Yeah I have actually read about IPA exploding. I cannot say I worry too much about it though, its not really what one could call an infamous source of destructive potential.
Funny EtOEt does that to you, personally I love the smell/taste of the stuff. DMF is usually only fishy if it contains traces of the corresponding amines afaik.
As for inhibitors in ether, yes, true, but it depends where you get them from. The supplier I use for most everything supplies her ether/THF etc uninhibited. I'd prefer it a lot if it were supplied w/ inhibitor.
DMSO I've little experience with really, its such a high boiling solvent that I avoid it whenever humanly possible, because one then has to bugger about going to all that effort to strip it off afterwards.
By swimming pool chemicals I presume you mean hypochlorite or similar? funnily enough, NaOCl has to be one of the foulest things I ever work with in terms of how I find the stink of it. Its gutwrenching, makes my insides do backflips just thinkng about it, without ever being anywhere near any, the thought goes right through me, like wool, or the texture of wooden ice lolly sticks *shudder*..ew!
Your definitely not wrong about AcOH and Ac2O. Tolene is..tolerable, neither really pleasant nor really unpleasant. Xylene I think smells alright, quite pleasant in fact..possibly because of all the paint thinners in the workshop my old man used to have before he had to give up work because of my mothers disabilities.
IPA and EtOAc..how can you possibly find those pleasant...jesus H! hate the smell of IPA especially, ethyl acetate I just don't much like. Reminds me a bit of tolly or slightly less so, of xylene. IPA though is gag-worthy in much the same way you find ether. I take it you'd not be accepting an invitation to an ether-drinking pissup then
Tell you one I really can't stand though, and thats propionyl chloride. Nasty stale musty sweaty kind of smell to it. The HCl fumes are by the way really, I figure its probably propionic acid from hydrolysis. For some reason it reminds me of a petting zoo, one with goats, if goats went stale if not used quickly enough
and if said goats past their sell-by-dates had instead of hooves, feet on which to place socks, which they could then forgo washing for a month or so of playing foot/hoof-ball. Why, I don't quite know, well the feet bit yes, propionibacteria are responsible for staleness in sweat, at least partly, and cheesy rancid feet.
Not that I go huffing them (well not apart from diethyl and diisopropyl ethers) for the purpose of intoxication, but just in the sense of generally having detected them by the means of their odors, favourites by far (so far) have to be EtOEt/DIPE, chloroform, xylene and acetonitrile. And especially nitromethane, nitroethane, benzaldehyde (without ring substitution that is, just plain bog-fucking-standard benzaldehyde). A knoevanagel where the aldehyde is benzaldehyde smells almost good enough to drink (not recommended however. And even less so given that LC's typical solvent for the knoevanagel is MeOH
IPA is good for it, but that fucking stinks like shit floating down the river Styx [not OF shit, like shit, big difference]) thats two of his favourite of all smells in the lab, in the same pot (the nitroalkane du jour, and benzaldehyde)
I'm not sure quite what the product was, back then I wasn't equipped to characterize is thoroughly enough to make an accurate determination, other than some basic tests, like trying to form oximes, bisulfite adducts etc), but once, many years ago when I was just a bit down the way of my chosen paths, hobbies-wise*, but what at the time I'd been trying to do, was to synthesize some TNT, only to find I'd run out of conc. HNO3 to do the usual mixed acid route to it, so naturally an alternative was sought, and what was done, was to try an in-situ nitration using conc. sulfuric, which I had plenty of left to try with, and ammonium nitrate. Tried it at room temperature, intending to go with a long rxn time. Didn't get what I was after, but rather
a mixture of something crystalline, which may have been, but was IMO, far more likely one or more isomers of mono/dinitrotoluene, in which, due to the other product, I quickly lost interest in. A yellowish, oily-looking liquid that smelled like benzaldehyde crawled up the arse hole of a huge, industrial sized block of marzipan, dressed in not fig leaves, but a suit of cherry laurel leaves for 'modesty's sake, and died, going to marzipan factory hell. Even on a relatively small scale (a drinking cup measure of toluene, not that the nitration was done in a coffee mug haha, no, it was only used for something to pour the tolly into so as to get a good idea of scale and not use more than I wanted, at that age, EVERY last scrap of ALL my reagents, including solvents, and even most reaction byproducts was saved, cleaned, redistilled for solvents, and rxn byproducts saves, separated if needs be and kept until I could find another use for them, because I'd only JUST even gotten a bank account with a card and checkbook, and my funds were way too limited for my liking so meticulous pennypinching, scrimping and saving were the order of the day; NaCl was about the only thing I didn't bother recycling. Lol before I realized how little was there to be had, I even tried isolating the pyridine from methylated spirits, and I'd save KCl, KOH, NaOH even, ammonium salts I'd recycle the NH3 from those, hack the lead oxides/sulfate out of car batteries, until I both had enough for my uses,
and I realized that those same car batteries could be turned into what was to me back in those days, a lot of money by trading them in at the scrap yard, not that the money usually ever even made it home, instead going straight to the hardware stores and automotive stores for ether, chlorates, ethylene glycol, NaOH, ammonium sulfate, HCl and conc. sulfuric. The furthest it ever usually got was to the pharmacies within walking distance for acetone, permanganate, epsom salts, clean bicarb, iodine tincture and other such things to keep my insatiable childhood curiosity occupied [now no different other than the sources of, the scale, quality and types of reagents, and insatiable adult curiosity. I'm absolutely not so much as an attosecond changed, save for being more learned and a lot better at it than I was then
Nor do I ever entertain the possibility of my being, or doing otherwise. Only in my worst possible, or damned close to it, nightmares.
