No I couldn't. I need that vac pump and I need it weeks ago. What is to be vacuum-distilled is itself worth (not that it can simply be purchased) much more than a mattress would be. And it has not got an infinite shelf life either. It needs to be stripped of solvent, and purified carefully and either derivatized for storage (lossy probably unless one prepares a direct intermediate to an end desired compound AS the derivative and it happens to be more stable) or uses it right away its shelf life is not indefinite. So not to put too fine a point on it, I'm staying on the sofa for now. Its comfortable enough. And the vac pump comes first. As do some more pieces of glassware and other supplies.
I just don't see the competition here. Makes about as much sense as comparing the risk of being born non-autistic/aspie vs asking how many people in australia pick their nose and wipe of on a dead badger. And because of those acid attacks there is the risk of not being ABLE to buy it unless I act now without having to order through chemical supply houses, the chinese etc. when I want some sulfuric acid for something that a bottle of 98% conc. drain cleaner grade sulfuric would give perfectly equal results for. I don't, for some reason, even if there happens sometime soon to be a spate of people being garotted with stretched out mattress strings, or little old ladies having their eyes put out by psychotic thugs armed with superglue-soaked, sharpened mattress-shivs for their pension money and the chance to expose themselves to the family cat, resulting in a knee-jerk ban (and given the current PM, by a jerk who ought to be knee-ed, yet whom nobody needs and no sentient organism whatsoever, of any kind for any reason would knead without the threat of death by slow torture With red hot mattress springs used in various creative and most likely quite unthinkably unpleasant ways. So, concentrated sulfuric acid and vacuum pump come first. As do my other requirements. The sofa will still be here next year, or the year after, it'll still be made of leather and I can still fall asleep with a portable CD player and some Otep, or Kittie playing, or in a pinch, freeview TV tuned to the kerrang radio station, albeit with its pissy soft rock anal floss excuse for metal. (I.e faggotry on an inconceivably immense scale such as green-day or good chalotte and other such verminous bird-turglars)
It'll be equally comfy as unlike a mattress the leather cushions are not sprung to begin with. And a new mattress would be expensive. I couldn't have it AND my vacuum pump, my 17-20 liters of at a minimum, 95% concentrated sulfuric acid. And I want one of those dry ice makers too, the kind you can buy or build, connect to a CO2 tank and turn CO2 gas into dry ice bricks, because that, dry ice on tap, would be immensely useful. Otherwise, as things stand I have to order it, or at least buy a CO2 fire extinguisher and fire it upside down through a container filled with densely packed wads of tightly woven fabric then compact the dry 'ice' (more like snow and as such evaporates much faster than desired) with whatever form of blunt force trauma and heavy objects happen to be most readily at hand and best suited for the job. I want to be able to not have to plan my experiments weeks in advance and try to time everything to within days, and then have next-day rush delivery and courier charges to pay for it to be sent me, but to be able to do it myself when I want it.
You know what they say about giving african men a fish, vs giving them the means TO fish for themselves, and the man having a full stomach for a day vs him and his family having a full stomach for the rest of their lives? its the same principle. Only I'm english and its solid CO2 for work involving cryogenic temperatures that is desired.
