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ave369
Eastern European Lady of Mad Science
Posts: 596
Registered: 8-7-2015
Location: No Location
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Mood: No Mood
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A particularly minor blunder, but still: preparing a chemical that loves to form colloidal solutions, then feeling all butthurt because it does not
want to be filtered out. Happened today with sulfur. In my country, an "ersatz solder" is commonly sold, which is made by melting sulfur with powdered
aluminium. It is cast into sticks and used by setting the stick on fire and sticking the burning stick into a hole, which makes the melted mass of
sulfur, aluminium and aluminium sulfide to fill the hole with a metallic glossy mass.
What did I do? I ground this ersatz solder with a mortar and pestle and dissolved it in KOH. Aluminium dissolved, and sulfur formed a colloidal
solution, which I failed to filter out.
Smells like ammonia....
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tommy claisen
Harmless
Posts: 14
Registered: 27-9-2015
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Mood: No Mood
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today decarboxyating in a 50L glass reactor at 180c. glass/PTFE tap underneath decided to crack, we were only a few feet away when this happened and
bolted out of there. we were lucky that the contents were essentially chemically innocuous, although the resultant thick white aerosol that quickly
filled the room appeared somewhat disturbing. thankful for no burns or fire. tomorrow will be a better lab day.
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karlos³
International Hazard
Posts: 1520
Registered: 10-1-2011
Location: yes!
Member Is Offline
Mood: oxazolidinic 8)
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Oh I have a nice example!
Once, in the lab, whole class being there, a girl put a beaker full with diethyl ether on the magnetic stirrer, turned on the heating... thinking it
was the stir control...
She turned around to the teacher and claimed her stirrer didn´t work...
Just in this moment the beaker had started to boil vigorously and splashed on the heating plate (which was indeed turned to nearly full heat)...
It was not very loud, a "whoosh" sound, as the fireball was nearly at the (very high, around 3 and a half meters) ceiling!
No one got hurt, well, except the teacher was angry at her so you could say he was butt hurt 
We made fun of her being that stupid for a whole year.
Edit: Damned, I´ve just read Bromic´s stories!
Some of them caused me to hold my breath, for having situations nearly that worse... on a much lesser scale, but anyway...
Phew! Luckily you didn´t loose an eye or else...
Once got a splash of lye in my eye, reading your lye story reminded me much of it.
Had to get ascorbic acid solution dropped in my eye every half an hour for two days... even at night(This is the treatment for lye burns in the eyes).
Lost a good portion of my sight on that eye because of this.
[Edited on 6-11-2015 by karlos³]
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hyfalcon
International Hazard
Posts: 1003
Registered: 29-3-2012
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Mood: No Mood
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Was she blond? I can legally ask that being a male version. Thank God I don't all take after that trait, though I have run across a couple male
iterations.
[Edited on 6-11-2015 by hyfalcon]
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Schleimsäure
Hazard to Others
Posts: 156
Registered: 31-8-2014
Location: good ole Germany
Member Is Offline
Mood: Probably
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I just ruined my 1l chrystallising dish as I cleaned 500g of sodium and got a nice fire in the bathroom sink.
Because I needed to heat the sodium in 3 batches after the first one I emptied the dish and on the bottom some very small beads of sodium were left in
the dirty slurry (the sodium was very dirty). After collecting the somewhat bigger beads out of the slurry the remaining sodium crumbs were very
small, below 1 mm in diameter.
I wanted to go on with rest of the uncleaned sodium and therefore wanted to use the dish again. So I put in some ethanol into the slurry and waited
half an hour for the sodium crumbs to react and neutralize. Of course much to little. As I thought there is no more hizzing from H2 production I went
to the bathroom with the dish and wanted to free it from the brown mess in order to go on with cleaning of the remaining 300g of sodium afterwards.
But just after the water contacted the slurry in the sink - poof. And the ethanol was burning. The flame was firstly like 20 cm high and grilled my
water tap of the sink 
I deceided not to use my CO2 extinguisher and let it burn down - like 10-15 min. A fair bit of smoke and stinking in the bathroom and after 2 min or
so the boro dish cracked. The watertap was unharmed.
