Experiments gone wrong!

[blike]

What is your favorite experimental "mishap"? Mine would have to be the time I decided to drill a hole in my potato cannon to see if the added oxygen concentration would have an effect on the firing distance.

 

I forgot to point the hole away from me.

 

ouch.

[Sayonara]

Mine was during organic chemistry.

 

"Don't let the reaction over-heat," we got told. Ah ha ha haaa.

 

I wish I could remember the name of that acid because it ate through a boiling flask and the desk.

[ed84c]

hmm

 

I tried to make hydrodgen once but the test tube exploded spraying boiling vinegar and aluminium shards across my bedroom, but i was only 8 at the time.

[YT2095]

my LAST bad one was a rocket fuel mix a few years ago.

http://www.yt2095.net/experiments/burnHeater.JPG

 

the actual worst one I don`t have pics of, I was 15 years old (17 year ago) and bit a little excess paper off the end of a homemade fuse, the fuse detonated (yes detonated! Armstrongs mixture) as did the explosive (only a tiny charge for a 19inch tree stump).

 

it shattered some windows in the front room sent me back into a pile of boxes, tore the underneath of my tongue, ripped the gums off most my upper teeth, broke my nose, mouth lining a mass of blood blisters as was my hand ( my hand ballooned out like a baseball catchers glove). I was deaf for 3 days and near blind (although I faked best vision coz didn`t want to worry my mom).

 

now maybe WHEN I give advice about things that are NOT COOL to try or do, or that there is a BETTER method to do something, Lisening to me would be a smart move!

 

and no, this is only some of the bad that`s happened to me, I`ve lost several friends that thought they could "get away with...."

 

anyway, `Nuff Sed

[Gilded]

How terrible YT. My grandfather lost two fingers when they lighted quite powerful blasting caps with a few second delay. He didn't have time to throw it before it exploded...

 

Anyways, I personally never had a terrible mishap. Kitchen floor melting... blowed-up test tubes... The most annoying was probably the potassium chlorate isolation thing, when due to lack of a proper pyrex or such test tube, I used a normal glass jar. About 1000 Celsius lighter + regular glass = not good. The bottom blew open throwing mushy match heads all over my clothes, table and floor and such.

 

Btw, I would too like to know what the Sayo's acid is called. Was it by any chance a pine table that it ate through?

[Sayonara]

I have no idea, but it was a wooden chemistry bench.

 

This was nearly 10 years ago so I'm unlikely to recall what it was

[YT2095]

10 years ago???? Hmm....

 

`ate` through a boiling vessel? sure it wasn`t a leak?

as for wooden tables any number of conc acids could do that, I could ID it better if you could answer a few simple questions though

 

1.was there any carbonisation of the wood?

2. were any gasses given off?

3. if there were gasses what color were they?

4. as above but any particular smell you can liken it to?

5. how fast and how deep did it corrode to, and in what time scale?

 

and no, this it NOT the £`rd degree Spannish inquisition, just a way to stimulate mem an maybe let you know what acid it was for future ref

[jsatan]

lol. I'd love to see some red smoke, pufff and the table has gone, lol.

[MulderMan]

nocked a tripod over supporting a fractional distillation setup, the smashed beaker with crude oil in spilt all over the lab desk and went up in flames, and my freind tried to put it out with alcohol that he thought was water. it made quite a mess considering the desks are still wooden! the teach' always though we did that on pourpose...

[YT2095]

red smoke would only be a Dye ( a waste of time really and quite expensive) now a Good BOOOOM and the table`s gone, would be more like cooking with gas

[blike]

This isn't really an experiment gone wrong, but it was a bad decision made in the lab

 

In organic chemistry lab over the summer, we were using magnetic stirring things. While cleaning the beakers my partner accidentally let the stirring rod go down the drain. He didn't want to have to pay for it so we got the genius idea of opening the pipes down below to find it. We suspected that it was caught in a certain bend, so we opened the pipe. Horrible mistake. The pipe fed directly into the tank that holds all the chemicals that are dumped down the drain. The contents of that tank ended up on the floor.

 

We spent an hour and a half cleaning it up, and we never found the stirring rod.

[YT2095]

if you knew the contents of the tank, it MAY explain why your rod is missing

 

a bit like the above, not an EXPERIMENT that went wrong, just a lab booboo!

 

messing with some bio stuff (I`de rather not say what for exactly but it was an "IS She cheating on me or not, by the way here`s the pants" type thing.

anyway... I wanted rid of the kit I used to test, so I acid dumped it after a Base steri.

I lost a ring in the proccess, and I mean LOST! as in nowt left!

I bought a replacement a few days later and still feel bad about it (

[AngelicTaboo]

Hey some guy in our laboratory class today set his hand on fire after making Methylcyclohexenes from 2-Methylcyclohexanol, it was a good job he had vinyl gloves on though or else... Mind you, you should of seen the state of the fume cupboard and his glassware that was in it....All Black! lol

[Sayonara]

1.was there any carbonisation of the wood?

2. were any gasses given off?

3. if there were gasses what color were they?

4. as above but any particular smell you can liken it to?

5. how fast and how deep did it corrode to' date=' and in what time scale?[/quote']

The only details I can really remember are that it was a colourless, slightly-more-viscous-than-water acid, and even at about -2c it managed to melt (no, no cracks) the boiling flask and eat the desk. It bored a good few millimeters into the wood before the teacher got to it with a tub of alkaline counteragent.

