PoorMansChemist

OK guys we are going to have to put the salen prep off today and try again tomorrow. We are having high winds today. Its so bad that a gust of wind just knocked over the tripod, graduated cylinder full of ethylenediamine 🤬, and all my scoopulas glass stirring rods. Weve had to film on windy days before but this is a different kind of windy. You can see in the picture that I had the graduated cylinders braced and I still lost one. It really pisses me off but I'm forced to conclude that it's just not safe to try to work under these conditions and I can't reflux these chemicals in my house. The second picture is of my indoor working space. Note the absence of a fume hood. Just weighing out the salicylaldehyde and ethylenediamine in here was beaucoup fun. 🫥 Sali doesnt smell bad but its STRONG!! When it's really concentrated it reminds me of benzaldehyde but when it's that concentrated it also gives me a headache. Ethylenediamine is chemical weapons-lite as usual.

The plan for the video is to do a bit of organic chem and make salen and then use that to make the nickel and vanadyl complexes. Gemini found a prep of a complex made from vanadyl sulfate and salen that's supposed to be forest green.

You have to be careful making complexes with this stuff because if the transition metal cation is in a low oxidation state and its susceptible to oxidation your product will be susceptible to decomposition. So Fe(II), Co(II), Mn(II), etc. All of the usual suspects. Im not sure if the vanadyl ion falls in that category. It's in a pretty low oxidation state though. But hopefully we can make it work okay. All the props I could find for these things were done in microscale using milligrams of chems. I scaled up the preps to the point where we would get a couple grams of product.

In the third picture you can see the little hand pump that I got to try to deal with really nasty stuff that I don't want to put through my expensive vacuum pump. I'm going to test it out on this prep and see how it works. I don't think we're dealing with anything particularly nasty in this prep but it's a good chance to give it a try. I've seen these things around for years but I've never tried one before.

So thats where we stand guys. For anyone wondering what happened to the tryptamine I was having a very hard time trying to get the product that I was after. The prep of salen and it's complexes is very similar to what we're trying to do there. I'm hoping that if I can get the hang of this I can figure out what I'm doing wrong on the other one. Apparently my storage method for the tryptamine is working well. I don't see any visible decomposition. So I think it's okay if we take our time and do things the right way. That shit is really expensive and I don't want to waste it on fuck ups. And come on a forest green vanadium compound? We've got to make that! That's just cool! I want to see that shit! 😁😁

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6 hours ago (edited) | [YT] | 10

PoorMansChemist

Update. So we didn't get good results last weekend. I could not get anything to precipitate to save my life. I'm really hoping that now that I have the vacuum pump and I can remove some of the solvent under vacuum we will have better results. It's supposed to rain tomorrow but Sunday and Monday are supposed to be sunny and clear. Although I think I'm at a point now where I could start working inside for some of this stuff.

These are some of the new science toys that Mysterious Benefactor 3 so generously provided funding for. THANK YOU MB3!!!

2 days ago | [YT] | 41

PoorMansChemist

Thank you to everyone for the feedback on the vacuum pump question!!! Just as I suspected you guys were very knowledgeable about the topic. I decided to go with a rotary vane pump to begin with and I am going to get a diaphragm pump down the road. I also got a cheap hand pump as a backup. Anyways all this stuff should be here in a few days. Woohoo!

It rained all day yesterday so I wasn't able to get a lot filmed. Going to try to finish something up today. The first attempt at making the Schiff base has officially failed but that's OK. I learned a lot from the attempt. I may pivot a bit and try to make salen and then fool with doing tryptamine based Schiff bases once I've got the basic Schiff base production method down. I am still deeply puzzled as to how the people who wrote this paper were able to keep this tryptamine-salicylaldehyde imine stable in hot acidified ethanol for two hours. But they confirmed the product using several instrumental methods. So either something about sticking a substituent on C5 of salicylaldehyde stabilizes the imine or once formed the Schiff base is stable in those conditions. It seems like it would have to be the latter. Their yield was about 70%-ish on these preps so presumably they got some beta-carboline product as well.

I want to establish in my experiments that whatever we get to precipitate in the end isn't a complex of one of the reactants with the metal cation. So I will try reacting the metal with each of the reactants to see if anything happens. Seems like a simple way to possibly demonstrate that any precipitated product isn't just unreacted salicylaldehyde or tryptamine forming a complex with the metal. We shall see.

Next week I have family stuff going on so I may not be able to do much this weekend. But after that life goes back to normal. Woohoo!

