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Chemistry Sets for Adults?
An Anonymous Coward asks "I've been pursuing a few different lines of study, to refresh myself in basic sciences before I return to school. Right now I am reading up on Chemistry, and thought it would be fun to acquire a chemistry set just to play around with and maybe learn a few things from. Do any science geeks here have any suggestions?" My childhood garage probably still has purple and black stains all over it (lucky I was wearing glasses). 300 in one electronics kits, anyone?
I hear those rolling methamphetamine labs are getting pretty popular.
So called "childrens" chemistry and electronics sets are perfectly good for adult too.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
When i was in Orgo chem the *best* and coolest thing we did was extract limoene (orange oil). But you need reflux glassware for it.. but i'll tell ya the stuff smells great. and the practical upshot is that you can use it and other essental oils as food flavorings
Carolina Biological Supply has a bunch of learning kits, books, and software that would probably help you out. We get most of our lab supplies through them.
I think it's about time we added a "hydroponics" category. Honestly, most nerds will probably applaud it.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
She saw me reading the Radio Shack 'Getting Started In Electronic's book over and over again and (in between studies for various certifications) and decided to get me a kit.
:)
She gave me bookmarks after chrismas...
Good list of kits: http://www.hobbytron.net/electronickits.html
I have the 300-on-1 which is $70 and is solderless.
Also check out http://www.kitguy.com/ - seems to be a definitive resource...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
but then i got high err heh
ask your local meth lab if you can do some intern work.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Edmund Scientific
http://www.scientificsonline.com
My dad used to take me there when I was a kid, a very trippy place. It got me through all of my science classes with pre-made projects.
It's actually a little bit of biology mixed in with a bit of chemistry; but it's really fun to play with.
:) I could entertain myself for hours with this thing.
It's a home-brew kit for making my own beer
Modern chemistry sets are crap; they have been gutted because of fear of lawsuits. So the materials and the experiments are bland and useless unless you're 8 years old.
ACK!!! Great stars! Are you *MAD*?! NEVER take anything from the Anarchist's Cookbook. Might as well drink a jug of chlorine, it'll do the exact same thing and save you a lot of time.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Right from that page : Limonene is also used as a flavour and fragrance additive in food, household cleaning products, and perfumes. Im not advocating shugging this stuff straight. Butl ike with any extration of essential oil be it spearmint, peppermint, orange oil, of capsicum the idea it to not over use it.
I'd be real careful about buying 'chemistry' kits these days. If the war on drugs does not send the suits to your door, I'm sure the war on terror will.
Brewing - wine and beer are a good start. A fair amount of chemistry (and biology) involved when you think about it. Taking the alcohol content above 15% or so lets you play with even more toys.
Best college experience was making moonshine from captain crunch in the dorms. A bit of enzymes to convert the starch to sugar, let bubble, then we pulled out the still. Nothing like a mass spectrometer to assure you don't go blind....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I would recommend a molecular model kit though if you really want something to play with, or if you want to be more geeky, you can get some molecular modeling software.
I agree. Building your own chemistry set would be more fun, and you would learn more.
The best way to learn is to teach. Collecting a bunch of good chemistry experiments, and the sources for the materials, would make a great project.
And you aren't the only one who benefits...
Some places to start:
Delights of Chemistry
Demonstration Lab
Lecture Demonstrations
Chemistry Resources
Some Sources of chemicals:
CHEM Scientific
Fisher
Sagent Welch
Carolina
I am certain you will get lots more from other Slashdaughters...
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
Exactly - that was the experience I had with my old 300-in-1 chemistry set about 27 years ago.
I did 30 pages of book/guided stuff. E.g. filtering a sand and salt solution, then spending 2 hours getting the salt out of the solution... at the end, guess what? I had salt again!!! Gee, that was fun.
I switched to my own guided experiments soon after that: KnO3 is cool, magnesium burns pretty well, sulfur smells bad, but hydrogen sulphide is even better! My father (a chemist) banished my experiments to the garage.
Next month, I told my parents I needed a pound of sodium chlorate as a desiccant. My father managed to keep a straight face, but bought it for me anyway.