Lesson learned: Even with smallest amounts of sodium one should wait a day or so after adding ethanol and before adding water.
[Edited on 6-11-2015 by Schleimsäure]
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Deathunter88
National Hazard
Posts: 522
Registered: 20-2-2015
Location: Beijing, China
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Mood: No Mood
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Quote: Originally posted by Schleimsäure  |
Lesson learned: Even with smallest amounts of sodium one should wait a day or so after adding ethanol and before adding water.
[Edited on 6-11-2015 by Schleimsäure] |
Another lesson, get a fire blanket. Your crystallising dish would have been saved had you draped a fire blanket over it. (MAKE SURE YOU GET ONE
WITHOUT ASBESTOS)
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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I just dropped a fairly expensive assembly composed of an addition funnel, a 3-neck flask, and a drying tube onto a test tube rack and came away no
more damage than with 2 broken test tubes, neither of which contained anything at the time. They were cheap flint glass tubes I bought locally at a
craft store. I consider myself lucky.
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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Oh and just now I was removing solvent from an oil that wouldn't crystalize... I tried applying gentle warming and a high vacuum and realized that
there was a leak in the apparatus. So I sealed it, and the solvent flashed, turning the oil into a foam that fortunately instantly crystalized almost
entirely inside the boiling flask (my Claisen got a little bit of product in it).
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Schleimsäure
Hazard to Others
Posts: 156
Registered: 31-8-2014
Location: good ole Germany
Member Is Offline
Mood: Probably
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| Quote: Originally posted by Deathunter88 | | Quote: Originally posted by Schleimsäure |
Lesson learned: Even with smallest amounts of sodium one should wait a day or so after adding ethanol and before adding water.
[Edited on 6-11-2015 by Schleimsäure] |
Another lesson, get a fire blanket. Your crystallising dish would have been saved had you draped a fire blanket over it. (MAKE SURE YOU GET ONE
WITHOUT ASBESTOS) |
Yes, with a 6l CO2 extinguisher I just thougt about the "big incidences". Good hint, will aquire one.
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j_sum1
Administrator
Posts: 6333
Registered: 4-10-2014
Location: At home
Member Is Offline
Mood: Most of the ducks are in a row
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I have a fire extinguisher -- powder type. I feel inspired to also get a fire blanket and possibly a CO2 extinguisher as well.
Thanks arky for sharing.
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Twospoons
International Hazard
Posts: 1326
Registered: 26-7-2004
Location: Middle Earth
Member Is Offline
Mood: A trace of hope...
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I built an electrolyser with a gas separator and NaOH as the electrolyte. I was using it to fill two balloons (one with hydrogen, one with oxygen).
After a while one balloon slipped off the gas exit tube, resulting in a fountain of hot NaOH solution thanks to the pressure from the other balloon.
This fountain covered both my lab, and me. Fast disrobe, and jumped in the shower - no damage to me thankfully. But boy did i feel like a twit.
Lesson: secure all fittings in a pressurised situation.
Same electrolyser, new game: making exploding foam by bubbling the mixed gas through soapy water. This time we (had some mates around) thought we'd be
cautious and try a lighting a small amount of foam before going large. The resulting bang left my ears ringing for two minutes. Acquired hearing
protection for the rest of the festivities.
Lesson: sometimes you can't be careful enough! We should have had ear protection right from the start .
My biggest mistake involves power electronics - not chemistry I know, but I'm sure a few of you play with electricity too. I was running a prototype
electric fence energiser, which stored about 50J at 900VDC. I then turned it off, and went to so something else. Half an hour later I came back and
picked the PCB up. Blam! 900V, 25J, DC shock from arm to arm (only got half the juice as the energy was split into two banks internally). I think I
was lucky to survive that one, took me an hour to stop shaking, and left holes burnt in my fingers.
Lesson : capacitors storing lethal charge should have bleed resistors and a tell-tale (neon or LED) to let you know when they're charged.
