Methinks tonight shall be the night I finally tangle with a certain chemistry reaction that has from the very first time I ever tried it has defeated me, its not one I like at all for many, many reasons, and one that uses an exceedingly poisonous chemical in the process, and its finicky as hell.
But, I've finally been given a step by step guide from somebody who performed it on a small scale and succeeded, getting maybe a 70-80 percent yield of the desired end product. I've only a very small amount of the critical reagent used in the reaction (the nasty ass poisonous one), although enough for several tries, since only a miniscule quantity is required in any case, tens of milligrams, and I've got a few hundred at least, maybe over a half gram left. So more than enough; I just want to use it up, so what can be achieved with its use is achieved, or at least attempted to the best of my abilities, so then its gone, and I can then turn to other methods that I'd prefer to use by far, such as use of lithium aluminium hydride (LiAlH4 or in chemist shorthand 'LAH'), its pyrophoric, water sensitive as hell, sensitive to oxygen, and needs to be handled under rigorously dried inert gas atmospheres, in glassware dried by flame, and the ether or THF used as solvent first pre-dried over conventional dessicants suitable for dessication of ethers and then by boiling it in a flame-dried flask with the condenser treated likewise and protected by a drying tube loaded with an efficient drying agent, and distilling from the sodium (or potassium, calcium, barium or strontium, as well as lithium ought to do just fine also) directly into the flask in which the reaction is to be performed, the sodium etc. serving to react irreversibly to produce sodium hydroxide as byproduct, and binding the water chemically, removing all but the most miniscule traces, fractions of a fraction of a percent at most,.
Whilst it reacts very violently with water, and will ignite on contact with solvent containing any H2O, or ignite when exposed to air, giving off a very large quantity of hydrogen gas and this igniting also when the LAH does so.
But, unlike the stuff I'll be using the last of, essentially to get rid of it, but in getting rid of it, derive what benefit it has to bestow, LAH is environmentally friendly and not itself a virulent poison, just requires great care in handling.
And its much more reliable, its fast, clean and doesn't produce toxic waste that is both a cumulative poison in living things, an environmental contaminant if not recycled and the Hg reclaimed, and the wastes are not malignant stuff. So, its preferable. And what it does, it does with great efficiency.
So, tonight, the person who succeeded and was kind enough to give me a blow-by-blow account of a reaction of the kind that I've failed at every attempt before, and at great cost in terms of resources, time, effort and money, as well as in reagents that are both watched as hell and difficult to obtain, their kindness will be put to good use, their work used as guide, and hopefully, success as they themselves had will finally, finally be mine. I'll have to do a recrystallization on my substrate first, but that won't take long or be difficult. Re-X from isopropanol will be just the thing I should think, perhaps in THF, although that would be more of an experiment, I'd have to test the substrate to see how soluble it is in THF, but I have no shortage of THF, or substrate either for that matter. Although the latest lot of said substrate does need some methanol removing from the post-reaction liquors to enable the crystallization of the substrate, and then needs my working it up to get it nice and clean, a re-X or two. No biggie anyway.
I just want to make this damn tricky, variable reaction work for me at least once, basically because I do not want to allow such a thing to beat me. It has cost me so much time, money, effort and chemicals that I HAVE to get it right at least once. I'm not the type to stand by and let the bugger laugh at me
And there's a horror movie (or its meant to be) in the background on TV, set in australia. Started with some guy getting stopped by the filth, fraudulently setting him up for a traffic stop and giving him an illegal ticket, trying to ruin his business, treating the guy like shit. Only he gets back into his car, takes a hunting rifle and blows one of the two copper's heads open, splattering his brains everywhere leaving him with just half a head, and forcing the driver pig off the road. Walks up to him trying to crawl away. Cop says 'I think my leg's broken' pleading for help, only for the guy they abused to grab his broken leg and wrench it, breaking it again in two places. Twist-SNAP!-twist-CRACK! *pig shrieks in agony*
Guy then says 'know what I do with pigs who don't stop squealing? I make them be quiet' before knifing the guy in the spine to paralyze him, putting him back in the pig car with the other pig, the one that just had his skull blown in half, and takes out a can of petrol, pouring it all over him, whilst the copper pleads for his life, saying he can make that ticket go away. Guy they abused just tucks the speeding ticket into the copper's pocket and says 'or I can make you go away', lights a cigarette and flicks the match onto the living pig, leaving him screaming as he burns to death, whilst the driver they stopped walks away and gets back into his car.
Horror? hardly. Thats music to my bloody ears that is. I'd SO love to burn a pig alive like that. Maybe saw the top of their skull open, lift it off and sprinkle bleach all over their exposed brain and leave them to burn. Hopefully they'd survive, hideously brain-damaged and live the rest of their life in a half-existence of pure torture
Hardly a horror movie so far, this is fucking golden
its a comedy, not a horror