Many more self-directed experiments were performed, and I found myself learning in leaps and bounds: I learned about the surface area of reactants when I thoughtlessly substituted powdered charcoal for granulated sugar in a simple propulsion experiment. Haha, skin and hair grow back.
Chemistry is cool, but make sure your set has fun compounds... I mean, what the hell fun is copper sulphate, etc?
Also, keep a lab book: it makes for pretty fun reading later in life ("4oz nitrocellulose," what was I thinking?) and is helpful if you screw up and the doctor/bomb-disposal unit needs to figure out what was going on.
To clarify, there are multiple versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, and if that's a copy of the original, just strap some TNT to yourself and light it, it really will save you time in the long run. The original is replete with errors, many chemical, that could cause lots of damage.
However, I doubt that's the original, since the original is extremely rare (if you don't see something about the bridges in NYC, you're not looking at the original). Still, it's not a wise move to perform chemical experiments using instructions from a book that's designed to cause destruction, chaos, and anarchy.
If you're really just looking to win a Darwin award, however...
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
If you are serious about doing synthetic work, I
would see about taking several lab courses at a
local college. They are already set up with
sources for the reagents, safty equipment (ie,
hoods, glove boxes, safe storage for the reagents,
safe disposal of the reagents, plus more
analytical instrumentation so that you will be
able to confirm that what you made is what you
intended to make.
If you really insist on seting up a lab at home,
make sure that you set up a safe lab. Please do
the following:
1) Ensure that you can safely store, handle and dispose of any reagents.
2)Be sure to join an amateur scientist oganization, and find some help, if only to double check that you are doing #1 correctly.
3) consider the legal difficulties
-in the state of texas it is a felony to own
certain common glassware without a permit.
Just to be safe, check your local laws along
with the fire codes.
4) If you can legally own glassware, consider
buying the microscale equipment. It should
be the same price or less for it, however
you'll use smaller volumn of reagent.
Other areas that involve chemistry and makes a good hobby are geology and mineralogy. You can collect samples, characterize them, learn about crystallography, and also analyze the samples chemically.
And if you get seriously involved, you can actually accomplish new science in areas like those, even with fairly modest resources. There are lots of publications dedicated to both the hobbyist and the professionals in those areas; look at them at your local university library to get some ideas.
By all means, check out the Student Science Service (http://www.tri-esssciences.com) in Burbank, California. They sell a few high-end chemistry sets of their own design (these are not kiddie sets). Ira Katz and his daughter, Kim, are the owners and are easilly accessable via e-mail. They're also one of the largest suppliers of pyrotechnic special effects to the local movie studios. Can't recommend 'em enough. -Kevin
Keeping proper care of a --bound-- lab logbook is something I'll carry with me always, regardless of my career path. I still hand-number RH pages in ink; TOC in front; notes on left page; --dated-- documentation on the right. My only backslide is the occasional use of pencil. (I no longer wrangle instruments, now sysadmin.)
Good logbook habits avoid the WTF syndrome.
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
Warning: prepare to spend at least an hour looking at this site.
Get into developing and printing your own photos. You know, the old analog kind. Even better, study some old antique photo processes like Cyanotype or Platinography. I make my own photo papers using these antique methods, and it is satisfying enough to keep me interested, and I was an Honors Chem major until I switched to art, majoring in photography).
Making your own printing papers and photochems is a ton of fun, and yields tangible results (unlike most things you could do with a chemistry set).
One of the most interesting and rewarding reactions you can study as an amateur is mirror silvering using Tollens' reagent. I had an arc lamp reflector that needed resilvering, and decided to do it myself.
h tm l
After a lot of web research, I found that this website had the best directions (and the best safety warnings!):
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm/Silver.htm
The only chemicals I had any trouble finding were silver nitrate crystals, which can be purchased from photography supply stores, such as:
http://www.photoformulary.com/
or ebay, and concentrated nitric acid, which can be purchased from lithography supply stores, such as:
http://www.rembrandtgraphicarts.com/13_rga_cat.
The hazmat shipping charge for the nitric acid will exceed the cost of the chemical.
The process is somewhat complex, involves a number of stages, but isn't too difficult to do. It's an interesting reaction to watch, and the result is cool and useful. I created a perfect mirror coating on the inside of a bottle on the second try, and successfully coated my reflector mirror immediately thereafter.