[Edited on 9-11-2015 by Twospoons]
Helicopter: "helico" -> spiral, "pter" -> with wings
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TheIdeanator
Harmless
Posts: 29
Registered: 8-11-2015
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Mood: No Mood
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When I was young I mixed some bleach and nailpolish remover (acetone) to see what would happen. Having no clue what I was doing, I poured them both
some of each into a solo cup. It started getting warm and the top of the cup started tipping over. Not wanting it to spill, I put it into another
plastic container. That didn't end up helping. I'm not sure what else I did but I ended up with stringy bits of solo cup all over. I mixed rubbing
alcohol and bleach at the same time with similar results. I found out that I made chloroform. That was my first foray into chemistry.
I was screwing around with Bi, trying to grow crystals on the stove and generally screw around with molten metal. I put some back in the pot to
re-melt. Usually the re-melting was a trivial process, the water flashed off on the surface except for one time. I put the metal back in the pot and a
second or two later there was a pop and molten metal went all over. One droplet got my glasses and some others are still embedded in the cabinet. I
think what happened is that when I cooled the metal with water, a bit got trapped subsurface that couldn't flash off when I re-introduced it to the
melt. I couldn't repeat the accident, even dropping water directly on the molten metal. Nobody was hurt.
Steam explosions are no joke and are also require special conditions in order to happen.
[Edited on 9-11-2015 by TheIdeanator]
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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I just started dehydrating some 3A seives that had been used to dry ethanol. I let the seives air dry overnight to remove ethanol and then put them in
an oven at around 300 C. They burst into flames! I watched the seives burn for a couple of minutes and then realized that the top of my oven was
turning red hot, so I removed them. The flames refused to be blown out; blowing on them made things much worse. I finally just suffocated the flames
with a metal lid.
Some of the sieves have lost their wet look, probably due to the high temperatures from the ethanol flames. I'm now drying the sieves at a low
temperature and slowly increasing it to avoid any unwanted fires.
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ave369
Eastern European Lady of Mad Science
Posts: 596
Registered: 8-7-2015
Location: No Location
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Today is a bad night in my lab: I received a sneaky bite from my nitric acid. That polyethylene stopper that I close the bottle with, it was always
somewhat fishy: it sits tightly in the bottle, requiring some fingernail action to pull it out, and it is always wet with nitric acid. But before this
day, I always managed to pull off the finger acrobatics to pull this bung out safely, relying on my long fingernails: the worst thing I got was yellow
fingernails.
Today I completely forgot that I broke a nail on my right middle finger, and started to open the nitric acid bottle the usual way. And got nitric acid
on my fingertip, mostly right under the nail.
Smells like ammonia....
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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| Quote: Originally posted by ave369 | Today is a bad night in my lab: I received a sneaky bite from my nitric acid. That polyethylene stopper that I close the bottle with, it was always
somewhat fishy: it sits tightly in the bottle, requiring some fingernail action to pull it out, and it is always wet with nitric acid. But before this
day, I always managed to pull off the finger acrobatics to pull this bung out safely, relying on my long fingernails: the worst thing I got was yellow
fingernails.
Today I completely forgot that I broke a nail on my right middle finger, and started to open the nitric acid bottle the usual way. And got nitric acid
on my fingertip, mostly right under the nail. |
Ow.
Yesterday I dropped my 105 degree vacuum takeoff adapter on the floor. D'oh.
I temporarily substituted an assembly constructed from a Claisen adapter and gas inlet adapter... it's not an ideal setup, but it will work until I
get a new vacuum takeoff adapter.
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Texium
Administrator
Posts: 4618
Registered: 11-1-2014
Location: Salt Lake City
Member Is Offline
Mood: PhD candidate!
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| Quote: Originally posted by JJay | I just started dehydrating some 3A seives that had been used to dry ethanol. I let the seives air dry overnight to remove ethanol and then put them in
an oven at around 300 C. They burst into flames! I watched the seives burn for a couple of minutes and then realized that the top of my oven was
turning red hot, so I removed them. The flames refused to be blown out; blowing on them made things much worse. I finally just suffocated the flames
with a metal lid.
