TIL: Today I Learned

[Cutlass]

Pharmacies in the US don't sell raw chemicals. However, you can just buy black powder at a sporting goods store.

 

[Farm Boy]

Does it impact your opinion of him if he got in trouble with Grandpa and Grandma several times for testing his homemade rocket-fuel mixes while they weren't home? He knew he wasn't supposed to do it while they were gone, but neighbors from town could hear the booms and would rat him out. He used an old concrete silo to do his mixing.

He did eventaully get his PhD this decade. Not too bad for a jumped up farm boy doing his part to "Keep up with the Soviets." This would have been somewhere around 1959 to 1961 if I had to guess.

 

[civvver]

A lot of gun enthusiasts reload their own bullets reusing the left over casings and new powder and projectile part cus it's supposed to be a lot cheaper. So yes I'm sure it's very legal to own the stuff.

As far as the mats, they're commonly sold under a bunch of different names like saltpeter is stump remover or some gardening thing, charcoal you can literally bust up grilling charcoal bricks, and sulfur I'm not sure but think you can just buy as sulfur.

It was just interesting to see how it was actually made. It really makes me wonder how the Chinese discovered saltpeter since the process to make it so weird. Any time I think about stuff pre industrialism it's always sobering (maybe that's not the right word, fascinating?) to remember how hard it was to get stuff back then and how you had to make so much out of scratch.

Just consider for a moment a pepperoni pizza and how many components it takes to make one. First you need dough. That means find a yeast strain and grow it, harvest some, grow some wheat the process that wheat into flour. Then you need sauce. Grow tomatoes and some herbs, you need some salt from somewhere. Most pizza sauce has sugar in it too so you'd be growing beets or sugarcane if you live in the tropics. Then cheese. My god. Better go milk something, process the milk, mix it with some enzymes from a sheep's stomach and let it ferment, do a bunch of other stuff I don't understand and probably takes forever and bam you have cheese. Finally pepperoni, better go slaughter some pigs, grind the meat up by hand with some sort of tool, mix with more spices, process the pig intestines, stuff em, let it cure with some celery juice, cook it separately. Combine all the ingredients and bake it and you have a pizza.

 

[Farm Boy]

Don't milk just anything, you want a decent cow breed. And it's going to taste like whatever pasturage they have available.

 

[Arakhor]

A lot of gun enthusiasts reload their own bullets reusing the left over casings and new powder and projectile part cus it's supposed to be a lot cheaper. So yes I'm sure it's very legal to own the stuff.

Just because it's legal to own the consitutent components does not necessarily mean that it is legal to make your own gunpowder in your backyard, even in America.

 

[civvver]

It probably depends on state rules but there's no federal rule against it that I know of. You can't sell it of course.

 

[timtofly]

If they don't bust you for making it why would the person purchasing it turn you in? Would they not want more?

 

[Takhisis]

Pharmacies in the US don't sell raw chemicals.

Don't you use charcoal pills for people with diarrhœa?

However, you can just buy black powder at a sporting goods store.

The horror…

 

[Bootstoots]

TIL that at least one of the following is true:

1. 1-bromopentane has a banana-like odor suspiciously similar to an ester.
2. The reaction of phosphorus tribromide with 1-pentanol and no temperature control produces esters as a side product along with a geyser of hydrobromic acid plus boiling pentanol.

I may or may not have purchased the PBr3 from a sketchy Russian guy on ebay. I'm probably on every watchlist ever by now.

 

[W|M]

That sounds a little dangerous

 

[Bootstoots]

Well yeah, and I should have done it more carefully. I did at least do it outside in fairly strong winds, so the HBr vapor dissipated rapidly, and it was all at arms' length with goggles and gloves. But dripping the PBr3 in slowly with stirring in an ice bath would have been the better way to do it.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Does it impact your opinion of him if he got in trouble with Grandpa and Grandma several times for testing his homemade rocket-fuel mixes while they weren't home? He knew he wasn't supposed to do it while they were gone, but neighbors from town could hear the booms and would rat him out. He used an old concrete silo to do his mixing.

He did eventaully get his PhD this decade. Not too bad for a jumped up farm boy doing his part to "Keep up with the Soviets." This would have been somewhere around 1959 to 1961 if I had to guess.

Yup now I love him. lol

That's how JPL got started. Dudes making rocket fuel in their dorm. haha

 

[hobbsyoyo]

TIL that at least one of the following is true:

1. 1-bromopentane has a banana-like odor suspiciously similar to an ester.
2. The reaction of phosphorus tribromide with 1-pentanol and no temperature control produces esters as a side product along with a geyser of hydrobromic acid plus boiling pentanol.

I may or may not have purchased the PBr3 from a sketchy Russian guy on ebay. I'm probably on every watchlist ever by now.

Sorry to double post, it won't let me easily combine posts once they've been made.

I meant to ask if you had any problems with the EPA or anything? I once looked into buying a banned refrigerant in a rusty old canister from a direct-from-china site to use as a working gas in a satellite propulsion system. Before the project was cancelled I had to put in a lot of calls to the local EPA office to obtain waivers but I always wondered if anyone would have found out in the government if I just made the order without telling them.

 

[Bootstoots]

Sorry to double post, it won't let me easily combine posts once they've been made.

I meant to ask if you had any problems with the EPA or anything? I once looked into buying a banned refrigerant in a rusty old canister from a direct-from-china site to use as a working gas in a satellite propulsion system. Before the project was cancelled I had to put in a lot of calls to the local EPA office to obtain waivers but I always wondered if anyone would have found out in the government if I just made the order without telling them.