Everything worked for me, except that I found that I had to heat the muriatic acid in order to make the solder dissolve when creating the sensitizing solution.
That's my recommended interesting experiment.
You can get all the chemicals you need at hardware stores, etc.
Examples: ammonia (cleaning), potassium nitrate (fertilizer), calcium cloride (road salt), ammonium nitrate (fertilizer), various petroleum distillates (everything), all sorts of metals, various exotic metal oxides (dry paint powders and ceramic glazes), sodium hypoclorite (bleach), hydrofluoric acid (for glass etching), hydrochloric acid, calcium sulfate (gypsum), etc... you can get almost any chemical you need for any purpose from common products, or manufacture it from common products. You just have to know what you're doing.
Repeal the DMCA!
Alfa Aesar sells chemicals en masse. They'll even send you a catalog for free. I'm not sure, but you probably have to have a license to buy anything from them.
You of course will need chemicals and chemistry equipment. I expect that you could call the local high school and find out where to get them -- and the high school teacher could suggest where you might get a nice sampling. I can't help a lot there.
a il/-/0030 32906X/qid=1041495102/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-128032 3-3723057?v=glance&s=books
But perhaps I could suggest a book, instead:
Laboratory Experiments for General Chemistry, 4ed
by Hunt, Block, and McKelvy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/det
This one is extremely useful in that it:
(1) Lists the equipment needed for each (so you can go through, find the experiments that you can do)
(2) Lists tons of safety and first-aid information, with standardized icons for each item
(3) provides lab reports to fill out, which will help you understand the experiments
(4) The experiments are actually rather standard; not all of them require special equipment.
One word of caution: After produced the book, my brother noted that one of the experiments, standard to most College Chemistry Lab courses, is wrong:
Experiment 13, the Burning of a Candle.
My brother claims that the experiment purports to demonstrate the stoichiometry of combustion; in reality, it demonstrates the heat given off by candles, and the ideal gas law PV=NRT. He said that he demonstrated this by attempting the experiment in several different ways, one with 3 candles close together (burning hotter), one with three candles farther apart (burning cooler).
I haven't done that experiment myself in his way. But I thought I should mention that.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Agreed. If you've never seen the Anarchist's Cookbook, it's rather like a long "Overrated" Slashdot post printed on paper with pictures and a handsome black cover. The guy doesn't really understand most of the things he discusses and is on the firmest ground when he sticks with safe topics (guns and knives). It was written during the Vietnam era by a pissed-off draft age guy. Now he's turned to Jesus and says he wishes he hadn't written the book at all. Another mind lost to religion.
The best explosive recipe in the book is one that the author discounts in passing- nitrogen triiodide, or NI3. (Actually, the structure is NI3-NH3, where the NH3 is bound to the NI3 electrostatically by what resemble hydrogen bonds.) According to the Cookbook a fly landing on it will set it off (which is probably true, although I never succeeded in getting a fly to cooperate). It claims it's too useless for any serious consideration when planning your anarchy. It might not be good for that, but it's great for pranks. I've had so much fun with that stuff. The secret to NI3 is DO NOT MAKE TOO MUCH OF IT. That way you can keep your fingers. A gram is way too much. Just take a few iodine crystals and put them under ammonia, and presto, it turns into this black powder. If you keep it under the ammonia, it's actually quite stable. When not under ammonia (even when under pure water) it might go off at any moment. Pick it up from the ammonia with a plastic eyedropper, and deposit the black sludge on some surface. Once dry it rapidly loses its NH3 adduct and becomes extremely sensitive to shock, decomposing explosively producing N2 and I2. Don't get traces of it on your clothes or skin, or you'll be treated to a continuous snap-crackle-pop of microscopic explosions (quite annoying).
Finding references on it is difficult- it's almost like people don't want to do research on it. It's probably unstable because the iodine atoms are huge compared to the nitrogen. Congestion around the central N forces the molecule into a planar shape, with repulsive interactions among the three iodines, so it's unhappy for steric reasons. One thing I did find out was that the stuff turns bright orange if you leave it under the ammonia for a long time (like a month). This is probably because it picks up additional NH3 adducts.