Very cool - a "Post to Blog" function. I thought I'd give it a try, since this post has some hopefully good information in it. pH Probes and Meters for the (per)chlorate process I spent far too much time on pH probes today. Again, the idea behind the simple bucket cell is so one doesn't have to mess with pH probes and meters, but I still need to use them to verify it works without them. That makes no sense at all, does it? I've always been a fan of Milwaukee pH stuff. They occupy a
When I first joined APC as a member, I designed a ball mill that was as simple as I could make it, with the thought that it could be replicated by just about anyone, via plans or a kit. While in appearance it was fairly crude, it has done an outstanding job, and the basic design is sound. In the server transition, it seems that there has been a bit of loss or mixup of the blogs - or maybe it is just me. Anyway, the ball mill consisted of two shafts, four bearing blocks, 2 sections of 3/4" pl
Hello everyone - it's been a long time! There was a period where I was posting a blog almost weekly. Then, I ended up working on projects that weren't blog-worthy. I also need to get my rear in gear for the fourth of July. Last year, I shamed myself with a paltry performance with a few festival balls and such. This year will be different! I have also been busy welding up electrodes - shameless plug, go to my web page for details on ordering. These encompass all of my experience in making
There are two bothersome problems when you use a traditional strap of titanium to deliver current to either the anode or the cathode in a (per)chlorate cell. The first, and most troublesome, is the cutting and sealing of an appropriate slot in the lid of your cell for a strap that measures perhaps 1mm x 25mm. In thin plastic, it is not too much of an issue. In 1/2" thick PVC plastic, it is frankly a bitch, and regardless of your cell lid thickness, ultimately, the electrode strap will be flop
If you haven't been keeping up, (and if you care... ) I have been blogging fast and furious while the LD anode is undergoing its first real test. If you'd like, it might be worth going back about a week to catch up. This entry will be more pictures, less text. Basically, a few of the warts on one edge had broken off and fallen to the bottom of the cell. While not catastrophic, this had me concerned, as it hinted that the integrity of the anode was not what I had hoped for. A greater conc
After the preliminary microscopy photos, which will help me create some baseline images of the pristine anode surface, it was time (finally!) to actually power the darned thing, and make some perchlorate with it. From the beginning, I have worked with potassium rather than sodium salts. Those who understand the chemistry of the process know that potassium is never used in major (per)chlorate plants due to the poor solubility... they always use sodium salts, and then convert the sodium (per)ch
With the great success of the Bucket Cell Adapter, it is finally time to put the Lead Dioxide anode to the test. At last! From January 2009, the birthdate of this anode: Lead Dioxide - Plated! It was definitely a pretty serious effort, and I have had this anode (anode #2; #1 was crumbly and worthless due to Bismuth) hanging on a hook on the lab wall, waiting, saying "Use me! Uuuuse me!" every time I looked at it. I am so hopeful for it, that I think I have delayed its use because if it fal
Based upon a thread that discusses BP in general and the "CIA" BP precipitation method in particular, I decided to check the various speeds of BP, including a CIA batch carefully prepared according to the directions in Tom Perigrin's book, "Introductory Practical Pyrotechnics." All of the homemade powders were 75:15:10. The CIA powder used Skylighter commercial airfloat charcoal, which is going to slow it down. The remainder used willow charcoal from the Custom Charcoal guy. Each sample wa
In my adventures with the (per)chlorate process, I have run the gamut from a plastic cup with no lid, to the T-cell, a dual-celled beast with a pump designed to produce vast amounts of chlorate crystals in a collection chamber. The T-Cell failed spectacularly (see older blog entries for the story) due to the tenacious clogging of tubing and pipes with potassium chlorate. I have since simplified the T-Cell into the T-Cell Jr., a single (but large) cell that works in the traditional manner... po
This is going to be short and sweet.! Anyone who has created what might be called a true, "serious" (per)chlorate production cell tends to take time to make the cell durable, functional, gas tight, and above all, maintainable. 99% of the anodes available are electrically connected via a sheet metal strap, usually titanium. These are easy to create, weld, and connect to the power supply. But they suck at being maintainable and gas tight. It is easy to cut a thin slot in a similarly thin
My blog entries tend to be pretty random, all over the place, and not always directly related to traditional pyrotechnics. I figure ANY entry is better than NO entry, and it's been a while, so I thought this might interest a few specialized enthusiasts. Pyrotechnics as a hobby makes extensive use of nitrocellulose lacquer. NC lacquer starts life as dried nitrocellulose fibers dissolved in acetone or some other solvent, in varying percentages, normally 20% to 30%. The vast majority buy the N
I have always enjoyed the Passfire articles where they take a commercial shell, carefully disassemble it, and weigh or otherwise analyze the shell contents. Much can be learned by the amateur by doing this carefully, especially such things as ratios... lift to shell weight, burst weight (and type) to star weight, number and size of stars, pasting methods, etc. Further, in the last few months, I have been collecting reagents and the associated techniques to determine the compositions themselves
It's been a long time since I've done a blog entry. I know a lot of people are following the perchlorate adventure - believe it or not, I still have not tested the lead dioxide anode. It is bagged and hanging from a hook on the wall. With the arrival of summer, as any homeowner knows, there is always work to be done that gets in the way.. real work. We had a massive storm this spring that dropped a 50 foot pear tree across a neighbor's fence. Stuff like that gets in the way of life. Anywa