Banned refrigerants are usually banned for being CFCs or HCFCs, for which there is a whole lot of regulatory hoopla stemming from a bunch of hippies being all like "we want there to be a functioning ozone layer" and the ****servatives Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations going along with it and signing the Montreal Protocol and directing the EPA to restrict accordingly. But there's a 99.99% chance that nobody would have ever found out or done anything if you'd have bought it direct from China.

I do most of my chemical purchases from a couple of ebay sellers in the US who sell a wide variety of chemicals in small quantities to anyone. They haven't been shut down in the ~1.5 years that I've been doing amateur chemistry as a serious hobby, so I think it's fair to say that this is legal or at least tolerated by the EPA and other government agencies. I've bought a lot of my glassware from China and a few rare chemicals from Eastern Europe, but most of the stuff I've gotten was from US sellers.

The only chemicals that are common in real chem labs but hard to find on the internet are a few drug precursors and explosives, and even then things are more lax than I would have thought (elemental iodine is pretty common to find despite its use as a meth precursor, and obvious explosive precursors show up a bunch too). I doubt you'd find CFCs, but I've bought weird eco-unfriendly things like mercury, cadmium, and radioactive stuff too. Big Brother collects a bunch of data, but he is either ignorant or apathetic most of the time.

That said, I am afraid that the cops will show up some day suspecting me of making drugs or bombs, use civil asset forfeiture to steal my stuff, and eventually charge me with some sort of environmental violation, zoning law violation, or whatever to justify their raid once it becomes clear that I don't make drugs or bombs. This has happened to a few, but not many, of the people on Sciencemadness.org, the site I've learned the most from.

edit: Actually, since you were doing something commercial, and much more so because it involves space, I don't know for sure. You could probably get away with a one-time purchase, but actually using it on a satellite might be a different story, although you know that sort of thing better than I do. Was there no HFC with similar properties?

 

[Cutlass]

Don't you use charcoal pills for people with diarrhœa?

Never heard of it. We have all these modern drugs, and pharmacists really aren't chemists these days. They sell pills, not make them.

The horror…

USA#1

 

[GoodSarmatian]

TIL that Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel are two different people and not just one dude about whose surname I'm perpetually confused.

 

[Synobun]

TIL that Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel are two different people and not just one dude about whose surname I'm perpetually confused.

I used to think Chris Rock and Chris Tucker were the same person. Rock was his comedian name, Tucker was his actor name.

Nope...

 

[Traitorfish]

Wait, Crimbs Krunkfle is four different people?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Banned refrigerants are usually banned for being CFCs or HCFCs, for which there is a whole lot of regulatory hoopla stemming from a bunch of hippies being all like "we want there to be a functioning ozone layer" and the ****servatives Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations going along with it and signing the Montreal Protocol and directing the EPA to restrict accordingly. But there's a 99.99% chance that nobody would have ever found out or done anything if you'd have bought it direct from China.

I do most of my chemical purchases from a couple of ebay sellers in the US who sell a wide variety of chemicals in small quantities to anyone. They haven't been shut down in the ~1.5 years that I've been doing amateur chemistry as a serious hobby, so I think it's fair to say that this is legal or at least tolerated by the EPA and other government agencies. I've bought a lot of my glassware from China and a few rare chemicals from Eastern Europe, but most of the stuff I've gotten was from US sellers.

The only chemicals that are common in real chem labs but hard to find on the internet are a few drug precursors and explosives, and even then things are more lax than I would have thought (elemental iodine is pretty common to find despite its use as a meth precursor, and obvious explosive precursors show up a bunch too). I doubt you'd find CFCs, but I've bought weird eco-unfriendly things like mercury, cadmium, and radioactive stuff too. Big Brother collects a bunch of data, but he is either ignorant or apathetic most of the time.

That said, I am afraid that the cops will show up some day suspecting me of making drugs or bombs, use civil asset forfeiture to steal my stuff, and eventually charge me with some sort of environmental violation, zoning law violation, or whatever to justify their raid once it becomes clear that I don't make drugs or bombs. This has happened to a few, but not many, of the people on Sciencemadness.org, the site I've learned the most from.

edit: Actually, since you were doing something commercial, and much more so because it involves space, I don't know for sure. You could probably get away with a one-time purchase, but actually using it on a satellite might be a different story, although you know that sort of thing better than I do. Was there no HFC with similar properties?

Yeah I know exactly why the refrigerants I was looking for were banned I was just curious as to how effective the bans are for small-scale use.

Oh and we looked at all the refrigerants and for the mission we were working on, we needed the superior thermodynamic properties of the banned refrigerants to make the scheme work. We were working on a NASA sponsored mission to take a shoe-box sized satellite from a lunar-collision trajectory into a lunar orbit. We did not have the volume required to make something like R-134a work as our propellant. The better thermodynamic properties of the banned substances are part of the reason why they were banned - they worked too well and have too long a life in the atmosphere to be acceptable for industrial-scale use and had ready substitutes.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

TIL that at least one of the following is true:

1. 1-bromopentane has a banana-like odor suspiciously similar to an ester.
2. The reaction of phosphorus tribromide with 1-pentanol and no temperature control produces esters as a side product along with a geyser of hydrobromic acid plus boiling pentanol.

I may or may not have purchased the PBr3 from a sketchy Russian guy on ebay. I'm probably on every watchlist ever by now.

*Checks eBay emails, does not see anything related to Bootstoots' chemistry experiments or purchases mentioned among the notifications for books, crafts, games, and cat art*

Nope, you're safe.

Unless you're doing weird stuff with rare Monopoly tokens...