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Separating KClO3/O4 from match heads


Aspirin

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Seems like a nice cave. The only I've been to is the Melidoni cave in Crete.

 

"I``ve gotta go and do some gardening in the pouring rain now"

 

It would be worth mentioning if it DIDN'T rain in England. :) Talking about rain, the worst acid rain has been measured in Scotland (can't remember the place), measuring about 1 pH. :P

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a very important note about the (per)chlorate:

when boiling water off at 100 celcius (or even 95 in my case) the (per)chlorate detonates. i had 84 match heads worth of (per)chlorate dissolved and when i got it down to about 20mL, it rapidly decomposed. alas, there was nothing i could do. i ended up with a small amount of chloride and almost no (per)chlorate. what makes this especially dangerous is if you did not filter correctly; instead of decomposing with vigorous bubbling like what happened to me, it will violently explode on contact with reducers (sulfur comes to mind).

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When i tried the separation proces today i ended up with a very small amount of it. All most nothing. But when i disolved KNO3 in Water a couple of months ago and evaporated the water today i got a pretty good amount of KNO3 out of it.

 

So is KCLO3/O4 more unstable than KNO3 ?

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192 cm at 16, wow I'm 188 and I'm classed as tall, u yanks eat too much, lol.

1ph acid rain, that has got to hurt, USA giving us all there pollution, whats new and they moan about fuel prices you dont know how lucky you are with fuel, lol.

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  • 4 weeks later...

i certainly hope you didnt boil your mixture down to the two crystals. if so, youre lucky it didnt explode in your face. if you didnt boil the water off, and there was any relatively significant amount of water, the chlorate/perchlorate was dissolved. filter as soon as the heads come apart.

 

yes, you can have fun with the striking strips; give it a nice acetone wash, then maybe acidify it in some 20% hydrochloric acid. then, scrape the strips off and you will get red phosphorus.

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No, i didnt boil it down yet, I have some lab stuff coming soon that i need in order to do that. But I have a funny story about boiling it down....

 

Before I got any lab stuff, i just used cheap pots and pans. So I boiled about 1 1/2 cups water with 500 match heads. I cooked it down and some sulfur started gathering around the edge. I was tired of waiting for it to boil down, so i added some sugar and about 1/2 cup lighter fluid, and ignited. At first it looked similar to creme brule (spelling), because the sugar camamelized. It burned for quite a while, and then the sulfer ignited...when all was cooled and not burning...it puffed up quite a bit. there was maybe 1/2" of fluid in a 7" diameter pan that was 4 inches tall. at one point in the pan, it actually raised above the rim. After that, we jokingly refered to it as the "cake".

The next day, when i walked in to chemistry, my teacher asked me what did i explode...since all my friend said is that we made a "cake".

 

Good times...

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oh, most certainly. sad you had to waste all that (per)chlorate, tho.

 

i actually have a worse story. last time i did it, i was boiling the water off. i got to the point where it's a really concentrated solution, then proceded to continue boiling. i decomposed most of the (per)chlorate in the process, sadly. i only got a few miligrams out of 100 or so match heads.

 

speaking of match books, tomorrow i think i'll buy a bunch of match books and extract the red phosphorus

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you`re getting the evap temp WAY TOO HOT! in that case :(

 

you`ll find that KCLO4 will drop out as crystals even at boiling point of water!

THEN is the time let it cool as SLOWLY as possible! (bigger tangible crystals).

 

Tsk Tsk tsk you waster! LOL :P

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I was able to extract ridiculously small amounts of chlorate. I did however filter it thrice when I last extracted some, to remove the sulfur. Turned out quite well, but I didn't get too much of it anyway considering I used over 200 match heads.

 

By the way, does it burn better if I add the sugar when the chlorate is still wet? I made a small "cake" last time, using some sugar that I mixed with the sticky chlorate. It didn't burn too well, it only spat out thick smoke and occasional sparks (guess it burned from the inside only).

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