I'm glad you're still going to go through with the synthesis despite someone else doing it first. I don't really care who does it first; I watch the channels I watch because I like the way the creators present their work.
LOL Back in the height of the Post 9/11 paranoia, I was playing with my RC Car and forgot to wash my hands before I packed my bags for a trip across country. When they swabbed my bag and Nitro showed up the red light went on and the fences fell locking about 150 people in the security center. .. XD After about 20 minutes of dealing with the 12 armed TSA agents stripping me and swabbing my entire breadth of possessions and clothing, They all had a laugh... Except I was violated for simply playing with a toy. 8/
Kinda ironic too because at the time they could only test for nitrogen containing explosives.. So if you were playing with TATP they wouldn't have known/cared
The stuff they use for top fuel is a much higher percentage of nitromethane. That stuff maxes out at 90% nitromethane. Although I believe you can choose a lower percentage if you wish. It almost certainly does not contain oil because it's not a two stroke.
@@turkeyboyjh1 didn't realize they ran any oil. But it makes sense to me since the amount of fuel they're going to be flowing through those mechanical fuel pumps.
Nice Job! I did this distillation with 1 gallon of 50% nitro fuel made for RC boats. Unfortunately I dropped my thermometer into the 1l flask and about 500ml of fuel soaked into my mantle :( Also the oil smells extremely bad when you get it hot so I recommend distilling in smaller batches and removing the oil each time you add fresh fuel. I got around 250ml of nitromethane which is definitely not a 100% yeild. I assume that you will be doing a Henry reaction with the nitromethane? I've done them and they're honestly some of my favourite reactions (except for the cleaning part). For substituted benzaldehydes I used GAA, nitromethane and ethonalamine and ended up with yields around 80-90%. Good luck on your synthesis!
Thanks! And yeah, I'll be using this in a Henry reaction to make 3,4-dihydroxynitrostyrene, which will be reduced with Pd/C to dopamine. I've ran the reaction before using protocatechuic aldehyde in methanol with ethanolamine, and it seems to work great! GAA/ammonium acetate was recommended, but I'd need to vacuum distill off the GAA, which doesn't seem feasible atm
@@LabCoatz_Sciencehere's my notes for the Henry reaction. It might be useful to you. "13.7g substituted benzaldehyde, 36ml GAA, 9g nitromethane, 6g ethanolamine were added to a 100ml flask and heated at 60C for 40min. The flask was allowed to cool to room temp and 100ml of water was added and the mixture was stirred for several minutes and placed in the freezer. After filtering, the material was recrystallized from methanol 15ml/g. The final yeild is 9.8g of bright yellow crystals of nitrostyrene." The 15ml/g number isn't actually correct. Also, I used a sodium borohydride and copper chloride reduction for reducing the nitrostyrene.
@@All_Science I think I looked into using borohydride, but it mostly seemed to produce oxides and other stuff instead of cleanly reducing the nitro and double bond. I would try GAA, but then I'd need to buy some and if it fails to precipitate, I'd need to redo my aldehyde synth. Maybe I will though... the yield might be better, as some people suggest!
I have to agree with those below. You can order Nitro (one gallon and 5 gallon cans) from your local auto parts place or performance auto parts house. The purity is reasonably high.
While locating an auto store that sells nitro could be a bit of a hassle, I do agree that simply buying it would be easier. The Hyperfuels website sells it for a decent price, and if I had know about them sooner, I would've just bought from them. However, this still seems like a useful process for people living in areas where nitromethane is restricted, and since there was some debate on Science Madness about how feasible this route would be, I decided to give it a go and post the results!
I love the distillation here. It’s too bad dopamine is too polar to cross the blood-brain barrier and reach the mesolimbic brain. If only we had something structurally similar, and more nonpolar that could do the trick. Oh yeah - AlphaMethylPHenylEThylAMINE. (The casing being intentional - wink wink) :-)
Great video! But a question, since you said it wasn't too tightly controlled in the United States can't you just buy liters of it from a seller that's not amazon?
