I work in a chemistry lab
So you do know what happens when you mix acids and bases.
for sure
Okay, question, what’s the least hazardous reaction you wouldn’t want an amateur to ever attempt? Somewhere in between etching art into something and making your own Teflon lives a cutoff line for future shed projects, but I don’t know where that would be exactly.
I’d stay away from anything with explosion hazards and toxic gases unless you have a fume hood. Boiling acids too.
Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.
In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren’t. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)
What if I do have strong ventilation, or even a lab-style fume hood? “Don’t produce any gasses” is a lot more restrictive than “don’t plan to deliberately work with gasses”.
Also, more exotically while we’re at it, what about pyrophoric gasses? If you your silane pipe breaks it should “just” start a fire.
If you have a fume hood that’s good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.
As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?
In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I’m taking a restrictive approach in my advice.
For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)
Ah. I see. A campfire produces dangerous gasses, technically, so that came across a bit “don’t do anything”-ish. This is the internet, I promise not to sue you if I decide to do some electroplating in a small, totally sealed room, and get hurt.
For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)
Okay then, wow. So that’s a nope, haha.
Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really “If there’s something that’s likely to hurt you because you aren’t properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it’s likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds.”
I take in oxygen and turn it into philosophical thought.
Same, except I turn it into farts.
Basically the same thing, honestly.
Cooking & baking
I don’t do that much of that but I hear my guts can do some amazing chemistry on the food all on their own, not to mention the cells themselves.
Extracted lsa from morning glory seeds in order to make my own knock-off lsd
Yeah, polar/non-polar extractions are about as far as my home chemistry got. But the LSA was good.
Amen, brother.
For me it has been etching circuit boards and specifically making my own liquid tinning solution at one point. I mostly do hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide on larger stuff and ferric chloride on smaller prototypes.
There was one time when I put a mold filled with liquid water in a cold container and made solid water.
that sounds super dangerous!
I’m surprised that nobody has done an extraction of organic/aromatic content in an oil/fat ? Have you never backed some “space cakes” ? I haven’t but I’ve seen people doing it, and it’s pretty advanced chemistry when you think well
Made pH 14 lye to break down some plant cells and extract stuff. Then putting “surgical spirit” (I hate common english terms) in it to extract it, pipetted it carefully and let it evaporate.
Came here for the DMT extraction comments.
Isopropyl alcohol
No, “Wundbenzin” which is clean “Benzin” which is “Petrol Ether”.
Its really confusing, in german we say “Benzin” to a mix of alkanes that are between Kerosine (really light) and “Petroleum” (pretty heavy, used in lamps) afaik.
In the US “Benzin” would be “gasoline” or “petrol” which is already so weird. And as that name for alkanes of medium long length is not reused, stuff like “spirit” or “ether” come along which are as far as I know both wrong (not an alcohol or an ether)
In the US, surgical spirit is isopropyl alcohol.
Yay!
Mac n cheese
Titration of pool water to find its acidity using a commercial kit
And then given the results, Pooli suggested I dump about 5lbs of baking soda in there to neutralize the acidity. Worked like a charm.
I wrote a report on alkali-silica reactivity in concrete.
Had to do a flame test to identify old fuel for recycling.
Made blue dye from indigo, and red and orange dye from madder, mixing in alum and other things. Making blue is amazing, it comes out green then changes colour all at once. Get the mix wrong and you get the wrong colour… Also we boiled one batch of madder and got orange instead of scarlet, so even the temperature had to be regulated.
Most recently, been making etched plates from the inside of soft drink cans, etching with copper sulfate (they sell it in Bunnings as a fertiliser). Lots of fun!
So yeah mostly art projects.
That said even baking a cake is pretty fancy chemistry.
I make solder paste stencils from soda cans. What is special about copper sulfate? I typically use hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide just to see the progress better.
I got old
I like this answer better than mine.
hahah, much less explosive. It’s a slow burn
Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
- sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
- streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
- also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
- a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…
It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.
Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.
A lot of those same steps/skills are used in growing magic mushrooms, if you’re ever looking for a new hobby
Production of chlorine gas
