Limpet_Chicken
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2005
- Messages
- 6,323
'Put that out, right now' (speaking of a thermite reaction conducted on the back garden path; one does not PUT thermite out. It burns itself out. Douse it with water, it'll split it apart to hydrogen and oxygen, and it'll split apart CO2 as well)
The only way to put out a thermite reaction, is to disperse the charge over so wide an area that the burning bits are tiny specks, isolated from one another.
This, was a decent sized charge, blazing away, and what exactly, did a parent think I was going to do? go up to it and kick it? stuff burns hot enough to cut through steel, and spews out a fuckton of sparks, whilst releasing a torrent of molten metal, the metal depending upon the oxide used. Not to mention, that it gives off enough UV light to cause eye damage if directly looked at for a long time without protection, although I was wearing welding goggles, I needed my folks to fuck off, quickly.
'What was that bang' (shouted up the stairs after the house mains power tripped, and then later, 'where is that vase' or words to the effect of the latter
The previous, being a LOUD blast, a whole lot of swearing, and a plume of searing hot caustic soda high enough to reach from the height of my lab bench, at the time, in my old house, when I was just a kiddo, in my bedroom, plus the height of my mother's vase, which had been drilled either side, a pair of battery electrodes (carbon rods) that I'd placed over one end, a length of copper wire,, a bit of solder, and hammered on a metal end cap before blowtorching the end in question, the solder being there just to ensure a better connection.
The other end of each of these, was attached to a long bog standard electrical wire, and the fuse of the plug had been replaced with a cast slug of lead, made to close size with a DIY mold and one of my blowtorches, to stop it just blowing straight out.
The intention, was to prepare sodium metal. At the time I was very inexperienced, just learning my chemistry (my special ed school, at least, the first one of two I attended, they didn't even HAVE a science lab, well, they had a tray with a few AA and D batteries, a couple of lightbulbs and bits of wire. And ONCE some classroom assistant told us all to go to the far end of the room, away from him, whilst he backed into a corner, and holding up half a potato, put two drops or so of iodine tincture onto it. Let us watch it, from as far off as possible, change colour. And then threw away the potato, put the wee bottle iodine tincture in his pocket again, without another word. *I* had to explain to the class, and the classroom assistant, what was going on!
(and the following night, after rounding up as many bottles of iodine tincture, some peroxide, and using a little sulfuric acid, after first meticulously distilling off (for future use, after purification, as a solvent, at that age, my income was whatever I could earn with my own ingenuity and a pound a week pocket money. And a pound a week does not a liter of 98-99% sulfuric acid buy. Nor does it keep a kid supplied with the kilos of caustic soda and liters of HCl he requires), I'd spent the night distilling it, using a tiny alcohol burner, until getting it as concentrated as possible before any iodine vapor came off, then acid, oxidizer, reducing the KI present to iodine, and subsequently, distilling further, and distilling off the iodine, subliming it onto an improvised coldfinger, then re-subliming it again, until I had before me, a few grams of pure, crystalline elemental iodine, set eyes on for the first time outside the context of tincture of iodine, took all night, and unsurprisingly, went back to that science-desert shithole of a special ed school..sorry, I'm classically autistic, not a fucking moron. And I really, really resent those who ought to have provided my science education denying it me utterly, and thus my having to slave my ass off breaking into derelict buildings to scavenge lead and copper, and selling bunches of flowers snipped from roadside ornamental cherry trees for 50p a bunch, off the back of a bike, and taking full advantage of people's tendency to go 'awwww, ain't that enterprising, lil'un is working hard here, cute fella' and voluntarily handing me more than the asking price, even got fivers and the odd tenner, once in a while. Which to me, a tenner meant a liter bottle of 98-99% concentrated sulfuric acid, a fiver a couple of kg of caustic soda, or a bottle of that and one of ammonia solution, to which I could gas with more NH3 to concentrate it, using caustic and ammonium sulfate or phosphate fertilizer until I had saturated aqueous ammonia, or a whole lot of tubs of potassium permanganate to use for generating chlorine gas.