I could have, but I filmed this back in July/August and didn't know about sellers like Hyperfuels at the time. And since there was some debate on the science forums about if this would be feasible, I decided to give it a shot for the people who don't have access to pure nitromethane.
I personally know a few top fuel racers and since 9/11 the rules on obtaining the quantities of pure nitro that they use have changed. Some racers have even been visited by the Department of Homeland security to verify how much nitro the have, how they're storing it and the security of their facilities
It's blue because many companies use that as a way to let you see what fuel you have by looking and another reason is because fuel mixed with castor or bean oil is used in 2 stroke engine which most rc engines are and it makes it a sure way to know that you aren't putting straight unmixed fuel into a 2 stroke engine and end up melting it down
Can we get Bezos in a submersible ? FYI VP sells a 50% NM product and 99.9% stuff is available as well , just not at Bezos The Clown's Circus Tent and Outhouse . Try a local speed shop, just know they are told to be on the lookout for " non racing types " looking for NM . That's been a thing for a long time . How about trying to break the azeotrope after this current project ?
Anything with the tagline "to outsmart Amazon" gets my click, and i think in watching this I've Found a new hobby: RC cars! Now to fit a nitro powertrain in a hot wheels🤣🤣
not sure if this has been mentioned before, but you really can't completely separate an azeotrope by simple distillation. IIRC, you could make a ternary azeotrope, but simple distillation is going to leave you with that 9% methanol.
You can purify the nitromethane here since it is the higher boiling of the two and present in a higher percentage than the azeotrope % nitromethane. That 9% means 9% nitromethane at azeotrope, not 9% methanol. Once you've distilled off all the methanol (technically 91:9 MeOH/MeNO3), the methanol is completely gone and there's leftover nitromethane.
Methamphetamine has good bioavailability and high affinity to dopamine receptors in the brain I don’t think ingesting dopamine will do anything, will it?
You use nitromethane to make dopamine?! O.o Also, making a dopamine antagonist would be interesting. I could actually use some of that... For research purposes.
@@user255 its a bad idea because you're risking something really bad & permenant like tardive dyskinesia. Use of antipsychotics for sleep might be common but I doubt theres really that many studies supporting that use. They only make you sleepy because they have H2 antagonism, which you can get from regular old benedryl
Sadly, that video probably won't be coming. My pathway was very similar to Pyrotechnical's, but it actually followed a published procedure. It involved reacting protocatechuic aldehyde with nitromethane to get 3,4-dihydroxy-b-nitrostyrene (Henry reaction), which would be dissolved in ethanol/HCl and reduced with 10% Pd/C under hydrogen to get dopamine HCl. However, the isolating the nitrostyrene proved to be essentially impossible, since catechols (benzene rings with two hydroxyl groups next to each other) tend to be super air-sensitive and unstable. I could never crystallize it, no matter how I performed the Henry reaction. I tried reducing with Pd/C, which seemed to work, but I could never get the HCl salt out of the tar...freebasing wasn't an option either, since dopamine freebase rapidly polymerizes. Overall, it was one giant mess and after going through nearly a half-pound of precursor, I'm pretty much burnt out.
Yeah... I still have a couple of canisters of nearly pure nitro at home. Like 90%. I used to mix my own rc fuel back then. It was much cheaper and my RC hobby guzzled the stuff.
I've heard several times that seperating the nitromethane from the mixture isn't necessary for the Henry reaction to work. Would be interesting if you could qualitatively test that out if you have some aldehyde left over after the main synth. Would save a lot of work and all the nitro stuck in the azeotrope. Either way, really looking forward to the next video :)
Believe me, if I could just use the RC fuel directly, I would! But sadly, I already tried that, and the result was a gooey red tar. Removing the oily impurities definitely helped, and with a more concentrated nitromethane, I can crash out the product much more easily. However, it is worth noting that the raw reaction mix shouldn't be directly reduced to dopamine: the tar and impurities leftover from the Henry reaction (mostly polymerized nitrostyrenes) cause the dopamine to fairly dirty.