6 days ago | [YT] | 33

PoorMansChemist

Hey guys I need some feedback about vacuum pumps. So a new Mysterious Benefactor that we will designate as MB3 has chipped in to help the channel to the point that I can actually afford to get a vacuum pump (and probably a sonicator too) even after buying two other expensive toys (the furnace and the microscope) relatively recently. God knows we've needed a vacuum pump in the worst way so this is quite amazing. Be sure to drop a thank you for MB3 in the comments and then do another one to thank all the other independent and Patreon/Subscribe Star Mysterious Benefactors who keep this channel on the air. You guys are absolutely fucking wonderful and English doesn't have words that can adequately convey the depths of my gratitude and thankfulness for each and every one of you. Also to all the viewers because without you we'd just be screaming science into the void and the channel would be pointless. Seriously guys I can't tell you how touched I am and how much I appreciate you all. 🥰🥰🥰

Anyways so vacuum pumps. I've heard a lot of horror stories about people spending a lot of money on a vacuum pump only to have it crap out after using it 3 times. I don't have nearly as much experience with vacuum pumps as I do aspirator systems. It's not that I don't use vacuum pumps a lot. At my job I use one frequently. But using it and knowing enough about it to know that buying it isn't just setting money on fire are two different things. What features should I be looking for in a vacuum pump? Can you guys who have more experience recommend a particular vacuum pump that I could use for low pressure distillations and things like that? If you just put the product name in the comments I can Google search it since YouTube probably won't let you post links in the comments despite me changing every setting I can find to let you. Thank you for any advice you guys can give!!! 🥰

1 week ago | [YT] | 42

PoorMansChemist

Finally went through and organized my collection. Everything is in alphabetical order and its fucking beautiful. 🥰 I have one more shelf of equipment to transition out of there (the one with the funnels and transfer pipettes) and then I will have completely separated all of my chemicals from my equipment.

Ive posted pictures of my collection before and I've had people ask me about the shelves tipping over. The bottom shelves always have a lot of heavy stuff on them. You can see in one picture that one set of shelves is way down with rain water. At some point I'd like to replicate some alchemical preps and they always call for rain water. Alchemists use rain water kind of like chemists use deionized water (so more or less for everything). The other set of shelves is weighed down with bulk chemicals. The shelves are also tied to the walls with cables. They're hard to see but they're there. I've taken a lot of precautions to store things as safely as possible. 🙂🙂

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1 week ago | [YT] | 84

PoorMansChemist

Okay so I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys about this tryptamine Schiff base thing. Much of it confirms suspicions I already had. Based on your feedback I'm going to try this reaction two different ways. I'm going to do it the way you guys suggest and I'm going to do it the way the paper says and we're going to compare what we get. Because the protocol on the paper is kind of weird. I would not have thought it would take that much heat for that long especially given the fickle stability of tryptamine. Also some of you have mentioned the tryptamine cyclizing to a beta carboline. I'm sure that's happening to some extent but it should be a minor product. Should be. After all we are going by the exact same protocol that was used in the paper and unless there is something special about having nitro or chlorine substituents at C5 of the salicylaldehyde that prevents cyclization of the tryptamine then I dont see why what we are doing with unsubstituted salicylaldehyde wouldnt proceed more or less the same way. But it does seem weird that it works doesnt it? If anyone has any thoughts Id love to hear them. I depend on you guys and your expertise when we hit issues like this. What do you think we should do?

1 week ago | [YT] | 31

PoorMansChemist

This is the general protocol that I am following for the Schiff base preparation. All of these salicylaldehydes are substituted at C5 (one of the meta carbons) of the benzene ring. I do not have any aromatic aldehydes that are substituted at C5 in my collection except for 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzaldehyde and there is no way in green hell I am sticking that on to the end of tryptamine. It wouldn't create some kind tryptamine NBOMe nightmare because it would still be an inert phenmethylamine not a psychoactive phenethylamine. But my assumption that the greater the steric bulk of the N-tryptamine substituent the less active the compound has already turned out to be incorrect.

This is taken from the paper "Synthesis, structural characterization, and anti-ulcerogenic activity of schiff base ligands derived from tryptamine and 5-chloro, 5-nitro, 3,5-ditertiarybutyl salicylaldehyde and their nickel(II), copper(II), and zinc(II) complexes" Its DOI is 10.1016/j.poly.2009.10.004

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 43

PoorMansChemist

In theory this should be our tryptamine-salicylaldehyde Schiff base in acidified ethanol. If anyone out there has any feedback on how this looks Id be much obliged! I may try repeating this and using thin layer chromatography to try to track the progress of the reaction. But for now we will soldier on.

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2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 44

PoorMansChemist

What sodium bismuthate does to plastic. I'm not sure how it got cracked but it wasn't falling apart it was still a single solid piece. 😲

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 32

PoorMansChemist

100 grams of arsenic trioxide. 🥰 This is from a new supplier. To my knowledge I have not gotten anything from them before.

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2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 38