That iodine...I'd worked all night for it, I still remember that night, brown fingers, brown hands, brown patches on my arms, and a huge grin, reflecting the sense of immense pride in being able to have that few grams of highly purified elemental solid iodine, as fine, fluffy crystals from the resublimation, looking lovely and greyish-metallic, the way it turned to vivid purple vapour, of a gorgeous violet when a little bit was put into a test tube, the outside warmed with a low flame from my micro-blowtorch (more controllable than the big one, faster than the spirit lamp), the delightful scent, the interesting, although violent reaction with white phosphorus....I was so proud of myself, at maybe 9-10, having done it all by dint of sheer effort and research in the library on the chemistry required.
And the day after, I'd been to the spesh school, come home, and went straight up to once again, admire the shit out of my iodine, only to find the chemical cupboard in my bedroom it was stored in, it'd turned bloody brown, and every last single grain of iodine was GONE. Evaporated. I hadn't realized it's volatility. Left it in a petri dish.
To say I was crestfallen....damn....I'd spent a lot, for me, then, at that age, income wise, on rounding up every bottle of iodine tincture in every pharmacy I could get to, that was a lot of my chemistry-money (which was pretty much every penny I ever got, save for the occasional bag of sweets, and a weekly copy of 'the beano'), I'd worked hard for that funding, really hard, hours on the bike flogging flowers door to door, burgling derelict buildings, stripping the wire out of the walls, wrenching floorboards up and slicing the pipes off with a pipe cutter or where size demanded, a junior hacksaw, I'd bricked leaded windows, I'd climbed the roof and ripped away the little bits of Pb that keep the slates in place, swung myself up into the lofts, slicing and dicing wherever I found a copper boiler (that, and ONCE, an oooooold ass big thick-walled lead water tank and piping that had to be cut up in place, and multiple trips made to reload my backpack , as WELL as a copper boiler in the same attic. And for some fucking WEIRD ass reason, which I'll never figure out, under one of the floorboards, a big pile of floppy disks, with a load of retro games. Big sodding pile, under a nailed-down floorboard. Well, until it was un-nailed-down by a kid hungering insatiably for chemistry and biotech funds
Even ganking the lead and PbO2, the heavy sulfuric acid, and the semipermeable membrane pouches to separate them, for future electrochemistry experiments, before filling them up with saturated aq. solutions of what was basically lab crap, garbage salts, nothing toxic, since I'd not want to be responsible for harming a scrap merchant, even if I was giving them surgically dissected, disembowelled of their useful bits, and replaced with enough saturated brine, chlorate crap, whatever other muck was around, and a load of soil and gravel before carefully putting them together again in a way not obvious.
Same went for copper pipes or lead pipes, dirt and rocks in there, hammered shut, or my other game, casting lead down the copper pipes, as copper got more money. But rocks and dirt were the usual.
Justified it to myself by 'this is paying for my schooling, my science education is being withheld entirely from me by the school who ought to be giving me at least the chance to put my mind to the teaching offered to me. But it isn't being offered at all. I'm not buying sweets or fags with the ill-gotten gains, I am spending it on equipment and chemicals to teach myself what the school teaches no student of theirs, ever, at all'
That, to me, a child's opportunity for a proper education, is worth more than the deficit incurred by a scrap merchant being cheated by a kid seeking the funds to continue his autodidactic learning, which had he not, he'd have been too poor to afford his needs, and he would have had to go without a proper early chemistry and biology/biotech education. The merchant will make more money, a kid, that was ALL my money, bar one pound a WEEK. That would be ten, maybe twelve weeks, with pocket money alone, for one single liter of 98-99% concentrated sulfuric acid.
Anyhow, I digress, I'm a spazz, hyperfocus sometimes gets me, and I'm a chemist spazz, so go figure.
The stupid question, it was not the shout of 'what the fucking hell is going on up there, are you alright?' coming up the stairs.
It was my mother, a day or two afterwards, asking where her flower vase was.
Afterall, parents know their kids (to a fair degree at least), and she should have known enough about me to know that asking where her flower vase was, or if I'd seen it, mere days after a thundering great BOOOOOM!! mysterious in source, emanating from her son's bedroom, followed by a torrential stream of vile language, and the sound of walls being peppered with shrapnel, was probably not going to get her her vase.
