I dont disagree with this comment at all as i understand it, but i would love if you gave a full version of what you mean by this?

It's a common saying roughly analogous to, "Garbage in, garbage out."

Poor setup and poor workmanship should be expected to yield poor results. That could be a loss in yield, a failed reaction, undesirable side products, contamination, or a nasty accident.

You get out what you put in basically. It goes for precursor reagent to end product also. Garbage in, then garbage is what one gets out.

Slipped and dumped the container of GBL, all at once, into the 5 or 6 liter beaker with the heated, stirring lye.

....I thought "Oh shit"... but everything appeared ok for about 1 minute, then I had molten Gamma Mt. Vesuvius Butyrate exploding all over the kitchen. My partner & I saw it starting to boil and executed a perfectly synchronized, television worthy slow motion double swan dive straight out of the kitchen and into his computer desk's alcove together and did the whole duck & cover routine. 

It ate: The Stove. The Linoleum flooring. The ceiling. The microwave. The cat dish & food. The countertops and finally, it stripped the paint off the refrigerator. Luckily, it didn't eat the cat who evidently had enough sense to stay the fuck out of there at that particular moment.

When the kitchen cooled off enough to enter and clean up, we began sliding the appliances back into their places and the linoleum flooring scraped up off the subfloor like algae under a razor.

We lost about half the product and wound up with about 5Lb left over as a consolation. 

When I was about 13 and in my father's lab, I reached over to grab a small distillation flask to examine the red liquid inside.... A hole, crack or some other thing turned it into the chemistry version of a dribble cup. About 15 ml or so of what I suspect to this day was phenol, ran straight down my right arm, soaking immediately into the flesh and searing right through the nerves, leaving a raised white welt wherever it touched, which freaked me well & truly out.

I didn't touch my dick with that hand for a week.

Another time when I was about 15 or so, I reached over with evidently lye dampened hands (or something) to grab my Dad's 1L RBF full of freebase amine by the neck, which promptly wound up draining through the cracks in the flooring we were standing on.... Note to self: Never grab glassware before you check yourself for lye....

Around the same age, while on a heavy amphetamine bender with my father, we spent a couple days working in the basement only to come up and find that the air upstairs was not nearly as acrid & smokey as the air downstairs. AFAIK, we'd been working in a cloud of HCl.

Also around that age a partner of ours was swirling something (I don't recall what) in a graduated cylinder when it suddenly became overly energetic and took off out of his hand like a rocket and past my face, smashing into the far wall. Whatever it was smelled like bananas.

The trio of us once again in the backyard shed, awake for several days, sitting around a reductive amination. Me sitting on a box (or a steel can of that evil red phenol shit that sank into my arm), my Dad on a Sanke keg and our partner on a stool. All of us doing the sleep dep nod.... My Dad, being fat, falls off his keg, kicking shit all over the place, waking our partner up and being somewhat neurotic at the best of times, spazzes out and with thrashing arms singlehandedly obliterates flask & glass bead packed, double column assemblage in a swath of destruction, the likes of which, thankfully, are rarely witnessed. The collective commotion & emergent projectiles sent me nearly to the roof to cling for dear life.

I came home from school one day to find a chlorine ground cover above the backyard lawn, which died shortly thereafter....

Another time the partner gassed us and the neighbors, with something that smelled strongly of sewage...

Eventually that shed did spontaneously combust in a final suicidal act and investigations by law enforcement were hotly pursued, yet ultimately fruitless due to the efficiency with which the shed immolated itself. That shed was hexed and killing itself was the only honest thing it ever did.

But we did have brilliant emerald green puddles in the back yard dirt every time it rained heavily. I'm still not sure what it was.... a chromic compound perhaps?

Sand just takes so much longer to heat up vs oil.

can you zap it in the microwave to get it heated up quicker? Not HOT, but warmed to a point where the burner can take it from there?

"We'll Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow!"

