We (students in a campus) used to drink tea made with a water boiled by a couple of razor blades separated from each other by couple of matches. No bad taste.
We used to do that in the army, except we stuck the razor blades into an eraser. Hooked up a couple of wires to the blades and plugged them in at 220V AC. The water starts boiling quickly if you drop a grain of salt in. Worked great.
The cavitation of the moisture on your skin really works as insulation for a few 100 msec. For some reason I did not panic but ran directly to a big freezer and put a 25lb bag of ice into a utility sink. I did not end up with even a single blister, only a little redness. Good thing I never wear long sleeved shirts
More donts:
1. Dont use a 12ga shotgun loaded with lettered shot (AAA) to open the boot of your shooting wagon. The fuel tank could be (was) directly in the line of fire.
2. Dont turn your back on the farmer you are doing a favour for by blowing a big tree out of the ground to make way for a dam. He might just think Hmmmmmmmm... I dont think Steve used enough explosive to move a tree as big as this" and pour 20kg more down the hole. Result is a pant-wetting suprise as 6' lengths of dense white gum fly out of the mushroom cloud past the tree you are all huddled behind wimpering in fear.
3. Dont take the sleeping tablet Stilnox unless you are actually IN BED as the next morning youll wake refreshed but alone as your whole family has gone to stay with the inlaws while you get over the psychosis you were exhibiting but cannot remember.
4. Dont suck on dry ice. (ED experience)
1. Dont use a 12ga shotgun loaded with lettered shot (AAA) to open the boot of your shooting wagon. The fuel tank could be (was) directly in the line of fire.
2. Dont turn your back on the farmer you are doing a favour for by blowing a big tree out of the ground to make way for a dam. He might just think Hmmmmmmmm... I dont think Steve used enough explosive to move a tree as big as this" and pour 20kg more down the hole. Result is a pant-wetting suprise as 6' lengths of dense white gum fly out of the mushroom cloud past the tree you are all huddled behind wimpering in fear.
3. Dont take the sleeping tablet Stilnox unless you are actually IN BED as the next morning youll wake refreshed but alone as your whole family has gone to stay with the inlaws while you get over the psychosis you were exhibiting but cannot remember.
4. Dont suck on dry ice. (ED experience)
Good thing I never wear long sleeved shirts
Oh, yeah. That would be bad.
Couldn't think of other stupid things, must have repressed them. But you guys reminded me.
Ammonia. Don't sniff it straight from the lab strength bottle. It will go up your nose like a freight train. Almost a week of nothing but ammonia smell. Was afraid it would be permanent.
Co2 cartridges. We used to make them fly down a string like rockets. You stretch a string between two trees. Make a little wire holder for the cartridge that will let it hang under the string. At the starting block you have a nail point sticking out. Tap the hanging CO2 cartridge into the nail to pierce the cap and off it flies in a poof of white exhaust. Many of you have done this. It's fun.
So I convinced my 5th grade teacher to let me demo this to the class. All set up in the classroom, string and cartridge in place - tap, tap, tap and off she goes -wooosh! Then flies off the string, hits the ceiling, ricochets of the walls and hits a little girl in the face. All I could say was "It wasn't supposed to do that."
Haha, good ol triethyl aluminum. When i was an undergrad, the grad student I worked under damn near burned his eyebrows off with the stuff. He was disposing of a bottle of it and didnt see the drop under the lip ofthe stopcock. He skipped the EtOH and went straight to water. 6ft fireball shotout.
Another fun one is diethyl zinc, I have several "bottles" of that in my glovebox right now.
Remember the Presto Hot Dogger? This thing cooked by passing 120V mains between two electrodes stabbing the ends of the hot dog.. Could cook 1 to 5 of them and with all five hot dogs sizzling away would draw almost 1kW..
Actually the hot dogs tasted pretty good and cooked in about one or two minutes. A former GF thought the whole concept was so gross that she threw it out one day when I wasn't home.. Sometimes I still miss it..
For 230V cooking you should probably put a couple of hot dogs in series to limit the power to a couple of hundred watts per dog.. I'd use stainless steel nails as electrodes.
Here's the very thing: http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/kitc...e_Presto_Hot_Dogger_Electric_Automatic_Cooker
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Haha, we use it often insome reactions. Usually diluted in the glovebox first. As anaside, it makes for a great flame thrower: tiny bit of Et2Zn + 5ml plastic syringe filled mostly with glove box air (nitrogen in our case) + slam the plunger home = instatorch. Craziness aside, diethyl zinc is crazy pyrophoric. We also use it to test the purity of our glovebox atmosphere. IIRC it begins whisping smoke ataround 5-10 parts per BILLION of oxygen. Fun stuff.
As for something stupid, I did it just today. I work with a mildly pyrophoric compound trimethylsilyl phosphine (henseforth called TMS-P). TMS-P is mildly pryophoric (mainly just smokes in the open air). With one caveat, when it has something to burn. Well, I transfer some in the glovebox, do all of my stuff eject my autopipette tip from the tms-P onto my paper toweland remove it from the glove box. Outside in the air, I feel the paper towel gettting really hot in my hand. Puzzled, I look over just in time to see the paper towel catch fire. Stupid me I had forgottten about the residual TMS-P on the pipette tip.
Yeah, anybody can get results with access to exotics like these, the real art is in using things you can find around the house. Try dripping a little glycerine onto some crystalline potassium permanganate.
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Ziegler-Natta? We used it to polymerize acetylene, which was really piling it on, danger-wise.
Actually not sure what the electrodes were made of, but definitely not stainless steel.. Those hot dogs though tasted pretty good. You could DIY one with stainless steel nails and a few scraps of high temperature plastic..
Flaming balloons was one of the more fun things I did as a teen science project/mischief with a close friend. Multiple iterations were attempted which mostly burned up before they got off the roof, quite amusingly in some instances. (Our lab was in a room on the concrete roof top of his parents apartment building.) Finally a successful flight that ended quite spectacularly and got us in trouble. This one used a diy alcohol burner and hand glued crepe paper balloon which worked very well until the paper caught on fire. It smoldered and smoked for a few seconds as it floated out over the street far below - the flaming fireball then plummeted 10 stories to the street below. Apparently it just missed hitting some people walking by the building and shortly thereafter we got a visit from the Milan police
Asked not so nicely what the heck we were doing, we explained it was a science project for school. Showed the officer the remains of several of our previous efforts, at which point he laughed and launched into a discussion of what was needed to make a working hot air balloon. (Being 14 yrs old neither of us thought to ask how he knew..) A small ring of aluminum foil around the envelope of the next one kept it from catching on fire, and lighter fluid provided sufficient heat with a much smaller burner to get the thing aloft. The final one actually flew in the court yard of our school and got us a good science grade. (It was a couple of feet in diameter and very light as well as fragile - it flew successfully but disintegrated when it crashed. Looked a little like a tiny Montgolfier Bros balloon)
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The Hot-Dogger was so simple and clever. Just 2 rows of metal spikes. There were cut from thin metal into a saw shape, or teeth. You placed the hotdogs between them.
The carrier drawer had contact prongs that plugged into the base when you slid it in. Presto, 120V on the rails! Not even a power switch, IIRC. Open it up and the power was cut. The thing must have cost about 50 cents to make.
EDIT: I was wrong about the spikes. Here's a photo of the version we had.
The carrier drawer had contact prongs that plugged into the base when you slid it in. Presto, 120V on the rails! Not even a power switch, IIRC. Open it up and the power was cut. The thing must have cost about 50 cents to make.
EDIT: I was wrong about the spikes. Here's a photo of the version we had.
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