I'm happy with it - i feel like the extraction i get is pretty good for the ease and safety of my little setup. I'm not trying to make enough to sell, just mostly making cheezits and candies for friends. When i do have a lot to process i usually do a dry ice shake.
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.
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.
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
Steel etching with Winsteard's reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.
It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.
I used to be an industrial chemist. We did esterification reactions to turn chicken fat and laxatives into oil field soaps by the truckload. So I guess mid-level organic chemistry?
Mixtral 8Γ7B says you were making "sodium alkyl sulfates" for cleaning the unique long chain carbon chemical properties unique to oil drilling rigs and that chicken fat and laxatives were potential sources for the long chain alcohols needed for producing such soaps.
She is pretty good at sexting, but how good is she at cleaning an industrial oil rig as a mid-level chemist? /s
There was also something about a long chain alcohols reacted with a concentrated acid to make carboxylic acids plus heat pressure and water to make soap.
That level of detail is usually not quite right with this kind of LLM, but I'm curious overall how close it got? Duck Duck Go tried to convince me to shop for oilfield bath soap soap on Etsy instead of telling me what an oil field soap is and nothing came up on Wikipedia.
They are certainly not primary sources. I did a quick search and the internet is far less trustworthy now. LLMs are like water cooler conversations. According to the internet, you basically did Etsy stuff. I think the LLM got a little closer.
We did some sodium salts for personal care, but the chicken fat in this instance is oleic acid, or sometimes soybean or canola oils, and the laxatives are sorbitol or PEGs. Mix and cook them and out comes a surfactant like SMO. We sent it to the midwest to help with fracking.
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.
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)
Gold and Tellurium nanoparticle synthesis was the most interesting but I am not sure it qualifies as "complicated" given the procedures we used.
If computational chemistry qualifies, I have run on the order of 5,000 DFT optimizations+freq and of those, the most complicated ones involved metallocarborane clusters. These are composed of Boron, Carbon, a metal and different groups coming off the cluster. The largest one that I worked on took about a week to run the calculations on my home machine.
Stripped a cast iron pan using electrolysis, although that might be more physics than chemistry. I had to add Sodium Carbonate so that's pretty sciencey!
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.
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 :)
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."
Extraction and purification of surface residue for triple quadrupole analysis looking for pesticides, or inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry looking for arsenic, but that's practically physics by that level.
Never got why people are so obsessed by combining both which would basically turn it into sparkling water. Individually both have a chemical action, but mixing both wouldn't bring anything
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.
My great nephew as a teenager ran afoul of an old-school BBS archive website. He was certain it would be good fun to make a few incendiaries, Despite my attempts to dissuade him, he began to hide his enthusiasm, which had me worried he'd do it on his own. I figured it'd be wiser (and safer) to have someone with a bit of chemistry knowledge around when he tried doing dumb things.
We started small. I purchased some dry ice. Thermite was too boring. Elephant toothpaste was cool at first. Some petrol with polystyrene mixed in. Aluminium and acid cleaner. Then onto fertiliser tennis balls.
We eventually worked our way up to the Taj Mahal... Cyclonite. Hexogen. RDX. Unstable as the devil and more volatile than nitrated toluene, or TNT. The chemistry was very simple, but ridiculously foolish. I consider it advanced only due to the difficulty in ensuring we didn't get to visit a hospital or get a visit from the bobbies.
Never again. It took several days because I multiplied the recipe, like a dunce. We should've just made TNT, it would've been safer, but he persisted and I indulged.
The night before the big day. At this point, we'd been faffing around a dangerous line for almost ten months, whenever he managed to wrangle some free time for more mischief. I'd managed to extract a promise, this was to be the last of it until after his national service. He agreed. Keeping it in the boot of the car had me especially anxious,and until we saw the detonation, I felt like a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The detonations in a desolate field were gratifyingly lovely though. He got the final trigger on an over sized charge, and his grin was worth the heartache.
