13yo just acquired a jar of iodine crystals from school, ,go to local pharmacy,buy 50ml conc ammonia --wack a couple of grams of the iodine in filter paper in funnel,,add

ammonia..looking,looking..

 hmmmmm softens crystals,,ok,,leave to dry,,go over to mates place,,return about 4am and ddecide to check out "results"-- open filter paper.....BANG.fuckin big time!!                               

scare shit out of self,, wake house,, cat stuck to ceiling...

decide product is highly unstable..forgo using/making again..no injuries except for angry 'old man' +freaked out cat

so hes got the b-nitrostyrene in a vac dessicator, and checks to see if its dry,,totaly not thinking, and releases the vaccuum, touches the yellow substance, hmm, it feels pretty dry, give it another 12 hours, and then do the recrystallizing, so he forgets to wash his hands, and even besides, all of a sudden his face is burning, FUCk, is it burning, and then washes his hands and face, but at this point, if you wash, it seems to get worse....I am in fucking agony, I am crying, my face feels like blisters,,and can hardly see...this shit is bad..what a fucking idiot, to be touching, releasing the vacuum, so all its fumes can punch my fucking unprotected face...wont happen again,,boohoo

I still have traces of B-nitrostyrenes stuck to my buchner pump handle from way back, sure looks pretty but every time I look at it I'm reminded of the seering pain those solids bring your eyes. Only had it happen to me once and it's not easily forgotten.

I once chlorinated a batch of acetone as a kid, using HCl and Cl2 at around age 13 or so, and oh boy, it got hot, suddenly, and even more sudden was the subsequent flash boiling gout of mono and polychloroacetones instantly vaporising throughout my garage, and quicker still, I am sure, was the aspiring chemist, cursing the air black in several languages, hightailing it out of there.

Another time, wearing the due eye protection, I was performing an electrolysis of molten NaOH, a bead of sodium metal, around the size of a lentil, or so, went 'pop', and left me wondering why no organic chem textbooks ever warn about NOSE protection.

Thats right, I got metallic sodium right up the nose, coated in very hot NaOH.

That one hurt like hell, and left a crater in my septum for quite a while afterwards.


Ring opening a certain lactone under basic hydrolytic conditions again when I was younger, it got hot and flash boiled right at the moment I lifted my goggles to scratch my nose, giving me a blast of hot, saturated NaOH (aq) in EtOH right in the face, my right eye still has poor vision.

Immediately ran to the sink and irrigated my eye and the rest of my face, then spent the next several hours pippetting up product from the floor, sink fittings, and swabbing splattered lactone and NaOH mix from the walls, floors and ceiling, aside from what was left in the flask, quite a lot, I did however manage to recover several hundred grams of perfectly useable product, which in more than one way left the night with a good ending (apart from the 'owwww shit' factor.


Scratching ones family jewels after working with KMnO4 is also not to be reccomended.......it leaves brown MnO2 stains that cannot be washed out, and it burns like fury for about two days.

I once, in my younger days, dissected a load of batteries I found, really large, unusually so, lithium cells, with a central pin type structure I assumed at the time to be some sort of pressure relief, upon yanking it out with pliars, and peeling back the casing, in the process I got my hands covered in what I assumed to be liquid SO2 at first, or something like it, then soon after kicked myself (metaphorically) repeatedly up the arse, finding out it was almost certainly thionyl chloride.

Stuff rotted my leather gloves to shreds in just a few minutes after contact, I didn't get too much trouble for it, aside from a permanent thickening and scarring of the skin on a large part of one hand and the utter and absolute destruction of a really nice pair of steel-spiked leather gauntlets (the spikes of which incidentally rusted up within a day or two.

Other accidents, misc. mishaps:

Small white P burn on one wrist, hurt quite a bit, maybe about the size of a grain of rice worth of phosphorus found its way onto my hand distilling the white P, formed by heating the red allotrope, didn't think much of it at the time, other than a minor burn hurting like one does, although later that hand became so weak, it became absolutely impossible to hold a pencil, I didn't at the time connect the two, until a short while later, when I remembered the burn.

Produced very pronounced localised muscular weakness, which surprised me, I haven't before heard of P burns having this effect, although I am well aware of its toxicity, I couldn't grip a pencil and write, trying to, my hand shook like a parkinsons patient with the effort, before just giving up.

Small scale Cl2 inhalation, didn't cause anything worse than gagging.

Likewise with SO2, although I actually like the smell of burning sulfur quite a lot
Some would hint that it implies certain things about my....parentage :p

Runaway with ammonium persulfate and toluene. Seeing that temp fly up and have it bump constantly is pretty unnerving, even when you've moved it out into the cold and its still getting hotter by the second. Another one is stirred electrochem cells. Tiny amounts of acid spray will destroy your clothes. Goggles and gloves are always a must, and coat or apron if you're going to be there for more than a few mins.

Yes small scale is always the best place to start. That was done on a small scale in a 250ml rbf with condenser but swim simply overheated the reaction on his high tech kitchen plate and couldn't stop the runaway. As long as you recognize it early on runaways will give you a lot of respect for the chemicals you're working with. Always wear PPE people! Shit is very fucking important.

thats why they have those vapor limits on the solvent cans get a voc meter and good ventillation if it's moving fast enough i've run flammable shit through a brushed motor never had problems but don't recommend that.

I was generating quite a lot of H2S once upon a time, preparing ammonium polysulfides back when I was a lil kid, and wanted to get back at somebody who had really pissed me off running their mouth and made some smartarse comment about autistic people, I was using a mixture of elemental sulfur and parrafin wax melted together and heated in a metal can, connected to a hose led into some ammonia solution.

The hose, unfortunately got too hot and decided to melt, spewing a great plume of smoke and H2S, I immediately held my breath though, and moved the blowtorch flame I was using to heat the reactor off it, and onto the end of the hose to burn off the H2S, then not to put too fine a point on it, ran like hell, to a safe distance, only coming back once there was nothing more being given off.

That was quite effective at scaring the piss out of me, and raising a hideous smell all down the road at the same time.

Yep, I personally am kind of over things that make you go BOOM. Consequently my lately realised interest in "Safe" chemistry (oxygen free at least in the box + argon/nitrogen in a schlenk line). I have to get the glass to use the design (limited funds) but hey, I ain't donating a mm² more skin. There really is nothing like seeing it and feeling it, and for the clowns that keep asking me did it hurt, Sedit too now knows, YES, it fucking does. Not pain precisely, more an intolerable heat.

Ethanol bumps hard.  Out of water baths.  Onto hot burners.  And catches fire.  It burns hot.

There is a very good reason why you never fill containers more than half full when boiling.

Oh nasty, I once did something not far off from the last post above.

Scratched my nuts after going for a leak, after handling a lot of sodium permanganate, wiped my arse after taking the co-ocurring crap, and oh my sweet blue, furry, babyfucking catholic priest jesus shit on a bike, owwwwwch.

It burned like fury for DAYS afterwards, felt like my goolies just got dipped in a DMSO saturated solution of phosgene oxime and CS then rubbed with broken glass.

Sure as hell wouldn't wish to drink chloroform, or even inhale it, but I have drunk quite a fair bit of EtOEt and diisopropyl ether in my time, quite tasty when ice cold and floated on a good vodka.