Some of the sieves have lost their wet look, probably due to the high temperatures from the ethanol flames. I'm now drying the sieves at a low
temperature and slowly increasing it to avoid any unwanted fires. |
Now imagine doing that but with ether
instead of ethanol...
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ave369
Eastern European Lady of Mad Science
Posts: 596
Registered: 8-7-2015
Location: No Location
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Mood: No Mood
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Also today my Vigreux column broke in half out of the blue. Damn Chinese glass.
Smells like ammonia....
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James Ikanov
Hazard to Self
Posts: 81
Registered: 12-7-2015
Location: Alaska
Member Is Offline
Mood: Zen
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A number of months ago (at least 8), before I had the money for proper glassware, I collected a sample of MnO2 from a fairly large oldschool battery I
was taking apart for the carbon rods inside. I simply chucked it in a jar and forgot about it.
It was very wet when I stored it so about 4 months ago, at least, I decided I was going to dry it out. I opted to just put the jar on my hotplate and
run it gently. What's the worst that could happen? I left the room for a moment to check on something else, and when I came back I noted that there
was a small "leak" near the base of the jar.
I tried to grab it and quickly move it into an un-compromised container.
Imagine my surprise when the bottom section of the jar shears clean off, and my arms are covered in a mixture of hot MnO2 and near boiling water!
I sure learned my lesson after that. Jars are for storage, NOT heating. 
One of many of my various poor decisions with experimentation in the past, but at least it was a learning experience, even if there are still MnO2
stains everywhere.....
“To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace” -
Vincent Van Gogh
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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Well, I just averted disaster....
Last time I tried drying out 3A molecular sieves, they caught fire. I was heating them in a glass beaker in an oven, and they were moist with ethanol
(they had been air dried, but they looked wet). The flames were alarming and could have caused damage to the oven but weren't that serious.
Today I spread out a much larger quantity of molecular sieves in a pan and allowed them to air dry until they lost their wet look before putting them
in the oven at 300 C. To my surprise, the entire pan caught fire, and when I opened the oven I was greeted with a large blue fireball followed by
shooting flames. I immediately closed the oven. The flames weren't extinguishing themselves, and I'd prefer not to destroy the oven or catch anything
else on fire, so I grabbed a spray bottle full of water that I had been using on my terrariums and misted the flames until they went out.
I'm not sure why so much ethanol is adsorbed into the sieves, but I guess I'll try heating them gently before hitting them with high temperatures.
[Edited on 21-11-2015 by JJay]
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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| Quote: Originally posted by zts16 | | Quote: Originally posted by JJay | I just started dehydrating some 3A seives that had been used to dry ethanol. I let the seives air dry overnight to remove ethanol and then put them in
an oven at around 300 C. They burst into flames! I watched the seives burn for a couple of minutes and then realized that the top of my oven was
turning red hot, so I removed them. The flames refused to be blown out; blowing on them made things much worse. I finally just suffocated the flames
with a metal lid.
Some of the sieves have lost their wet look, probably due to the high temperatures from the ethanol flames. I'm now drying the sieves at a low
temperature and slowly increasing it to avoid any unwanted fires. |
Now imagine doing that but with ether
instead of ethanol... |
I'm guessing it could blow the door off of the oven... scary stuff.
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JJay
International Hazard
Posts: 3440
Registered: 15-10-2015
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That sucks!
My Chinese kit appears to be a mix of low quality and high quality components. The sep/addition funnel appears to be high quality; the flasks appear
to be high quality; the condenser appears to be high quality; and everything else looks like it was picked out of the reject pile. The vacuum takeoff
adapter was pretty low quality but I have a good one now, and I figure I'll just replace components as they fail with American counterparts. Vigreux
columns aren't cheap....
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Magpie
lab constructor
Posts: 5939
Registered: 1-11-2003
Location: USA
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Mood: Chemistry: the subtle science.
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| Quote: Originally posted by JJay | I just started dehydrating some 3A seives that had been used to dry ethanol....
