Simple question, see subject. What courses did you take in high school/college and what subjects did you learn yourself?

I ask because Chemistry II is an option for me to take in a year, and I want to know what I need to know past that to be able to make "things" synthetically.

But not drugs. Seriously. I think it's just too damn dangerous.

[This message has been edited by laundrysoap (edited 03-24-2007).]

I have a 90% average in grade 10 science

Enough to trick professional chemists into thinking I'm pro, little enough that I know I'm an amateur...

As much as was avaliable in HS, college was devoted to other topics....

Distillation was the only useful thing in HS, despite the wide number of other topics covered. Everything I find useful was self-taught.

So... what : plastics or nanotech?

Anyways... it's all the same chemistry, and you really don't need to know... all that much... to get your feet on the ground. Once you know the whopping three or four basic steps that open up all the psychedelic amphetamines, you... basically know enough to cook up all kinds of things for other purpouses...

...ever heard of a methoxylation referred to as esterification?

...ever worn "polyester?"

Esterification, oxidation/reduction, condensation, halogenation, and halogenation's derivatives, hydroxylation and lithiation, and you can come pretty darned close to crudely putting just about anything together, sooner or later. If you know that oil 'n water don't usually mix, if you know that an acid and a base tend to form a salt... those two are pretty much what 99.9% of chemistry was deduced from.

Hell... what are you looking to do? I'll be glad to provide what half-arsed tips I can in this thread.

Thats pretty damn sweet!

I just purchased a 41pc smallish glassware set from a bid on ebay. I got a bargain. Its for organic chemistry and includes a small distillation set up. Im going to start doing home chemistry. Only things I can find to do are drugs and pyro, I want to do some small, cheap and fun synths etc.

Any ideas?

Thanks

No, you got me all wrong.

I mean not make drugs. So I am looking to not make drugs

[This message has been edited by laundrysoap (edited 03-25-2007).]

im mid way through a chemistry degree. so what i don't know i can easily find out.

i don't really have any interest in drugs at all though, but im happy to give my 2c on any pure chemistry topic.

I got a 5 on the chemistry AP. The only usful thing I learned in that class was titration, distillation. Things that I did outside of the class with my Chem teacher: High Explosives, Pyrotechnics, and once we did a GBL -> GHB but he didn't know what that was.

[This message has been edited by Pooter (edited 03-25-2007).]

Lol... it's all the same chemistry anyways. Hit me up on PM or somethin'.

Well... one thing that comes to mind...

...any skunk cabbage in your area?

In the right season, it's pretty high in a compound known as calcium oxylate. Tends to give a burning sensation when touched to the tongue when it's at its most nonedible. Don't swallow a salad.

...brew a large pot of tea, and condense it down 'till it's about 1 litre or so. Filter while hot.

Add about twice its volume in a miscible non-polar... say, an alcohol, or acetone. Watch as, theoretically, large amounts of calcium oxylate precipitate out of solution, since salts are polar enough to only dissolve in water, usually.

Sweeeet. Piles of crystals from the aether.

Now... oxalic acid is one of those curious, rare organic acids; instead of having a carboxolic terminal at *one* end, it has a COOH at *both* ends of its chain... this comes in handy in a second.

Dissolve your technical-grade calcium oxylate in some nice, distilled water... pour the water into two cups, run a siphon hose between 'em (careful priming the siphon... it sorta, well, burns... and is mildly toxic in very high dosages. Don't swallow)...

...and whip out your 9v and electrolyze it!

You should now have a cup of calcium hydroxide solution, and a cup of oxalic acid solution. Both of these should be very, very caustic. I think the COO- migrates to the + electrode.

Naturally, we can't exactly have this stuff being all, y'know, caustic and such... so, quench it with a *bunch* of clear white household ammonia... good old ammonium hydroxide solution, the cleaner the better.

Condense this down a bit (and be careful in venting your ammonia fumes) until you can gently evaporate it down into a moist sludge in an evaporating dish, perhaps one which is sitting in a pan of warm water.

Scrape up the warm sludge - which, as you've probably guessed, is the salt ammonium oxylate - and slap it in a neat little pile on a piece of tinfoil.

Bake it in the oven at about 150-180c for a few hours.

Presuming it doesn't catch on fire, you have made your very first polymer material, polyammonium oxylate. Short-chain carboxolic acids undergo condensation with ammonia at temperatures between about 150-200c, popping off their little hydroxyl and becoming CONH3. Forms a decently tight bond...

...and you've got long chains of this repeating over, and over, and over... you have made plastic!

Play with it. Find out its properties. Shave off a little piece and see what temperature it starts to degrade at. Find its specific gravity by displacement of water. Find the PSI it takes to mar it, stuff like that...

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(continued from above)

...and welcome to the world of making plastics. If you boil your polyoxalamide in zinc and hydrochloric acid for a bit, it will pop off the little ketone and go from CONH3 to CNH3... forming either polyethylamine or polypropylamine, can't remember which. The reaction is called the clemmensen reduction, I believe. It can also be used to make plastics in different ways. Should make it a bit sturdier, and far more resistant to pH variations.

If (and I'd have to look it up), oxalic acid is HOOCCCOOH instead of HOOCCOOH... boiling your polyoxalamide in chlorox, instead, would give you polymethylamine. I'd expect this polymer to be somewhat elastic, by the way its bonds form, and fairly sturdy. This reaction is called the hoffman rearrangement, I believe, and was invented by the man who invented LSD. It's also - speaking of drugs - the leading source of methylamine, I believe, from the rearrangement of acetamide.

'n speaking of plastics - and the polyester mentioned in the last post - y'know those mothballs? Paradichlorobenzene 'n all that?

If ya take a package of those, divide it in half, and melt half of 'em over finely-granulated lye (sodium hydroxide), you *should*, after much, much cooking, have a jar of paraphenyldiol... C6H4Cl2 + 2 NaOH = C6H4(OH)2 + 2 NaCL.

...and if you pour molten paraphenyldiol into molten paradichlorobenzene and cook it for, well, about forever... you should end up with...

...polyphenylester. Just one of many polyesters around. Generally speaking, ROH + RX = ROR + HX... where X is any halide (chlorine, fluorine, iodine - second from the right on the periodic table), and R is any hydrocarbon.

...so that's a cheap-and-easy intro to plastics. Technically, what's listed here, plus a little friedel-crafts, *should* be enough to synthesize every polymer known to man, with a little work... but I figured I'd go with the examples that cost, well... under two bucks, with a little help from the dollar store.