It was all in the name of fun... mostly. It was also one of the most memorable teaching experiences.
I thought I mentioned smoke bombs, but apparently not. They were a good litmus test to see if the boy could keep a secret. Following which were: Dry ice bombs. Thermite, Elephant Toothpaste. Napalm. Hydrogen gas explosions. (If you see a plastic bottle on your lawn filled with blue liquid, do NOT disturb. Call the non emergency police line.) Nitrogen explosions. (See 2020 Beirut explosion for visuals.) And a few other unmentionables that are much too easy to manufacture, one of which I saw in another's answer.
RDX (Royal Demolition eXplosive) is the oomph behind the plastic explosive C-4. It is slightly more explosive than C-4, because it hasn't been stabilized by anything.
All ended well and mostly good. Unfortunately I think I assisted the boy is believing breaking the law was fine so long as you don't get caught. Now I can't look at chemical formulae without my heart starting to pick up the pace. However, there were no injuries, no actual close calls except the spilled water when we started the dry ice. Following which the boy sat through several intensive lessons each on operations security, command structure and discipline, distractions, and safety. We learned safely, which is all that matters in the end.
No, not a professional anyhow. We're all teachers of one kind or another.
I consider myself a hacker of the classical variety. Not a cracker, but someone who is driven to understand something until the puzzle pieces fall together elegantly. You can do all of this yourself, if you can make it through a decent chemistry book. Look for "A Molecular Approach", Tro teaches the subject well.
Once you get to the point of understanding catalysis, you can make a detonation out of just about anything. After you can solve chemistry problems, all it really takes is a written reaction 2H + O = H2O to give you an idea of how you might go about making said reactions. The composition of Semtex is public knowledge, just ask Wikipedia.
My HS chem teacher was a troll; he assigns my group Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions. Which meant dealing with 1999 internet trying to find resources on it. OTOH, it did make for a very pretty lab demo.
Does biochemistry count? I exponentially copied very specifically selected short fragments of DNA. From 1 to up to 1,099,511,627,776 copies in just 2 hours. I've also very specifically cut and glued together DNA strands.
And at home, I just extracted juice from red cabbage and played with changing its colour by adding lemon juice or baking soda.
I have taken and passed two years of Chemistry with lab components. I have studied organic chemistry on my own, after graduating college, with degrees in another STEM field.
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 take in oxygen and turn it into philosophical thought.
Same, except I turn it into farts.
Basically the same thing, honestly.
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.
I helped create life and It was orgasmic!
Orgasmic chemistry!
baking bread
This one is underrated. That shit is like college-level difficult
Weed science. Not complicated at all, but there's so much bro science out there...
Liquid gas column extraction of organic compounds? I'm told that's something you should definitely do outside!
Oh no.... Mine is super basic... Flower, everclear, freezer, air fryer.
Alcohol isn't that great as an organic solvent. Are you using the air fryer to evaporate? That must be a fair fire risk!
Butane on the other hand is a good organic solvent and will evaporate at room temperature (just don't evaporate it in a room or near any heat source).
I'm happy with it - i feel like the extraction i get is pretty good for the ease and safety of my little setup. I'm not trying to make enough to sell, just mostly making cheezits and candies for friends. When i do have a lot to process i usually do a dry ice shake.
Eating.
Probably something using dihydrogen monoxide as a solvent for a mixture of organic compounds
Closest I've come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
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
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.
I bake from scratch.
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
Steel etching with Winsteard's reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.
It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.
I don't know if we can call it chemistry but quenching steel.
In high school I was doing blacksmithing and so quenching the blade was part of the process, probably my favorite part.
Heating the blade above 800Β°C and dipping it in oil, with the oil instantly catching fire was always very dramatic.
Fire is chemistry.
I got old
I like this answer better than mine.
hahah, much less explosive. It's a slow burn
I used to be an industrial chemist. We did esterification reactions to turn chicken fat and laxatives into oil field soaps by the truckload. So I guess mid-level organic chemistry?