Also. Who is to say that Theresa May-be but really, really shouldn't have ever been, will set her sights solely on concentrated H2SO4? what if she/he/it starts going after caustic alkali bases, ammonia, formic acid, hydrochloric, phosphoric acid? I don't want to have to be stuck in a world where I need to make and distill weak hydrochloric acid brick cleaner into NITRIC acid from a nitrate salt and then distill to get fuming nitric acid and use THAT with a sulfate like epsom salts just to get friggin' H2SO4! the thought of a waste like that of perfectly good nitric acid or/and nitrates (nitric acid isn't over the counter but it is easily made, typically by addition of a metal nitrate, or ammonium nitrate and sulfuric acid then distillation. To actually do the reverse, to obtain the much less valued (by hobbyist scientists) sulfuric acid from the (FAR more precious to hobbyists) WFNA or RFNA (white/red fuming nitric acid respectively, the latter being HNO3 with extra nitrogen dioxide dissolved in it. Sort of like the nitric acid version of oleum, or fuming sulfuric acid, anhydrous H2SO4 with additional quantities of the anhydride of sulfuric acid, SO3, sulfur trioxide, oleum being well described as 'virulent in the extreme' meaning of course the likes of hazmat fees on top of just regular prices too. I don't to pay through the nose just because somebody has to hold theirs
)
Could do with some large size (liter, half liter etc.) heavy-duty, thick-walled borosillicate glass with teflon caps and teflon or other similar polymer compression-seals impervious to strong oxidizers and some more rolls of teflon tape, since I'm fresh out of teflon tape, and I will be wanting it so as to produce and distill some chromyl chloride, CrO2Cl2, a volatile although relatively high-boiling at 1 atm pressure, reddish, toxic, carcinogenic, powerfully oxidizing (likes to set lots of solvents on fire, most are incompatible but freakily, will oxidize alcohols to sensitive aldehydes, as well as toluene to benzaldehyde without carrying on all the way to the corresponding carboxylic acid. Which is quite a surprise considering aldehydes generally are really sensitive to oxidation and should be kept cool, in the dark and ideallly with bottle headspace topped off by some argon or nitrogen to exclude atmospheric O2. Yet CrO2Cl2 will allow the oxidation of a hydrocarbon like toluene (methylbenzene) to proceed to benzaldehyde for example without oxidizing it to benzoic acid or simply causing it to ignite spontaneously on contact)
And I of course, need something to store the reagent in when it is not being used. So its the special pig-bottles the cretin squad left behind or my buying some bigger ones of a proper size. Reacts violently with water as well, hydrolyzing to hexavalent chromium leftovers (not pleasant at all), toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, Cr(VI) is really quite a nasty species in mos of its incanations as wekk as giving off hydrogen chloride gas/forming HCl as aqueous hydrochloric (muriatic) acid while it does.
And the preparation of it isn't exactly very friendly, material-wise either. It involves addition of very concentrated sulfuric acid to a mixture of common salt (I.e NaCl) and a dichromate salt (got everything I need, just want something to store the stuff in and more teflon tape) and then distilling off the chromyl chloride, boils at 120-something 'C. So as imaginable, a mixture of salt and an oxidizing agent like dichromates are, the HCl generated from reaction of H2SO4/NaCl, and a searing hot pot full of brutally corrosive mixture with plenty added oxidizing agent in it, along with the powerfully dehydrating effect of concentrated sulfuric acid is going to be (and is, I've made and distilled CrO2Cl2 in the past and I've seen what a spill of the mixture being distilled, after a flask failure, did to a lab bench. It seared it to ashes anywhere it hit, and anything it touched ended up as Cr(VI) impregnated charcoal or something like it, I had to cut out the entire section of bench-top with a saw and implant a new piece of of bench into/over the gap. Was fortunate that my reactions were quick, because there is only so much protective clothing is going to do for you when its 98% sulfuric acid, already a strong acid but at such concentrations its bloody powerful as a dehydrating agent and generates a lot of heat when it hydrates as it sucks the water out of other molecules [sugar for example is burnt to inorganic carbon ash, and swells up to produce a big long column of porous carbon if a little conc. sulfuric is poured on it, accompanied by sufficient heat that ordinary glass could possibly crack, and the sugar starts to smoke and stink as the sulfuric acid rips the -OH groups from the sugar] and that at a temperature of at minimum 117 'C if using atmospheric pressure to do the distillation, full of fairly strongly oxidizing sodium/potassium etc. dichromate, salt, and chromyl chloride already formed....lets just say that whilst I've never actually SEEN what that mixture at that temperature does to flesh, if I ever do see it, I most certainly want the flesh to be a piece of raw meat, not a piece of ME. a spill big enough I could see chewing down to, or maybe even through bones, and even adding the water to dilute it, and hydrolyze the chromyl chloride and as best possible remedy the injury and try and arrest the progress, is going to heat it up like crazy and release the fumes from perdition's own bowels after a pus-soaked malignant cock-end cancer vindaloo curry cooked by satan himself on the coals made from the skulls of the damned being burnt alive and liberally laced with politician, ground up in old nick's own spice grinder and using human eyeballs in place of kidney beans. And then the morning after, all that stored up hellfire pus-curry flatus released in one huge arse-belch:P
