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Making the chemical sodium nitrite

Sleepy_Slumber

Bluelighter
Joined
Dec 2, 2005
Messages
78
This isn't a recreational drug synthesis question.

Is there any way of making sodium nitrite through some sort of displacement or redox reaction? Are there any relatively easy chemicals that you could use? Would it be a reaction similar to say adding sodium metal to silver nitrate?
 
Very practical way, is to add conc. H2SO4 to BaNO2, this will precipitate BaSO4, which is extremely insoluable.

Then slowly add the resulting nitrous acid solution (which must be kept cool) to NaOH solution, evaporation will result in crystalline NaNO2.

Alternatively, look on ebay=D
 
Just heat some charcoal with sodium nitrate. NaNO3 is an oxidizing agent, that after donating an oxygen atom becomes sodium nitrite (NaNO2). Mix charcoal & sodium nitrate, apply match, watch pretty white flash as it ignites (it's like gunpowder minus the sulphur - I know gunpowder uses potassium nitrate, that's why I said 'is like'). After it has cooled, dissolve in water & filter to remove any unreacted charcoal (always use an excess of charcoal).

What do you want it for - got a lot of spam you want curing?!
 
F&B, thats going to bee pretty messy, not trying to be offensive, or to outdo you, I respect you more than any other poster on BL, but I do believe using barium nitrite and precipitating the barium cation out as BaSO4 will be far cleaner and less unpleasant a procedure to go through.
 
^ One can obtain NaNO3 from the gardening centre but where does one obtain BaNO2. Your method is a lot neater and easier though.

Thanks for sharing your method F&B - I think that it will come in handy!
 
I actually was unaware of that, but I have never had a problem buying barium compounds, and have one or two sources for cyanide salts, and I have actually never been requested to sign or acknowledge any sort of form or end-user declaration :\ not a good thing in this day and age.

(well, it is for me, but then again, I am not the sort of mad, fanatical fuckpot who would try and poison somebody)
 
I've got to second the eBay suggestion. Failing that, sodium nitrite is also used to cure meat and sometimes as an oxidizer in pyrotechnics.
 
Being a former pyro enthuesit Sodium nitRITE is often made by burning Sodium NitRATE with lead (Pb). This gave us two useful chemicals of PbO and NaNO2. One is water soulable the other isnt.

The same can be done with Potassium Nitrate. NaNO3 and Lead are readyly available.
 
sodium nitrite can prove to be quite entertaining.

take 2 equal parts white sugar and potassium nitrite (1c/1c), melt together on stove on low heat while wearing oven mit(s).. (always always make sure to use low heat, you dont want this pot of goop to ignite in your house! (ruined pots+fire department responding to house leaking thick billowing smoke clouds!))
once melted, remove small chunks and form into balls.. lay down away from heat and let dry/cool..
take one of these suckers and place it down on a surface you do not own, apply a nice steady heat for 10-30 seconds.. wooooooosshh! you'll have a cloud of the thickest, whitest, most distracting smoke you can imagine! (a small 1cm/1cm chunk of this shit is enough to fill quite a large area with thick smoke)..

or, if you are feeling a little too frisky, a wee overly randy, try taking a tablespoon of this in you next meal, that bad boy will be down and begging for mercy in no time.



ugh fun times.. when you're like.. 13

peasout.






(ps: i just won a lot of 5oz potassium nitrite on ebay for 5$us as i finished typing this message. hehe)
 
^^ Um, I believe you do want the nitrATE for the 'candy' smoke bombs. I once made a 'small' (about half-pound) 'smoke bomb' with this mix; it actually seems to work much better for smoke if you don't even bother to melt the components (just combine as milled powder.) The fully melted and fused comp seemed to burn too hot to give a good smoke, at least at the scale I tried it. (Went up more like a rocket engine, actually.)
 
Unless you've access to a furnace, the nitrite salt is probably best prepared by the Pb +NO3 method described by static_mind although f&b's method should also work ok.

As for making a smoke cloud:

When I was a lad we used to make smoke clouds by mixing NaClO3 (once used as weed killer & sold freely in 5kg tins) with various organic fuel sources. Brown sugar was the best. The reaction is very fast and the smoke cloud appears almost instantly. It became such a regular event for a while that our neighbors were often hesitant to hang out their washing.... 8(
 
This is a serious advise!!
Ask in a butcher's shop where they make sausages theirself. But probably it has an other name than sodiumnitrite. -No idea, how maybe SAUSAGEPRO...?
 
Also just cause people are using it quite commonly here: Remember that, I think, over 1gram of sodium nitrite and you pretty much have a terminal poisoning...
 
^ Also it forms nitrosoamines with secondary amines under acidic conditions (like the stomach) and nitrosoamines are known carcinogens. Quite why they use it in curing meat is beyond me (also doesn't impact on me because other than eating fish/seafood I don't eat animal products), surely there must be safer compounds that can be used for curing/preserving meats.
 
^ I remember reading some time ago that a significant proportion of Bowel Cancer in the united states was attributed to bacon preservative, namely sodium nitrite. So serious was this - it was claimed - that there was mention of removing bacon from sale if a suitable replacement preservative couldn't be found - yeah right 8)

Besides inhibiting botulinal toxin, the nitrite salt adds to flavour as well as alters the colour of the meat. Nitric oxide, produced from the nitrite, reacts with myoglobin, and that produces the deep red color of bacon and many other smallgoods.

I don't know about other countries, but in Australia there doesn't seem to be any problem in ordering it from a chem company. I needed some last year for a spot test reagent (Liebermann test for phenols) and got 500g for a few bucks. I would imagine a meat smoke shop would also have it.
 
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