FormidableRogue said:
Safety is priority, when I was younger I had a hatred for all things with 8 legs.... So I took it upon myself to rid the world of the blight. While innocently enough trying to conjure up the perfect Spider Control Serum™ I ended up with a not so mild form of Mustard Gas.... (Bleach+Ammonia=extreme unpleasantness)as I sat on my asclutching my eyes and wondering why my chest wouldn't expand, I vowed to be more diligent when educating myself before I wadded headlong into areas that professionals spend years researching. Thought I'd share a close call, maybe there's a fellow yellow hunter that shares my disposition of spiders....if your out there buddy, for god sakes read first man. For all that's good and decent, read first!
thank god you're ok. That mixture is so dangerous, and possibly explosive. Hydrazine and chloramines are no joke. They can kill you very rapidly from the get go or give you cancer and then kill you.
I've worked with all sorts of weird materials as an amateur chemist. And some of my ideas were rather stupid but others were downright regrettable and probably illegal looking back. One very close call involves material that I did an organic leach with a mix of acetone, Methyl Ethyl Ketone, and turpentine. The leach did remove a lot of polymer crap from my precious metal ore. However when the material dried out after decanting the majority of the liquid (or so I thought) I added a mixture of straight pool acid and 60% peroxide used as a septic tank cleaner.
Unfortunately for me and probably the small town I used to live in, the solvents did adsorb to the material and make a highly explosive oil of organic peroxides. I closed the bucket so I can move it which in hindsight was a huge mistake. I picked it up and it bumped into the fence, rather normal, but what should have been routine dings to the bucket became an enormous explosion. Like, beyond sticks of dynamite. within inches of me. If the lid didn't give way, I'm absolutely certain I and a good 50 meter radius area would have been leveled into a pink stain mixed with wood pulp and glass dust.
It's a rather poetic way of saying that there would've been casualties and extensive property damage, I'd even go as far to say that it would've been a state or federal class disaster :shock:
Another stupid idea was open incineration of circuit boards and everything else including batteries and capacitors in my backyard fireplace. I honestly shouldn't need to explain why this is a stupid idea.
The 3rd most stupid mistake, worst to basic nuisance, is probably the paint can bomb. I tried incinerating stuff in a paint can but on a basic charcoal grill without extra air flow. The reason why it exploded might be due to the reaction conditions. Low temperatures makes the ethylene oxide formation more favorable along with other things like crown ethers. Probably the absolute worst contributing factor of the failure was mixing it with potassium nitrate then lighting off the gas which turned out to be a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen along with other explosives. It pretty much annihilated the paint can. Would've severed some arteries without my safety equipment.
another thing I screwed up with was most likely safety measures. At the time I didn't realize that the salts of metals like copper can go through skin even though I knew other salts can go through skin. So I was covered with the salts aerosol almost constantly thankfully I didn't get too much and although I was rather sick on several occasions with zinc and copper poisoning, nothing really bad happened because I wasn't working with nitric acid which would dissolve lead and due to my impure reagents had a bunch of sulfate ions floating around which dropped the worst of the metals out of solution, though still my lead levels were at about 7ug/dl and probably could've been as high as 10 at one point or another even though I showed no symptoms of lead poisoning until I contracted pneumonia. However considering the length of time I worked on it, I probably have several horseshoes up my behind to still be alive. Also I was sick so more lead than usual would be floating around in my blood and my lack of access to proper lab equipment as an amateur so that didn't help me at all. It's also illegal where I live to do amateur chemistry so I had to be on the down low so I don't get myself arrested or most likely killed.
Another note I should make is that the main reason I did the project in the first place was for mental health reasons as at the time I was probably not that stable at the time because I was undiagnosed and thus not treated. I turned out years later to be suffering from bipolar disorder which honestly is not that surprising.
So in conclusion, don't go into unknown territory without having a clear head no matter how much you know. Also, although it's true that I had no idea that I was bipolar, I did have some rather severe bouts of depression and was even hospitalized at a few points in time for nervous breakdowns. Thankfully that is years behind though that lab will probably forever haunt me despite how well it worked out in the end. Though I've since relocated to a different county so the people who really want my head on a stick, on an alias for a reason. my online mentor from Romania was named Viman so that's why I named my profile refiningviman as a sort of commemoration.
Also I know these things may seem like easily avoidable mistakes, However many people who are just starting may and have fallen into these sorts of traps and they unfortunately aren't so lucky
