>>12047268Well, bugger. I was hoping I wouldn't have to go looking through each MSDS. I finally ordered some glassware, and I'm planning on synthesising basic reagents before I buy them, as well as putting together a home lab.
My first steps were just going to be simple distillations, eg. of water, ethanol, etc. As well as putting together a workspace, get an old rangehood for a fume hood, make up a bench with power and an isolation switch for the hotplate, etc.
Not so much about purity to begin with, I'm just more interested in if it's working. Like if I try to synthesise nitric acid, test if it works. Although I've looked at other ways I might be able to approximate purity with more readily available equipment, like my write-up for distilling water, I thought about testing the electrical resistance at graduated lengths of 10mm with a multimeter, and compare that to graphs I've seen.
I've started to cobble together a list of things in a few levels of complexity. Like the aforementioned water and ethanol, then nitric and sulfuric acid. I also was planning on trying out some gases like carbon monoxide, dioxide, and developing my own set of standard reactions for commodity gases. I've also been trying to develop two experiments for each target.
My stretch goal at the moment is making calcium carbide, reacting it with water to acetylene, then passing the acetylene in a copper tube under heat to convert it to benzene. That might take me 6-12 months to get to it though, and there's a reasonably long list of really basic things in the meanwhile. A bunch of recrystallisations. I bought an old microscope recently, so that should be nice to look at, I just need to finish modifying the lamp to an LED one.
