull off.
It would be a good but challenging project. Reminds me a lot of Nurdrage's efforts to create long-chain tertiary alcohols.
You would certainly learn a lot doing it and if your techniques were lacking you would see it in the yield. It is certainly more ambitious than I would attempt with my current skill set.

One thing to consider (of many) is that Grignards must be absolutely anhydrous. I dod not notice dessicants on your list.

draculic acid69 - 21-9-2019 at 18:37

I think it's doable for sure but it'd be a week's work.definetely not doable in a day.

DraconicAcid - 21-9-2019 at 20:02

Quote: Originally posted by Cou  

then i could make glacial acetic acid from vinegar and do fischer esterification with acetic acid and tert-pentyl alcohol to get this cool ester:


Won't work. Fischer esterification works best for primary alcohols, and doesn't work well for tertiary ones at all. To make t-butyl acetate, you need acetic anhydride and zinc chloride as a catalyst (sulphuric acid will turn the tertiary alcohol into an alkene). I would hope similar conditions would work for the t-pentyl alcohol.

Also, the banana smell is iso-pentyl alcohol. The tertiary one may be different (t-butyl is supposed to be blueberry).

Pumukli - 22-9-2019 at 03:07

This is a great project plan, Cou!

It has the obvious flaw DraconicAcid pointed out: you should choose a different esterification method.

But in general your outlined steps are doable and although lengthy, I really like the OTC approach!
What I'd like even more is a nice, detailed write-up of the whole process here on SM! :)

Even if you failed somehow, the half-project would still be interesting and maybe encuraging for others to continue the work and finish it. ;)