No mas pantalones? 

exothermia is what happens when you are'nt paying attention

can you zap it in the microwave to get it heated up quicker?

 nighulS a bit (a few mm) of water works a treat as the steam convects the heats throughout the sand and quite quickly too


 fresh is cleaning some oily things with acetone at a friends parents place...they are supposed to be gone until the next day, so the elves have come out to play (expensive secure eviroment etc)

 has about 500mls of acetone in a stainless steel bowl which is on a big chest freezer with the door on the top

  Almost finished, probably has about 20-30gms of 'oil' in the acetone when he goes to pick up a rag off the floor...well, as he bends over, and he reckons he couldn't have done this if he tried ,, his arse somehow bumps the lid of the freezer so it springs open distributing olefin ALL over the wall, the acetone evaporates in no time and he's left looking at a ketone painted wall

  ok thats a bitch but it can be scraped off, it will just take some time, unfortunately as fresh and his mate are admiring the art and discussing the best way to try and recover the oil....his (very straight) parents come down the driveway

   did we panic?  er yes, more like PANIC as we suddenly found ourselves with about 60secs to make the kitchen look like a kitchen again..fortunately this dude and fresh are almost telepathic and it was clear this was no time for talk

The friend starts grabbing anything suspicious and starts taking it anywhere but just inside the backdoor where his folks are about to enter, while fresh freaks and with a heavy heart, quickly soaks THE rag (culprit!) and quickly wipes the wall clean,
  appearing from behind the freezer to mr and mrs friend who says to us "well thats a sight for sore eyes.." f1 didnt know what to say coz he didnt know what she was looking at....heart in mouth, slack jawed, oily rag in hand, time slowed to a standstill  . . .

and....nothing! somehow we had made it look like we had decided to clean the kitchen and mrs friend wasnt complaining..



  Another time in a galaxy far far away, fresh and his grrrl decide its hydro time and spent much time and money establishing a "hidden in plain sight" growroom we nickname 'alice'...coz walking into it was like going into wonderland! Its got it all including CO2 systems etc but it rocks...

This was in an oldish (1940's) second floor apartment with wooden floors.

Its a 2.8x3.6mts grow with micro irrigation on rockwool and a 100 litre reservoir at the low end (which the grrrls drank more than half of each day!)  This reservoir is made from thick black builders plastic in a wooden frame, with no base, the plastic sat on the carpet.

  In the reservoir were a pump and an aquarium heater set to IIRC about 24c and for a few months, its all good

   Then, one morning fresh hears knocking at the back door and goes to find his downstairs neighbor asking "if" maybe we had had some kind of flood to which I reply 'no, why?' He then takes me down to his flat and into his so he tells me, newly painted bedroom...

     much to f1's astonishment, he sees the contents of the reservoir drippin off this dudes ceiling, and rapidly starts searchin for some plausible reason for this, which doesnt implicate fresh
    He remembers the night before was a crazy thunderstorm and goes off into some "its so unbelievable it must be true" account of the
REALLY BAD leak in his lounge which somehow had found a way into his bedroom  which IS a bummer BUT he was already discussing repairs with the agents...and doubted this would happen again....

    Making excuses to run away fresh nips up to alice to see wtf and finds the heater has someho dislodged itself and had fallen to the bottom of the reservoir and had melted through the plastic and watered old mates bedroom

  There was no way he was going to pull the crop over this shit, but was definitely a touch more paranoid for the next few weeks, and as it was xmas wanted to visit some friends in the bush and so left alice in the care of a mate...who didnt bother to do shit, so fresh comes home to a mature crop with maybe 10 days to go, in the process of dying...NOOOOOOOO!!!!

Once again panic as he tries to resuscitate the plants every way he knows, only to slowly realise his efforts are in vain and has no choice but to harvest.
       Could have been worse, still got about 1.3kg dry   and learnt a LOT about indoor growing

thats sad to hear toady mate.  I think my friend had some paranoia issues but still he should have said yes and done no!

the loss of plantlife is bad enough, but being let down by someone who "promises" has its own pain

Shit, shit, fuck, I want to cry right now.

I shouldn't have worked in the lab, I was very tired due to lack of sleep. Or I should have finished that one thing and gone to bed, but no. While another experiment was refluxing in an oil bath I took a small flask in which was made a small 1.5 gram batch of DET by ethylating tryptamine à la Shulgin, but was stirring for a week instead of 36 hours. A nice yellowish brown solution was obtained with white solids on the bottom, it looked promising.

I just performed a TLC on the solution and compared it with a commercially obtained tryptamine standard. Plates were silica gel, eluent was methanol/NH4OH(strong) 100:1 and it was visualised with the modified Erhlich's reagent.

A single spot of Rf 0.59 was obtained, close to the reported value of 0.65 using this solvent system. Tryptamine standard was 0.32 by the way.

Yes a single, beautiful, promising violet spot, you heard it right. (The tryptamine standard spot turned reddish-violet after a couple of minutes). Then I decided to strip off the solvent, turned around, slipped and, goddamned, the little flask fell out of my hands right into the hot oil bath (130°C), producing a loud cracking noise and a small geyser of oil.

I want to kick myself so hard.