 

I also turned on and lit the wrong gas tap while suffering from sleep deprivation. Twice.

[jsatan]

lol. A friend of mine has done the wrogn gas tap thing, but the gas went straight across the burner he was wanting to turn off, flames away, lol. well funny.

[LucidDreamer]

I added a little too much Ammonia to a distillation experiment and one of the rubber distillation tubes came undone and flooded the room with intense ammonia vapors. We had to clear the room and one girl passed out in the hallway.

[badchad]

Nothing major on my part. I've injected a few rats with the wrong drug before. I've also blown/puntured the aorta out of rats during perfusions.

 

Basic mistakes, nothing too serious though.

[AngelicTaboo]

Aww poor rats!

[LucidDreamer]

I've also blown/puntured the aorta out of rats during perfusions.Basic mistakes, nothing too serious though.

Unless your the rat.

[raivo]

My worst mistake was probably testing for hydrogen in rather complex self made electrolyser that fortunately was made mostly of plastics. There was big bang and anything in about to 10m was sprayed with electrolyte that was not very diluted sulphuric acid plus ferric sulphate. I managed to wash may eyes and face at once and luckily had no wounds but clothes i weared got millions of small holes.

 

Another bang was when heating boiling flask with oil bath on kitchen hotplate. It was years ago when i had not much experience yet and so i had no idea what may happen. Solution in the flask boiled a bit too much. Water got into the oil bath and part of oil flew ower the room another landed on hotplate and started to burn. Luckily i was some meters away when this happened.

[budullewraagh]

The only details I can really remember are that it was a colourless, slightly-more-viscous-than-water acid, and even at about -2c it managed to melt (no, no cracks) the boiling flask and eat the desk. It bored a good few millimeters into the wood before the teacher got to it with a tub of alkaline counteragent.

well since it went through your beaker there are definitely fluoride anions in there. im thinking it may be pentafluoroantimonic, hexafluorosilicic or a crazy solution of sulfuric with hydrofluoric

[LucidDreamer]

Do they use hydrofluoric acid in high school chemistry?

[budullewraagh]

oh, and with regard to bad experiments...

 

when i was young and naive i titrated some incredibly conc fuming hydrochloric with draino. yeah im cool:\

i didnt read all the ingredients and missed the part about sodium hypochlorite being in it. i was doing this near my face so i could get a nice view of the reaction. i took a nice deep breath of chlorine. coughed for a few minutes

 

i always seem to have difficulties with gases. last time i opened a lithium battery i smelled something (in retrospect it was probably diethyl ether). that was no fun either, as i got a bad headache. last time i was extracting potassium perchlorate from match heads i got a nice breath of some odd congealing agent.

when i was significantly younger and significantly more naive than mentioned above, i made a nice potassium nitrate+sucrose smoke bomb. it didnt light quickly for some reason or another. so yeah, i just sorta stood over it waiting for it to burst into flames, and i tried to convince it to start. then it did and i got a complete lungful of carbon dioxide.

 

i got an acid burn on my hand from working with that conc fuming hydrochloric once.

 

also ive noticed that i have a particular weakness for the element chlorine. any exposure to an oxidized form of it (or neutral as well) makes my throat sore. of course the anion isnt cool if it's hydrochloric but hey, i have no problems with sodium chloride.

[Mokele]

two of my favorites, though neither is me:

 

In Honors Ochem lab, I was making a particular compound, and thought I had it. So, I put some in an NMR tube, and put some more in one of those little plastic conical vials with the snap top that the TA had, so we could use it for mass spec later. So we're sitting there in the NMR room, waiting for it to work (bad OS on the computer), and I see him take a plastic vial out of his pocket and start chewing on it. I ask him, and he says he always keeps a few for that, since it beats chewing on pen caps. We think nothing more of it until we go do the mass spec. He asks me for the sample, I tell him I gave it to him already. He gets this "oh ****" expression and takes out the tube he was chewing on, and sees a few flecks of white substance. His reply: "Well, that explains the headache I got."

 

Another one is second hand: My prof did some studies on the energetics of sidewinding, which involved putting a respirometry mask on sidewinder rattlesnakes. Basically, he's just glue it to them, and then use a solvent to remove it, without any harm to the animal, thanks to their scales. One time, however, he was gluing the mask on, and accidentally glued himself to the snake (they weren't anaesthatized, as that's a very risky proposition for herps). Fortunately, he was able to strain and reach the solvent, but there was a few moments of "Oh ****, I'm glued to a venomous snake that's in a *very* foul mood."

 

Sadly, I don't have any stories of myself yet that aren't boring and mundane, or are basically just tales of the hazards of reptile handling.

 

Mokele

[muad'dib]

I've never had a bad lab accident as of yet but my favorite is one that my high school biology teacher told me.

 

When he was in college his lab partner was an idiot and instead of wafting his hand over a solution to smell it he put it directly up to his nose and inhaled deeply. He immediately passed out and hit the floor. When someone asked for some smelling salts to wake him up the professor said they wouldn't work becuase smelling salts are three percent ammonia and what the student had inhaled was thirty percent ammonia. My teacher said that the tissue in the guy's nose throat and mouth just sloughed off over the two weeks after the incident.