methane gas bubbled thru nitric acid that has methanol and ethanol in it. 😐 its a polarized nitrated gas that is semi soluble in alcohols. nitropropane is the same thing, helps engines start up as the compression cycle of 120-180psi from 0psi is enough to thermally crack the nitrate off creating a small heat increase before the spark, pulmonary emulation of dieseling without igniting what's around it. but whatever
Bravo........ok.....urine......what is the best way to increase nitrate level .........aged in bucket .....with soil and wood chips.......can u add anything more..........ammonia.......cheers
It takes a _serious_ shock to set off by itself, even when mixed with a sensitizer it still requires a decently strong blasting cap to detonate, and while there is a record of hydraulic shock detonating nitromethane at large scales (a tanker truck), it happens so rarely as to be negligible. The reason it is not commonly sold by amazon or ebay is its use in explosives, they don't want to be held liable for selling explosive material, kind of like how they stopped selling ammonium nitrate and other oxidizers. Pure nitro is readily available online without requiring paperwork for 30 gallons or less, I got a gallon of it last year from Torco Race Fuels for about $120.
@@TheExplosiveGuy I feel like you're explaining to me what i already suggested I was aware of without being too wordy. I'm well aware of the parameters, the incident i referred to in the one you reference with the tanker. Also not saying you 'cant' buy it pure, but every time i've tried, even if it says 100 or 99.9 on the bottle, it has 5% methanol in it as a desensitizer. I would challenge you to check yourself.
If you mean anything like this (nitromethane), than no, not to my knowledge. However, certain chemicals like diethyl ether or THF can build up explosive peroxides that may concentrate and subsequently detonate during distillation.
I've only ever seen 66% on Amazon, could you provide a link (or maybe just the listing title, since RU-vid likes to delete comments with links)? I went with this stuff because of the price: it was only $25, while the 66% was $100 and only sold by the gallon. I distilled it mostly for the sake of seeing if separating the nitromethane was achievable, since some people on Science Madness were debating that a while ago. But yeah, if you just want nitromethane, I would recommend buying a liter of the 99.9% stuff from Hyperfuels for $35.
Why did you jump straight to 101 b.p. of nitromethane. You was meant to distill methanol 64 degrees and everything beyond the point of nitromethane. And then try to distill pure nitromethane in case any of the oil exceed the b.p of 101
I didn't jump straight to 101C, the temperature reached that point naturally after most of the methanol boiled off. And I redistill it to isolate the mostly-pure nitromethane from leftover methanol and any oil that came over.
The dopamine is synthesized in your nostrils when you smell that burned nitro and oil 😂 Used to race semi-indoor and the sound and smell of RC car exhaust was awesome. It’s like that scene in Apocalypse Now… “You smell that!? That’s napalm, son. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like… victory.” 😂😂😂
Not really, the only good way to get it into your body is intravenously, and the results probably aren't what you think. Sadly, it just causes high blood pressure (the HCl salt is frequently used for this purpose), not ultimate bliss, so you can't get high off pure dopamine.
I can tell you why it's blue. When they are synthesizing their mixture there was some swamp gas from a weather balloon that's trapped in a thermal pocket reflecting the light from Venus. That's what gives it the blue tint.
@@yoctoflop Neither of them are "happiness juice", nor they cross blood brain barrier. Take some SSRI and your serotonin levels get up almost instantly. Zero effect on mood, until *maybe* after few weeks, which seems to be caused by new synaptic connections, instead of serotonin per se.
VP is available at the pump in some union76 gas stations. I don’t understand what you say but I do know what you are doing. Oddly the comments are not typical. I would enjoy a discord round table of intelligent people. Not the typical discussion among the uninformed. Like….. one time while discussing painting automobiles this fool said to me….thats what Roy said…my opinions were baseed on experience while his were based on what he was told. I ended all debate by saying you are as smart as a parot and I am a painter. The guy hit me. Violence is how ignorant people win arguments. I don’t fight or even argue. I will teach you that I am right.
