LabCoatz
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ARCHIVE: LABCOATZ FORMATIVE DAYS
🕑 Added 2025-08-23 23:09:20 +0000 UTCI was cleaning out some old SD cards, and found this little clip. This was filmed back in February 2021 in the early days of LabCoatz, before I had a half-acceptable camera and before I really got into home chemistry...you might be able to tell, since I had "never actually smelled ether", which is a common solvent that I now have a few liters of, lol. I was kinda experimenting with a handheld "Explosions&Fire" video format, which was easy and minimal effort, but obviously not the style I went for. I think my logic was "there's already a lot of low-effort chemistry channels out there, and they tend to get poor views, so I might as well try a more professional, NileRed-like format".
In this clip, I was attempting to produce ethyl chloride from ethanol, sulfuric acid, and salt, in a similar manner as my first real YouTube synthesis, which was for the similar alkyl halide, isopropyl chloride. I think my end goal was to react it with magnesium or aluminum to get a pyrophoric organometallic compound, but I ran into several issues at the time. For one, I lacked a real condenser, so the extremely volatile ethyl chloride mostly escaped. Second, I was very new to chemistry and wasn't following an existing procedure...I procedure that probably would've told me that everything needed to be RIGOROUSLY dried beforehand, possibly mixed with an ether-type solvent, and that the metal would need to be activated with something like iodine. Oh, the things you learn from five years of experience! Maybe one day I'll make a pyrophoric liquid, but for now, I need to get back to finishing my other projects.
Comments
LabCoatz
That's good to know!
Lethal Science
My suggestion is diethyl zinc, not only is it an organometallic pyrophoric liquid, but from what ive heard it is also pretty easy to make.
DelfDrizz
Love it XD - the Explosions&Fire style video, and even with yellow chemistry 😂