I'm guessing it could blow the door off of the oven... scary stuff. |
From an earlier post of mine:
I had been using 3A mole sieves to dry some 95% ethanol. Wanting to re-activate them I poured them into a 9"x9" glass cake dish and set them on the
kitchen counter to dry. They were already mostly dry after sitting in a large beaker overnight. After about an hour on the counter they looked dry so
I set the kitchen oven for 500°F (260°C) and placed the sieves in the oven. Some time after the oven had reached temperature I hear a loud bang
while sitting in our family room watching TV. I looked in the kitchen expecting to see some heavy object laying on the floor; but there was nothing
amiss. I then surmised that the noise must have come from the oven - an explosion of ethanol/air pushed the spring loaded oven door open and then it
closed itself with a bang! So I just continued the heating until the time (2 hrs) was up then turned off the oven. A short time later I opened the
oven and retrieved the sieves, after assuring myself that the oven temperature was below the auto-ignition point of ethanol.
The single most important condition for a successful synthesis is good mixing - Nicodem
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The Volatile Chemist
International Hazard
Posts: 1981
Registered: 22-3-2014
Location: 'Stil' in the lab...
Member Is Offline
Mood: Copious
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Bromic Acid tells great stories...
I once (mind you, before I know how chemistry worked) thought sparklers *must* contain some sort of oxidizer to work. Since I had sublimed sulfur
powder, I thought I could make some pseudo-gunpowder. I ground up approximately 10 sparklers, and added all the sulfur I had. I placed this on a very
large piece of copper sheet metal I had acquired. Well, thank God it wasn't actually gunpowder, there was a lot of this stuff... I lit a sparkler with
a magnifying glass, and carefully placed it on the mix. It flared up with the most intense heat and light I'd ever seen at the time. Great spectacle
for a pre-teen. It stayed lit, spewing 'sparks' for a while. The sulfur was obviously reacting with the copper sheet, forming nice blue-green
splotches on the metal (in retrospect, it could've been an iron sulfur-oxyanion too). I realized, though, that the flying pieces of metal and molten
mix flowing on the copper sheet were a bit of a fire hazard, given the fact the whole thing was sitting on dry grass in our back yard. Trying to stay
calm (but still feeling ridiculously cool for figuring out how to do this), I picked up the sheet by its corners with my pointer wingers and thumbs,
each corner on a finger or thumb. Now, this plate was approximately 12 inches long and 3 inches wide. And it had been allowing a thermite reaction to
continue on its surface for a little while now. So it slid out of my fingers and thumbs, melting four lines down them, one for each corner, one on
each finger. It took a bit to feel the pain, but of course it didn't last too long, since I now had to stamp out the fire caused by the fallen sheet
and dripping metal. Parents never did hear much about it, though it made a good story at school...
Lesson: 1. Don't be Stoopidd.
2. Know what your reaction is doing, d3on't assume what's in something.
3. Adding sulfur just makes it smell bad. And make clouds of suspicious gas/smoke.
4. Don't be rash, and don't do chemistry if you're just doing it for bragging rights.
Not that chemistry's bragging rights anymore. Heck, the girls in my chemistry class last year probably thought I made drugs due to my 'friends' in the
class making loud jokes and statements. This year, I get asked for help by a few, but I've been ostracized from the general social world anyways. If
I'd stayed in band I'd at least've had those friends... :/
Chemistry stories, man. They're great. Max Gergel's first novel is my favorite biography, story, almost favorite book.
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ave369
Eastern European Lady of Mad Science
Posts: 596
Registered: 8-7-2015
Location: No Location
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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Today, in a break between playing Fallout 4, I decided to test my brand spanking new distillation setup. When I ran it on water, it all did
handy-dandy. But then I've run it on Glauber's nitric acid synthesis, and totally forgot about that rubber bung sitting on the top of my Wurtz
flask...
Poor, poor bung. It weeps some black liquid into the flask...
[Edited on 1-12-2015 by ave369]
Smells like ammonia....
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MrHomeScientist
International Hazard
Posts: 1806
Registered: 24-10-2010
Location: Flerovium
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Just scrap a tire wall and some Nuka-Cola bottles and you'll have a new chemistry station in no time!
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