Not in the same shape it was two or three days prior, at least. And definitely not in a way that flowers could be once again put therein, since there was no 'in' for them to be put, anymore. Maybe balanced on the shards sticking out of my one-occupant version of a bunk bed, or driven into the walls, but definitely not standing upright, or with water in amounts larger than could be measured with a pipette or eyedropper.....
'what are you doing with 50kg of weedkiller and all those copper pipes and the power drill????' (at the time when sodium chlorate was still sold)
As well as enquiries about the reason there were blocks of wax strapped to aerosol cans with drinking straws stuck in the wax blocks and duct tape wrapped round the whole contraptions. (It was only partially wax, serving as a binder for...other things. High-temperature, slow-burning, incendiary things)
I was a bit of a hair-raising kid, I'm sure.
And why at first, for a fair while, nothing would grow whatsoever in an octopus-shaped pattern on the back garden lawn, this not THAT long ago, last year/early this one, I'm keeping thinking of this year as 'last year' now, since it's so close to xmas, and then, the grass, everything plant-life sprung up with astounding lush vigour, as if it'd all been dosed with steroids and pumping iron as if there were no tomorrow. And at the time, what that garlic-like smell was, and why there was a massive, dense white cloud of smoke rolling over the garden, searing the life from more grass)
(Alembic sprung a crack, whilst a distillation of white phosphorus, preparing it from the red allotrope, was underway, I got the fuck out of the way, ducking behind the side of the house at a helluva sprint, the moment I saw the crack, dropping the torch, just running for dear life, knowing from the first little spraying jet of glowing white-green flame that the thing was going to break catastrophically. So I ran for it. It cracked in half, and several hundred grams of refluxing white phosphorus, promptly liberated from it's argon-shielded atmosphere, boiling and bubbling inside the alembic, before it failed, went up in a colossal ball of blinding white-greenish tinged searing, blazing hot flame)
Damn glad THAT didn't hit me, jesus, doesn't bear thinking about. When white phosphorus burns someone, it either burns out, or it burns in one side and out the other, stopping only when either completely consumed, prevented from contacting oxygen, or being physically dug out of the person with a knife. I've been burned once by it, the first time I ever prepared it, at an age where I had to scrape matchboxes by the bucketful to get a few grams of red phosphorus, and distill from test tube to test tube.
Got a tiny, tiny little bit, half the size of a split lentil or so, on my wrist. Burn was awfully painful for it's size, but it was the after-effects that shit me up. It's toxic, IIRC the lethal dosage, is roughly the same as potassium cyanide, about 40-60mg or so for an adult if it were administered by mouth in either case)
Obviously, some of the white phosphorus burnt, and not all was absorbed. This was back in the old house, when I had to make do with a lab bench built for me by my old man, in my room (I'm still amazed he did that for me), first white phosphorus I'd ever set eyes upon outside a picture, or news-clip of an incendiary shell airbursting in a war-footage reporter's video backing, hurt like a bitch, but the day after, I found my muscles weakened, on that side, just my arm, it hadn't become systemic, but arm, and hand, fingers, so, so weak that it was almost paralysis. And trying to move it, or do anything, my arm would shake, and twitch and then just sag and drop, as if palsied and suffering a stroke.
I couldn't so much as pick up a pencil, the only way I could hold one, was to use the unaffected hand to open my fingers, put it in, then close the hand with the good hand. IF I could lift the affected arm a few inches momentarily, the muscular weakness was so profound that it'd just fall to the ground (the pencil)
That wasn't easy to....well I couldn't exactly just say what'd happened, but pass off for the considerable time my dominant hand, and arm attached to it were crippled and unusable; in my first spesh school, the shitty one of the two (the only good thing about the place was the fact there were some REALLY fucking sexy Kanner's autie girls there. Where better, at that age, to find myself a fox, than a special ed school for classic autism afterall)
But writing...having to use my left hand, drew attention, teachers thought I was fucking them about at first, until it became obvious that I was doing things like eating food with my left hand alone, and not being able to do a coat zip up. Really shit me up for the first week or so, as I didn't know if my liver was going to fail, and I'd end up dead.
