Sciencemadness Discussion Board

What is the scariest reaction/syth that you do?

binbin - 2-6-2015 at 17:17

Just wondering, but what is the scariest, or most uncomfortable reaction or syth that you do or have done? What do you dislike about it? What would be your contingency plan in the event of the unexpected?

Thanks!

cyanureeves - 2-6-2015 at 17:45

fulminating gold that blew up between my legs and up to my face was the scariest.next time i will not let it get dry,next time i will LISTEN when i'm told about ammonia compounds.recovering gold has always been a hit or miss for me when doing small batches.fulminating gold though will always form without fail and with tiny amounts of gold too.this compound hasnt really been much of a benefit at gold plating for me so i am in no hurry to make it again.i hate explosives because a human being can be gone in a blink of an eye.anything that can disappear in a split second is not worth the effort to make in my opinion.

Zombie - 2-6-2015 at 23:28

Separating two canines. The reaction is instantaneous, and violent. The resulting by products are most unpleasant (urine, blood, feces, fur, skin), and can take hours to clean up.

That's probably the most unpleasant , and dangerous reaction around my lab.

szuko03 - 3-6-2015 at 07:27

The scariest and stupidest thing i did was allow a nitration of glycerin to go out of hand. I was young and just playing around with mixing this and that basically and my friends grandmother had glycerin style suppositories, basically looked like little rifle bullets. Anyway I mixed them with some potassium nitrate in sulfuric acid and heated it. It was so terribly impure and boarder line pointless because anything that came of it would have been in a mixture of god knows what.

But being stupid and not expecting it to work at all as it was literally "mix stump remover, with drain opener and add the suppositories" which for minutes did nothing at all then like instantly the bullet like suppository melted and the mixture became outrageously hot and boiling evolving nitric oxide and possibly creating NG in a hot acidic environment in my friends enclosed room. I heroically grabbed the vessel and took it outside placing it on the ground. That friend thinks the story is hilarious and loves the fact I did it, it like makes that part of his life interesting "remember that summer..." comes up every few years :)

I learned a lot about not mixing random things and we all have to learn somehow. It is funny because here that is probably acceptable anyone else hears the story thinks im crazy.

byko3y - 3-6-2015 at 09:07

I always feel uncomfortable whne making primary explosives. I wonder how it is made on industrial scale. Probably in small batches (up to 5 g) and costs a lot. And you actually need to press this stuff before it can be used - this is the scarriest one. Few times I briefly lost hearing testing this stuff, thanks god I've never had any incedental detonations.
Cyanogen and H2S made me little nervous, although I see no danger in them, until you do them on few moles scale.
Also, one time I burned a piece of floor by spilling a burning gasoline on it. It was scary to see the flames being as high as you are, but it had finished burning relatively fast, and I had not time to really scary, because I needed to extinguish fire.

blargish - 3-6-2015 at 18:13

I too had a nervous encounter with H2S during the preparation of a sodium polysulfide solution for use in a Zinin Reduction to make picramic acid. I didn't anticipate that a boiling polysulfide solution would emit enough H2S to become problematic; however, the distinct smell of rotten eggs was persistent and I ended up getting a bloody nose (strange, since I almost never get them), which I later found is one of the symptoms of lower-level H2S exposure... yikes.

Anything involving primaries always has me on edge (in my somewhat limited experience with them), which I guess is a good thing as a heightened sense of caution is always welcome when working with those. Also, anything involving the formation, and subsequent inhalation, of nitrogen oxides is never fun :(

skip - 3-6-2015 at 18:33

Sodium metal in ethanol. Its not fun to stand next to.

Ozone - 3-6-2015 at 20:23

Bahahaha! Szuko tried to nitrate suppositories and had a runaway! Funniest thing I have heard in a long time.

The most dangerous thing I have done (and this is relative to a few dangerous things), involved sealed tube reactions (in glass with teflon threaded caps). I once had one literally strip the threads on the cap and (unexpectedly) discharge the contents at 160°C. The cap was a heavy projectile, and the solvent (THF) instantly vaporized. Fortunately, it did not catch fire...but, it was a serious pain to clean the resulting mess out of the hood.

Fortunately, I did not have to clean a similar mess out of my pants...but, it was close.

O3

subsecret - 4-6-2015 at 17:45

I made bromine via the TCCA, HCl, and NaBr method yesterday, and I added the acid way too quickly. Most of the ~25mL came over in under a minute, and I almost ran out of the lab. Thanks to my fume hood, I didn't even smell the bromine.


[Edited on 5-6-2015 by subsecret]

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byko3y - 4-6-2015 at 17:59

Well, sarin is not VX and is as dangerous as phosgen. You need fumehood/closed apparatus/closed breathing system + someone with first aid kit staying next to you.
It's much worse when you incedentally synthesize phosgen without realizing this fact, like adding conc H2SO$ into CCl4 or passing chlorine over ember.

Loptr - 5-6-2015 at 04:30

Quote: Originally posted by Ozone  
Bahahaha! Szuko tried to nitrate suppositories and had a runaway! Funniest thing I have heard in a long time.

The most dangerous thing I have done (and this is relative to a few dangerous things), involved sealed tube reactions (in glass with teflon threaded caps). I once had one literally strip the threads on the cap and (unexpectedly) discharge the contents at 160°C. The cap was a heavy projectile, and the solvent (THF) instantly vaporized. Fortunately, it did not catch fire...but, it was a serious pain to clean the resulting mess out of the hood.

Fortunately, I did not have to clean a similar mess out of my pants...but, it was close.

O3



Where you using one of those glass pressure vessels? I just got one and was wondering what the operating conditions were, as I can't seem to find them listed anywhere.

szuko03 - 5-6-2015 at 09:14

Yes I was young and stupid basically found some old anarchists cook book type stuff. Honestly it was one of the best things I could have done it kind of marked a significant change in my life. Use to be chemistry was just something I did to impress friends with things like pressure vessel noise makers if you will from evolving hydrogen gas or CO2 in an enclosed space and I would actually make an attempt at understanding the chemical equations occurring but this gave me the field of organic chemistry in a relevant way and in an at home way.

I was always into chemistry but this make it way more available its hard to explain but that was the "precursor" to my home lab if you will.