This is going to be a long and rather dry blog entry, but I believe it to be important for those seeking the electrolytic production of potassium perchlorate, producing a product clean enough to be called "Pyro Ready." At last, a real victory in this challenging task - taking perchlorate from a cell, and ridding it of remaining potassium chloride and chlorate. No batch of perchlorate can be considered pure until it is rid of ALL detectable chlorate. Chlorate remnants render the entire batch
I still had a bit of work to do on the electronic hydraulic pressure gauge system, and the result, I think, is worth a blog entry. If you haven't read the background on this thing, read my entry on the 9th of April for the whole story. Any gauge for hydraulic pressure is going to suck and be a pain to use if it is not convenient. With the transducer in its current disk-shaped form, it was going to be very difficult to utilize. I decided, then, to encase the transducer in two massive blocks
This is going to be the last blog devoted to purely an electronic venture. This is an amateur pyrotechnic forum, not an electronics site! But fortunately, everything I've made so far has a solid use in pyrotechnics. For years, I've been envious of those who have what I would call a "deluxe" hydraulic press. My rockets have been inconsistent because I have nothing to go on, in terms of pressure, other than "that feels about right." Like so many others. I've got ove of the exceptionally chea
One of the challenges in an amateur lab is the control of apparati like solenoid valves, pumps, etc, down to the second or less. The T-cell, when operating, requires large and regular dosages of HCl to keep the pH in the optimum range, as close to 6.8 as you can make it. The first thought is to use a pH controller to do the job. The simplest controllers are those sold to the aquarium market. When the pH reaches a setpoint, the controller turns on a simple outlet. Plugged into that outlet i
It has been a while since the last blog entry, but it has not been wasted time. Much of it was spent researching the type of data collection I wanted to attempt, and the remainder of that was gathering the necessary components, much of them from eBay, although I was forced to buy a few items new. One of the things I learned was that with data collection, it is not the analog to digital conversion that is difficult or expensive; rather, it is the art known as "Signal Conditioning" that was the
First, a postscript from the previous blog entry, where I attempted to clean perc with Sodium Bisulfite, a reducing agent... following some suggestions from Tentacles and others, I proceeded a bit more methodically and was rewarded with success - perc that tests as clean as my commercial stuff! It simply required an acidic environment to liberate the SO3 gas, which dissolved immediately into solution, and reduced the stray chlorate. Future cleanups will use potassium metabisulfite so as to avo
All of the work in the last few months has gone into the hopeful production of pyrotechnic grade potassium perchlorate. It is not difficult to make perchlorate... contaminated with chlorate and perhaps other unwanted hitchhikers. It is apparently difficult to make it pure. In a previous blog, I mentioned how well n-phenylanthranilic acid and sulfuric acid work in tandem to reveal chlorate contamination down to very low levels. I finally got to put these chemicals to use, and the results, as
This is going to be a fairly brief blog entry. I still have not tried either of the recently plated LD (Lead Dioxide) anodes to create perchlorate, but I hope to soon. I'd like to make a few more while the setup is in place, and vary some of the parameters a bit. I've always been a fan of microscopy, and decided to take a look at the better of the two anodes under a stereo microscope. To take pictures, I have two options - I can set up a camera in one of the eyepieces, and use a small noteb
Thanks to some inspiration from Rosco Bodine at SMDB, among others, I have successfully hacked a $10 crock pot and turned it into a precision heating bath capable of holding +/- 1 degree C. Background: I have been using expensive polypropylene tanks to do the bulk of the work, and an immersion heater provides the heat. The immersion heater is an industrial cartridge heater encased in copper pipe, soldered shut at the business end. It works... but the Cu is not always compatible with the bat
It has been a long road, but I now have two anodes plated... one of them looking fairly sad, while the other looks excellent. The weather has NOT cooperated, and in addition to the physical discomfort (cold!), there are process issues as well. Jugs of distilled water are ice cold, and the hot bath (60 to 70 degrees C) must really struggle to maintain heat. Evaporation from the bath is at a ferocious rate. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. I've spent probably a month preparing for this
I would have imagined long ago that I would have made a lead dioxide plating attempt by now, but the more I read, the more useful information that I am able to gather... and the more reagents and hardware I seem to require. The print resources and other descriptions are rarely simple "home chemist" solutions. Usually, they are patents, and the patent office is not going to award a new patent to a scientist who plates a tiny MMO anode in a 1 liter beaker - they are going for the biggest, best,
VERSION III of "Lead Dioxide for Dummies!" Fellows, this is the LAST update of this document at this blog, but the document itself will see continued editing and work as the research progresses, so feel free to download it in a few weeks (months? perhaps) when it is complete. Here, the document ends rather abruptly at the pre-plating stage. It will eventually include an actual plating procedure, but that will be a new blog entry, full of photos and hopefully quite interesting. I will
