Extracted lsa from morning glory seeds in order to make my own knock-off lsd
baking bread
This one is underrated. That shit is like college-level difficult
Weed science. Not complicated at all, but there’s so much bro science out there…
Liquid gas column extraction of organic compounds? I’m told that’s something you should definitely do outside!
Oh no… Mine is super basic… Flower, everclear, freezer, air fryer.
Alcohol isn’t that great as an organic solvent. Are you using the air fryer to evaporate? That must be a fair fire risk!
Butane on the other hand is a good organic solvent and will evaporate at room temperature (just don’t evaporate it in a room or near any heat source).
I’m happy with it - i feel like the extraction i get is pretty good for the ease and safety of my little setup. I’m not trying to make enough to sell, just mostly making cheezits and candies for friends. When i do have a lot to process i usually do a dry ice shake.
I bake from scratch.
Eating.
For me it has been etching circuit boards and specifically making my own liquid tinning solution at one point. I mostly do hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide on larger stuff and ferric chloride on smaller prototypes.
Probably something using dihydrogen monoxide as a solvent for a mixture of organic compounds
Gold and Tellurium nanoparticle synthesis was the most interesting but I am not sure it qualifies as “complicated” given the procedures we used.
If computational chemistry qualifies, I have run on the order of 5,000 DFT optimizations+freq and of those, the most complicated ones involved metallocarborane clusters. These are composed of Boron, Carbon, a metal and different groups coming off the cluster. The largest one that I worked on took about a week to run the calculations on my home machine.
Extracted lidocaine from butt lube.
Steel etching with Winsteard’s reagent. It is a bit dangerous because if done wrong it forms explosive dust. It was also long and tedious because the liquid must be near boiling and stirring so it evaporated quickly and has to be topped off and brought back to temperature often. The etch itself requires a long temper of a quenched sample and has an iterative process of etching and back-polishing to gradually remove surface roughness but leave the slightly deeper grain boundaries.
It took several hours of preparation and several hours of active work per sample and even then had a 50/50 success rate. I was professionally trained by a third party who learned this process from the person who perfected it, George Vander Voort.
I work in a chemistry lab
Production of chlorine gas
Napalm from petrol and styrofoam
Extraction and purification of surface residue for triple quadrupole analysis looking for pesticides, or inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry looking for arsenic, but that’s practically physics by that level.
Baking
