funny you mention the jar-in-kettle-of-water method; that's what i used at first. it's great for breaking the match heads apart. after filtering the white powder initially recovered (sulfur), i found that boiling the water out of my beaker was very, very difficult, so i used tongs and held my beaker over my stove (because my stove only goes to 100 celcius).

 

to prove a precipitate powder to be potassium chlorate, try igniting it; it will decompose yielding [math]O_2[/math]

if you want fun, add sulfur and ignite; it should burn with vigor. also, alkaline earth metals make for big reactions.

Hmm? Should I remove the white powder before boiling it further if it's just sulfur and potassium chlorate/perchlorate forms later?

if you have any sulfur, remove it. if you get white powder after boiling off a bunch of water, keep it; it's the chlorate/perchlorate

Heh, there's too much dye to tell if it's really white. I think I'm going to burn some of it today and see what happens.

ok. try burning some with sucrose as well. if it goes up like crazy, you have chlorate

Hmmh, I tried burning some a few minutes ago (without sucrose). It flamed up and burned pretty fast, and crackled a bit, not too pure I guess, but pretty good results when you consider that I didn't crush the match heads and had heavily dyed matches.

 

Edit: Ok, put like 1g of it and 1g basic sugar I found in the kitchen (pure succrose?). Burned like crazy! Lots of smoke and somewhat coloured flames. And it burned a lot longer than without the sugar. Also, it smelled like pancakes or something because of the sugar melting. I recommend this experiment for every young/starting chemist, it's a lot of fun.

the sugar didn't melt; it oxidized. was the color purple/lilac? if so, that's characteristic of the oxidizing.

Yeah, it did have a purple color (and sorry for saying melt, of course I meant oxidized: otherwise adding sugar would have no use at all. And some of the sugar actually did melt, because I had spilled some near the actual chlorate/sugar mix). I actually got it on video with my digital camera. When I have time I try to convert it to a small and easily viewable form and upload it somewhere. Really nice flames, with just a little KClO3/O4 and succrose.

 

Edit: It also burned quite easily through aluminum foil that was folded over thrice or something.

oh man. save it as a .wmv

it won't be compatible with everything but at least it will load.

I made it an .avi. I successfully viewed it with DivX player and winamp (Quicktime had some problems, but I have a pretty old version). Now the only problem is that I can't figure out a place where to upload it since geocities free pages' bandwidth is so minimal.

 

Edit: http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/chloratesucrose.jpg <- before and http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/burned.jpg <- after.

open it with windows movie maker and save it as a .wmv

if you do it at low or medium quality you can get a 30 second video that's only a few megs (<4 i think)

try http://www.freewebs.com for 100mb of free hosting

i just looked at the pics and that powder looked a bit sketchy. i take it the chlorate was that yellowish stuff. it should actually be a white powder. you have sulfur in it.

*Sigh* Freewebs requires a week before you can upload over 750kb. Try http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/kclo3succrose.AVI (if there happens to be bandwidth left)