I managed to score a bottle of embalming fluid (PowerPakt High-Impact Cavity Fluid from Pierce Chemicals)!
The bad news is that it also contains methanol and blue dye, so some sort of processing is going to be necessary to get usable formaldehyde.
The obvious thing to do is to heat the raw product in a closed container, carrying the vapors off through a tube to bubble through chilled water. This
should vape the formaldehyde out of the crude product and redissolve it, producing a formalin solution.
My concerns are:
*What about the methanol? I'd prefer to leave it behind, but being volatile and water soluble, I'd expect at least some to come over. Not as bad a
contaminant as the blue dye, but still...
*How will I know that the transfer is finished? I'd prefer to lose as little as possible, while getting the greatest concentration out.
Protips?Steve_hi - 1-3-2013 at 09:33
WHY DON'T YOU JUST BUY FORMALDEHYDE Mailinmypocket - 1-3-2013 at 09:48
Methanol is always (or almost) in formaldehyde added as a stabilizer. Without it it would slowly become paraformaldehyde. Distilling out the methanol
wouldn't be a very good idea if you want to keep the formaldehyde as a solution. I purchased formalin and it has methanol, (albeit no blue dye) but
how darkly colored is it? For all intents and purposes I have never removed the methanol, using it as is works fine. The blue dye would annoy me
though, depending on the experiment you need it for.
[Edited on 1-3-2013 by Mailinmypocket]hissingnoise - 1-3-2013 at 09:57
I smelled embalming fluid once ─ the smell was quite faint, leading me to assume there was little formalin in there . . .mayko - 1-3-2013 at 10:15
Problem solved then!
I'm unfamiliar with the smell of formaldehyde and didn't detect any particular *odor*, but the nasal irritation was intense.
I am currently on a shoestring budget and a gutterpunk aesthetic, so I'm primarily working with whatever I can beg, borrow, or dig out of the
dumpster. Doing it this way also allows me to practice extraction and purification techniques with messy, real-world products. Fantasma4500 - 5-3-2013 at 13:22
not everybody is able to buy chemicals, due to varying reasons, but his reason is apparently the budget, no offense but its really ignorant to just
advice buying something thats not always easy to get a hold of..Bot0nist - 5-3-2013 at 14:55
I see what your saying, Antiswat, in that not everyone hase the same resources, and that it is often more educational and rewarding to produce your
own reagents.
However, I thik steve was just trying to point out that somtimes it is better to source a relativly cheap and available reagents than to try messy,
difficult, inefficiant, or otherwise troublesome isolations or extractions from an OTC or handy source.
This is espesially true if the reagent your trying so hard to get is just one of several that you may need for a planned synthesis or experiment.