But it certainly got me a lot of questions, quite a few of them pretty stupid, in that school.
The only way to put out a thermite reaction, is to disperse the charge over so wide an area that the burning bits are tiny specks, isolated from one another.
This, was a decent sized charge, blazing away, and what exactly, did a parent think I was going to do? go up to it and kick it? stuff burns hot enough to cut through steel, and spews out a fuckton of sparks, whilst releasing a torrent of molten metal, the metal depending upon the oxide used. Not to mention, that it gives off enough UV light to cause eye damage if directly looked at for a long time without protection, although I was wearing welding goggles, I needed my folks to fuck off, quickly.
'What was that bang' (shouted up the stairs after the house mains power tripped, and then later, 'where is that vase' or words to the effect of the latter
The previous, being a LOUD blast, a whole lot of swearing, and a plume of searing hot caustic soda high enough to reach from the height of my lab bench, at the time, in my old house, when I was just a kiddo, in my bedroom, plus the height of my mother's vase, which had been drilled either side, a pair of battery electrodes (carbon rods) that I'd placed over one end, a length of copper wire,, a bit of solder, and hammered on a metal end cap before blowtorching the end in question, the solder being there just to ensure a better connection.
The other end of each of these, was attached to a long bog standard electrical wire, and the fuse of the plug had been replaced with a cast slug of lead, made to close size with a DIY mold and one of my blowtorches, to stop it just blowing straight out.
The intention, was to prepare sodium metal. At the time I was very inexperienced, just learning my chemistry (my special ed school, at least, the first one of two I attended, they didn't even HAVE a science lab, well, they had a tray with a few AA and D batteries, a couple of lightbulbs and bits of wire. And ONCE some classroom assistant told us all to go to the far end of the room, away from him, whilst he backed into a corner, and holding up half a potato, put two drops or so of iodine tincture onto it. Let us watch it, from as far off as possible, change colour. And then threw away the potato, put the wee bottle iodine tincture in his pocket again, without another word. *I* had to explain to the class, and the classroom assistant, what was going on!
(and the following night, after rounding up as many bottles of iodine tincture, some peroxide, and using a little sulfuric acid, after first meticulously distilling off (for future use, after purification, as a solvent, at that age, my income was whatever I could earn with my own ingenuity and a pound a week pocket money. And a pound a week does not a liter of 98-99% sulfuric acid buy. Nor does it keep a kid supplied with the kilos of caustic soda and liters of HCl he requires), I'd spent the night distilling it, using a tiny alcohol burner, until getting it as concentrated as possible before any iodine vapor came off, then acid, oxidizer, reducing the KI present to iodine, and subsequently, distilling further, and distilling off the iodine, subliming it onto an improvised coldfinger, then re-subliming it again, until I had before me, a few grams of pure, crystalline elemental iodine, set eyes on for the first time outside the context of tincture of iodine, took all night, and unsurprisingly, went back to that science-desert shithole of a special ed school..sorry, I'm classically autistic, not a fucking moron. And I really, really resent those who ought to have provided my science education denying it me utterly, and thus my having to slave my ass off breaking into derelict buildings to scavenge lead and copper, and selling bunches of flowers snipped from roadside ornamental cherry trees for 50p a bunch, off the back of a bike, and taking full advantage of people's tendency to go 'awwww, ain't that enterprising, lil'un is working hard here, cute fella' and voluntarily handing me more than the asking price, even got fivers and the odd tenner, once in a while. Which to me, a tenner meant a liter bottle of 98-99% concentrated sulfuric acid, a fiver a couple of kg of caustic soda, or a bottle of that and one of ammonia solution, to which I could gas with more NH3 to concentrate it, using caustic and ammonium sulfate or phosphate fertilizer until I had saturated aqueous ammonia, or a whole lot of tubs of potassium permanganate to use for generating chlorine gas.
That iodine...I'd worked all night for it, I still remember that night, brown fingers, brown hands, brown patches on my arms, and a huge grin, reflecting the sense of immense pride in being able to have that few grams of highly purified elemental solid iodine, as fine, fluffy crystals from the resublimation, looking lovely and greyish-metallic, the way it turned to vivid purple vapour, of a gorgeous violet when a little bit was put into a test tube, the outside warmed with a low flame from my micro-blowtorch (more controllable than the big one, faster than the spirit lamp), the delightful scent, the interesting, although violent reaction with white phosphorus....I was so proud of myself, at maybe 9-10, having done it all by dint of sheer effort and research in the library on the chemistry required.