Mixtral 8Γ7B says you were making "sodium alkyl sulfates" for cleaning the unique long chain carbon chemical properties unique to oil drilling rigs and that chicken fat and laxatives were potential sources for the long chain alcohols needed for producing such soaps.
She is pretty good at sexting, but how good is she at cleaning an industrial oil rig as a mid-level chemist? /s
There was also something about a long chain alcohols reacted with a concentrated acid to make carboxylic acids plus heat pressure and water to make soap.
That level of detail is usually not quite right with this kind of LLM, but I'm curious overall how close it got? Duck Duck Go tried to convince me to shop for oilfield bath soap soap on Etsy instead of telling me what an oil field soap is and nothing came up on Wikipedia.
Soaps are generally speaking, salts of fatty acids not long chain alcohols and strong acids. Dont trust LLMs for anything important.
They are certainly not primary sources. I did a quick search and the internet is far less trustworthy now. LLMs are like water cooler conversations. According to the internet, you basically did Etsy stuff. I think the LLM got a little closer.
We did some sodium salts for personal care, but the chicken fat in this instance is oleic acid, or sometimes soybean or canola oils, and the laxatives are sorbitol or PEGs. Mix and cook them and out comes a surfactant like SMO. We sent it to the midwest to help with fracking.
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.
Best DMT you can get :D
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!
Definitely not nitrating cellulose. That would be irresponsible.
Gold and Tellurium nanoparticle synthesis was the most interesting but I am not sure it qualifies as "complicated" given the procedures we used.
If computational chemistry qualifies, I have run on the order of 5,000 DFT optimizations+freq and of those, the most complicated ones involved metallocarborane clusters. These are composed of Boron, Carbon, a metal and different groups coming off the cluster. The largest one that I worked on took about a week to run the calculations on my home machine.
Pop Rocks, mouth, coca cola.
Made alcohol from yeast, sugar, water.
Extracted lidocaine from butt lube.
Made soap out of lye and a mix of fats and oils.
Stripped a cast iron pan using electrolysis, although that might be more physics than chemistry. I had to add Sodium Carbonate so that's pretty sciencey!
Chemistry is just messy physics.
Biology is just messy chemistry.
Physics is just messy math.
Your list is in a messy order.
Philosophy is just messy biology.
retrobrite of my fridge handles. hydrogen peroxide and uv light to remove yellowing
I remember we had a lot of fun with Benzene and Benzoates in university, but suspiciously I can't remember details. Hmmm
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.
Thanks! That's pretty simple.
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.
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."
Extraction and purification of surface residue for triple quadrupole analysis looking for pesticides, or inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry looking for arsenic, but that's practically physics by that level.
Baking soda and vinegar to clean stuff
Never got why people are so obsessed by combining both which would basically turn it into sparkling water. Individually both have a chemical action, but mixing both wouldn't bring anything
Pour them down a clogged drain and block it so that the clog gets pushed through.
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.
My great nephew as a teenager ran afoul of an old-school BBS archive website. He was certain it would be good fun to make a few incendiaries, Despite my attempts to dissuade him, he began to hide his enthusiasm, which had me worried he'd do it on his own. I figured it'd be wiser (and safer) to have someone with a bit of chemistry knowledge around when he tried doing dumb things.
We started small. I purchased some dry ice. Thermite was too boring. Elephant toothpaste was cool at first. Some petrol with polystyrene mixed in. Aluminium and acid cleaner. Then onto fertiliser tennis balls.
We eventually worked our way up to the Taj Mahal... Cyclonite. Hexogen. RDX. Unstable as the devil and more volatile than nitrated toluene, or TNT. The chemistry was very simple, but ridiculously foolish. I consider it advanced only due to the difficulty in ensuring we didn't get to visit a hospital or get a visit from the bobbies.
Never again. It took several days because I multiplied the recipe, like a dunce. We should've just made TNT, it would've been safer, but he persisted and I indulged.