I didn't know at the time, as I'd no internet connection, not sure there even WAS an internet at the time, if there was then it was certainly in its very primitive stages...my computer ran MS-DOS at the time, and somewhat later on, windows 3.1
not that I've many bad things to say about DOS, I still use DOSbox quite a lot, although far prefer the real thing. So textbooks were my teachers, my first Kanner's school didn't have a proper science teacher, the only specialist teacher in the whole school
was for IT, and even he taught me nothing I did not already know. And the only chemistry class during my entire time at that school, was watching someone drop iodine tincture on a potato. Once. From as far away as they could get it...never letting
the students anywhere near either the iodine, or even the fucking potato! Which is quite likely what spurred me on to spend all the money I had on as many bottles of iodine tincture, some peroxide and some sulfuric acid the moment I got home, and spending from the time I returned home from rounding up my purchases, to the very moment I had to step out of the front door of the house to the waiting minibus to take me to 'school' again, and carefully fractionating off the other ingredients until I'd managed, to my delight, to see/own some I2 in the elemental state for the very first time, not bought, but prepared by my own two hands, which is what mattered the most to me at that age, not simply the acquisition; but rather the having learned from it in the process because I'd done it. Unfortunately, I'd not realized how volatile it is, so you can imagine how PISSED and upset I was after getting home from school the next day, having been on the edge of my seat all day, itching to get home and try the next thing on my to-do list, MeI starting from scratch, only to find what I'd worked all my free time the previous day, and into the night without a break and without sleeping, and finding it gone. Or rather, relocated, to stain the everfucking bejeeszis out of one of my reagent cabinets, not to mention part of my bedroom wall. Although that was of secondary, minor irritation compared to discoloring the reagent cupboard
Anyhow at the time, I wasn't at all familiar with its physical properties, but now, I suspect that the yellow oily liquid from my failed attempt at in-situ production of TNT, had been in actual fact, nitrobenzene, and the crystalline solids para-nitrotoluene and/or 2,4-dinitrotoluene. The liquids I guess could have been one or a mixture more likely of the ortho- and meta- isomeric nitrotoluenes, but those are meant to have a weak smell, although nevertheless of bitter almonds. Or perhaps oxidation of some of the toluene occurred and produced benzaldehyde itself. Never actually smelled pure redistilled nitrobenzene, as its toxic as buggery and something only handled whilst wearing a gas mask. Bar, if it was indeed one of the unintended products of that attempt at nitrating tolly using a nitrate salt instead of HNO3. Faint, it was not, though, even a very small quantity left out in the open, was sufficient to fill the entire room with the most overpowering, although quite delicious scent of marzipan or benz. One of these days I'll have to have another go at it, not aiming for TNT, already found out that didn't work, but so I can actually thoroughly characterize whatever the devil the mixture of compounds that do result contains.
*(mycology excluded, as I got an extremely, extremely early head start there thanks to, for some reason there being textbooks available for my perusal and use in teaching myself to read [3yo, according to my old man, was when I was gotten a copy of Phillips' after exhausting everything in the others, and finding ones with drawings etc. completely unsatifactory. I was really chuffed, that much I DO remember even at that age, because it has plenty of details on the microscopy, and I was allowed, as long as I was careful with it, to use my dad's old microscope. And when I say old, I mean 'big, chunky, heavy-as-all-hell article, formed out of solid brass or bronze. Its still
around somewhere AFAIK although I haven't used it in decades, especially as I now have a very nice new one I bought myself as a treat when I had a couple of hundred quid I could afford to spend on something other than the essentials in life. And by that I mean the kind of essentials that one puts in one's mouth in order to supply the rest of the attached meat with sufficient protein, carbohydrate and fat to keep it able to make use of the kind of essentials-in-life that one generally puts in RBFs and other flasks, test tubes etc. and shiny new condensers, Kipp gas generators, sep funnels, Sohxhlets [granted one can make do without a soxhlet, but it was nice to get one all the same]still flasks, dessicators [albeit my dessicator was a gift from my old man, as was my autoclave and my vacuum pump. Hes not a chemist, not at all, but he knows his son, and he knows the kind of things that he likes to receive most, if a gift is to be given..he knows how to please, that he does, if he decides to do so then he usually hits the bullseye. My b/day opportunity has gone this year, but methinks for xmas I'm going to be angling for a cryostat..either that or a sonoacoustic laser,although I'd rather try and build the latter, the cryostat on the other hand
is something I've been wanting for AGES] and other such non-consumable, reusable essentials)
Least favourite/worst are IPA, ethyl acetate, GAA (if that counts), MEK and worse, MiBK. Minty but somehow awful at the same time.
I can't imagine using Ac2O without proper ventilation, at least not without a good mask with acid gas filters. Even GAA isn't great, especially if its being strongly heated. Leaves the area stinking like the aftermath of an airstrike on a chipshop