And the day after, I'd been to the spesh school, come home, and went straight up to once again, admire the shit out of my iodine, only to find the chemical cupboard in my bedroom it was stored in, it'd turned bloody brown, and every last single grain of iodine was GONE. Evaporated. I hadn't realized it's volatility. Left it in a petri dish.
To say I was crestfallen....damn....I'd spent a lot, for me, then, at that age, income wise, on rounding up every bottle of iodine tincture in every pharmacy I could get to, that was a lot of my chemistry-money (which was pretty much every penny I ever got, save for the occasional bag of sweets, and a weekly copy of 'the beano'), I'd worked hard for that funding, really hard, hours on the bike flogging flowers door to door, burgling derelict buildings, stripping the wire out of the walls, wrenching floorboards up and slicing the pipes off with a pipe cutter or where size demanded, a junior hacksaw, I'd bricked leaded windows, I'd climbed the roof and ripped away the little bits of Pb that keep the slates in place, swung myself up into the lofts, slicing and dicing wherever I found a copper boiler (that, and ONCE, an oooooold ass big thick-walled lead water tank and piping that had to be cut up in place, and multiple trips made to reload my backpack , as WELL as a copper boiler in the same attic. And for some fucking WEIRD ass reason, which I'll never figure out, under one of the floorboards, a big pile of floppy disks, with a load of retro games. Big sodding pile, under a nailed-down floorboard. Well, until it was un-nailed-down by a kid hungering insatiably for chemistry and biotech funds
Even ganking the lead and PbO2, the heavy sulfuric acid, and the semipermeable membrane pouches to separate them, for future electrochemistry experiments, before filling them up with saturated aq. solutions of what was basically lab crap, garbage salts, nothing toxic, since I'd not want to be responsible for harming a scrap merchant, even if I was giving them surgically dissected, disembowelled of their useful bits, and replaced with enough saturated brine, chlorate crap, whatever other muck was around, and a load of soil and gravel before carefully putting them together again in a way not obvious.
Same went for copper pipes or lead pipes, dirt and rocks in there, hammered shut, or my other game, casting lead down the copper pipes, as copper got more money. But rocks and dirt were the usual.
Justified it to myself by 'this is paying for my schooling, my science education is being withheld entirely from me by the school who ought to be giving me at least the chance to put my mind to the teaching offered to me. But it isn't being offered at all. I'm not buying sweets or fags with the ill-gotten gains, I am spending it on equipment and chemicals to teach myself what the school teaches no student of theirs, ever, at all'
That, to me, a child's opportunity for a proper education, is worth more than the deficit incurred by a scrap merchant being cheated by a kid seeking the funds to continue his autodidactic learning, which had he not, he'd have been too poor to afford his needs, and he would have had to go without a proper early chemistry and biology/biotech education. The merchant will make more money, a kid, that was ALL my money, bar one pound a WEEK. That would be ten, maybe twelve weeks, with pocket money alone, for one single liter of 98-99% concentrated sulfuric acid.
Anyhow, I digress, I'm a spazz, hyperfocus sometimes gets me, and I'm a chemist spazz, so go figure.
The stupid question, it was not the shout of 'what the fucking hell is going on up there, are you alright?' coming up the stairs.
It was my mother, a day or two afterwards, asking where her flower vase was.
Afterall, parents know their kids (to a fair degree at least), and she should have known enough about me to know that asking where her flower vase was, or if I'd seen it, mere days after a thundering great BOOOOOM!! mysterious in source, emanating from her son's bedroom, followed by a torrential stream of vile language, and the sound of walls being peppered with shrapnel, was probably not going to get her her vase.
Not in the same shape it was two or three days prior, at least. And definitely not in a way that flowers could be once again put therein, since there was no 'in' for them to be put, anymore. Maybe balanced on the shards sticking out of my one-occupant version of a bunk bed, or driven into the walls, but definitely not standing upright, or with water in amounts larger than could be measured with a pipette or eyedropper.....
