This video details how to make calcium acetate and use it to make a flammable jelly with isopropyl alcohol. Remember that all acids can pose dangers to your health and caution should always be taken when boiling them
Thanks for stopping by! Let me know if you have any questions or if you have any ideas for future videos leave them down below and I will check them out!
Looks like the Old Spice deoderant i used to slice up and burn forever, like 30 years ago. My mom wondered why i used a lot..... but it was darn good at melting the faces off barbies that my sister's had, and some g.i. joes.
This is correct, however boiling 36% acetic acid indoors is very unwise, hence why I went with a lower percentage. Theoretically it should be safe if you measure out correct molar amounts of calcium carbonate to match, but to save time and simplify the process I added an excess of vinegar so as much safer to stay with the food grade stuff
For most people that's probably the easiest source of calcium carbonate. I personally have an intolerance to eggs and therefore rarely eat them so it would likely take me a long time to collect enough eggshells to make any meaningful amount of calcium acetate
@@laurice8056 if you can find ones made from calcium carbonate those work great. The only ones I could find at the store near me were made from calcium sulfate so they wouldn't have worked.
If it's extremely well sealed, it will last a long time. Otherwise, the IPA will just evaporate out of it. It's not actually a chemical reaction, it's just that the calcium acetate gets suspended.
So long as the alcohol can't evaporate you'll be good storing it pretty much as long as you want. Really the only way it goes bad is that if the container is an airtight the alcohol will evaporate
That's pretty troublesome. CaCO3 in powdered form is pretty easy to find for cheap, so I don't see any reason to go out of your way to crush up some pills and further process it and deal with all that impurities. Even using just crushed up dried egg shells would have been a more efficient source of CaCO3. Furthermore, the color of the flame on the gel depends on the alcohol you used in the process. Methanol and Ethanol gives off a blue flame that may or may not be clear to the eye (depending on the purity of the end product), whereas Isopropyl gives off a more orange flame.
Thanks for stopping by! At the time of making this video I was only able to find chalks made from calcium sulfate including the Crayola ones I looked at when I went to the store. If I had shopped around more I'm sure I could have found the ones made of calcium carbonate as you suggest, but this was all really last minute. Tums do have quite a bit of sugar that would need to be removed just like the maltodextrin that needed to be removed from these pills, but mainly the reason I didn't use Tums is that Nile Red already did a video on making calcium acetate from Tums. In the end there are quite a few sources of calcium carbonate that can be used and in the case of the chalk would actually simplify everything quite a bit, but I wanted to try something a little different and see where it took me. Thanks for the time to reach out!
I have calcium carbonate I use to make chalk paint. It is quite pure and very fine powder. I would like to use it to make gel fuel for emergency stoves. Any advice??
What happens to the calcium acetate when the alcohol burns? It doesn't pollute the air, does it? If just the alcohol burns, can the remainder be reused in some way?
...Or you could just reacted deicing salt CaCl2 (dirty cheap) with Vinegar and them obtained Calcium acetate and HCl (that is really volatile) and left it to evaporate on a glass tray and the HCl will dissipate while leaving the Calcium Acetate.
Can anyone tell a complete novice if acetone is actually being released/burned during the burning of the gel (is it releasing a secondary combustant) or is it just burning the alcohol?
There pretty much the same price, but at the time of filming I assumed that there there are a few more additives in tums to deal with. Chemistry isn't necessarily my strong suit so I wanted to avoid as many complications as I could.
It does not, using a more concentrated vinegar is actually faster since it reduces the amount of time you need to boil off the water in the final step. Just make sure you react enough calcium carbonate with it to use up all the acetic acid in the vinegar.
While that may be true for vinegar with low acidic content, I wanted to stress the importance of reacting all the acetic acid possible, as you can definitely run into heath problems when especially when boiling vinegar in the 10-22% acid by volume range. These concentrations are commonplace in areas such as eastern Europe and I wanted to make sure that anyone attempting this no matter where would be able to do so safely. It is also worth noting that when pickling, you do not boil the vinegar for nearly as long as you need to for this experiment, and that even with low concentration vinegar is would be unwise to boil this completely away if there is extra acid and you are processing large enough quantities. As for the the heat speeding up the reaction, while this would be the case for most chemical reactions, calcium acetate is one of a handful that that is not necessarily true for. As I mentioned, the solubility of calcium acetate in water is actually lower when it is hotter, causing it to drop out of solution more easily and making it harder to separate out from the un-reacted mixture. Not to mention that hot filtration is not fun do do under any circumstance, and I think you can see that a colder reaction is the clear winner.
@@elemental_workshop well I certainly see your point and being that I make my own fermented hot sauces with cayenne, Habanero and Ghost Pepper, where the capsaicin is liberated by simmering in vinegar during the cooking process at the end, for safety sake, I get it. The fermentation needs a Ph of 4.6 or lower to be shelf stable and safe, but I add 5% cider vinegar and cook at the end, to avoid pathogens. I have no experience with 10 to 22%. But I do understand the dangers inherent in boiling much stronger acids like hydrochloric, sulphuric, or phosphoric. Btw....wouldn't plain old chalk, not the sidewalk stuff work as well for this, barring there is something else in its matrix I am unaware of?? Thanks for the enlightenment!
@@elemental_workshop Oh that'll be a hoot😂one of my friends of 20 years owns Pepper Palace. I got into the whole extract thing with Blairs Death sauces years ago, but now I prefer a natural approach. As you might well imagine theres a lot of extract produced now days to keep these chillihoics happy. Cooking is chemistry in a crude form and I love the outdoors too. I'm disabled, so I have been quite interested in the production of a substance that can get moderately sized firewood going WITHOUT being explosive, illegal or just STUPID dangerous. I am quite sensitive to cold rainy weather, but I love the outdoors, camping etc, and I REALLY need to avoid hypothermia at all costs since I loose gross motor function rapidly due to cerebral palsy...hence I stumbled across your video...
@@tikkidaddy Glad to be of any help. You may want to check out trioxane tablets if you can get a hold of them any more, they burn pretty hot and can usually be found in military surplus stores if the calcium acetate doesn't work out for you. Incidentally, you can also by the calcium acetate/alcohol jelly from stores as those stoves they use to heat chaffing dishes