The night before the big day. At this point, we'd been faffing around a dangerous line for almost ten months, whenever he managed to wrangle some free time for more mischief. I'd managed to extract a promise, this was to be the last of it until after his national service. He agreed. Keeping it in the boot of the car had me especially anxious,and until we saw the detonation, I felt like a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The detonations in a desolate field were gratifyingly lovely though. He got the final trigger on an over sized charge, and his grin was worth the heartache.
He's a pharmacist now.
wow I don't know what most of these are but it sounded risky. I was reading your story hoping it wouldn't end badly.
It was all in the name of fun... mostly. It was also one of the most memorable teaching experiences.
I thought I mentioned smoke bombs, but apparently not. They were a good litmus test to see if the boy could keep a secret. Following which were: Dry ice bombs. Thermite, Elephant Toothpaste. Napalm. Hydrogen gas explosions. (If you see a plastic bottle on your lawn filled with blue liquid, do NOT disturb. Call the non emergency police line.) Nitrogen explosions. (See 2020 Beirut explosion for visuals.) And a few other unmentionables that are much too easy to manufacture, one of which I saw in another's answer.
RDX (Royal Demolition eXplosive) is the oomph behind the plastic explosive C-4. It is slightly more explosive than C-4, because it hasn't been stabilized by anything.
All ended well and mostly good. Unfortunately I think I assisted the boy is believing breaking the law was fine so long as you don't get caught. Now I can't look at chemical formulae without my heart starting to pick up the pace. However, there were no injuries, no actual close calls except the spilled water when we started the dry ice. Following which the boy sat through several intensive lessons each on operations security, command structure and discipline, distractions, and safety. We learned safely, which is all that matters in the end.
So cool. And how do you know all this ? are you a teacher ?
No, not a professional anyhow. We're all teachers of one kind or another.
I consider myself a hacker of the classical variety. Not a cracker, but someone who is driven to understand something until the puzzle pieces fall together elegantly. You can do all of this yourself, if you can make it through a decent chemistry book. Look for "A Molecular Approach", Tro teaches the subject well.
Once you get to the point of understanding catalysis, you can make a detonation out of just about anything. After you can solve chemistry problems, all it really takes is a written reaction 2H + O = H
2O to give you an idea of how you might go about making said reactions. The composition of Semtex is public knowledge, just ask Wikipedia.Production of chlorine gas
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.
I once destiled water... from a but less impure water.
Mac n cheese
I used to run a bakery from home. We made pretzels with lye.
I wrote a report on alkali-silica reactivity in concrete.
Acid assisted microwave digestion
Napalm from petrol and styrofoam
Colouring hair, baking soda+vinegar (to clean and showoff), crude fuel cell, cleaning a washing machine with borax and something (some soda?)
Making grain beetles horny for my undergrad organic chemistry degree.
Didn't get to see a train beetle rub one out. Thankfully.
Do they make Kleenex that small?
Please elaborate
My final year organic chemistry dissertation to make grain beetle pheromone. Very large ring molecule with until then very low yields.
Sounds more like biology.
I tried a few simple AB extractions long ago in a previous life.
My HS chem teacher was a troll; he assigns my group Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions. Which meant dealing with 1999 internet trying to find resources on it. OTOH, it did make for a very pretty lab demo.
Crack cocaine
Baking
Does uni count? I synthesised aspirin.
Does biochemistry count? I exponentially copied very specifically selected short fragments of DNA. From 1 to up to 1,099,511,627,776 copies in just 2 hours. I've also very specifically cut and glued together DNA strands.
And at home, I just extracted juice from red cabbage and played with changing its colour by adding lemon juice or baking soda.
Speedballing
DIY metal finishing
um, Ive nitrated various organic compounds at home as a teenager
I think it was 10th grade, boy they gave us a lot of homework
I have taken and passed two years of Chemistry with lab components. I have studied organic chemistry on my own, after graduating college, with degrees in another STEM field.