'what are you doing with 50kg of weedkiller and all those copper pipes and the power drill????' (at the time when sodium chlorate was still sold)
As well as enquiries about the reason there were blocks of wax strapped to aerosol cans with drinking straws stuck in the wax blocks and duct tape wrapped round the whole contraptions. (It was only partially wax, serving as a binder for...other things. High-temperature, slow-burning, incendiary things)
I was a bit of a hair-raising kid, I'm sure.
And why at first, for a fair while, nothing would grow whatsoever in an octopus-shaped pattern on the back garden lawn, this not THAT long ago, last year/early this one, I'm keeping thinking of this year as 'last year' now, since it's so close to xmas
, and then, the grass, everything plant-life sprung up with astounding lush vigour, as if it'd all been dosed with steroids and pumping iron as if there were no tomorrow. And at the time, what that garlic-like smell was, and why there was a massive, dense white cloud of smoke rolling over the garden, searing the life from more grass)(Alembic sprung a crack, whilst a distillation of white phosphorus, preparing it from the red allotrope, was underway, I got the fuck out of the way, ducking behind the side of the house at a helluva sprint, the moment I saw the crack, dropping the torch, just running for dear life, knowing from the first little spraying jet of glowing white-green flame that the thing was going to break catastrophically. So I ran for it. It cracked in half, and several hundred grams of refluxing white phosphorus, promptly liberated from it's argon-shielded atmosphere, boiling and bubbling inside the alembic, before it failed, went up in a colossal ball of blinding white-greenish tinged searing, blazing hot flame)
Damn glad THAT didn't hit me, jesus, doesn't bear thinking about. When white phosphorus burns someone, it either burns out, or it burns in one side and out the other, stopping only when either completely consumed, prevented from contacting oxygen, or being physically dug out of the person with a knife. I've been burned once by it, the first time I ever prepared it, at an age where I had to scrape matchboxes by the bucketful to get a few grams of red phosphorus, and distill from test tube to test tube.
Got a tiny, tiny little bit, half the size of a split lentil or so, on my wrist. Burn was awfully painful for it's size, but it was the after-effects that shit me up. It's toxic, IIRC the lethal dosage, is roughly the same as potassium cyanide, about 40-60mg or so for an adult if it were administered by mouth in either case)
Obviously, some of the white phosphorus burnt, and not all was absorbed. This was back in the old house, when I had to make do with a lab bench built for me by my old man, in my room (I'm still amazed he did that for me), first white phosphorus I'd ever set eyes upon outside a picture, or news-clip of an incendiary shell airbursting in a war-footage reporter's video backing, hurt like a bitch, but the day after, I found my muscles weakened, on that side, just my arm, it hadn't become systemic, but arm, and hand, fingers, so, so weak that it was almost paralysis. And trying to move it, or do anything, my arm would shake, and twitch and then just sag and drop, as if palsied and suffering a stroke.
I couldn't so much as pick up a pencil, the only way I could hold one, was to use the unaffected hand to open my fingers, put it in, then close the hand with the good hand. IF I could lift the affected arm a few inches momentarily, the muscular weakness was so profound that it'd just fall to the ground (the pencil)
That wasn't easy to....well I couldn't exactly just say what'd happened, but pass off for the considerable time my dominant hand, and arm attached to it were crippled and unusable; in my first spesh school, the shitty one of the two (the only good thing about the place was the fact there were some REALLY fucking sexy Kanner's autie girls there. Where better, at that age, to find myself a fox, than a special ed school for classic autism afterall
)But writing...having to use my left hand, drew attention, teachers thought I was fucking them about at first, until it became obvious that I was doing things like eating food with my left hand alone, and not being able to do a coat zip up. Really shit me up for the first week or so, as I didn't know if my liver was going to fail, and I'd end up dead.
But it certainly got me a lot of questions, quite a few of them pretty stupid, in that school.
...I'm wiping away tears of mirth 
having a much better day now. I'm on my way to Dunkin for a coffee and reading a book or three while writing Python Code for a self paced coding collage class...You are 
