What is in Liquid Fire?

[madscientist]

I just bought some Liquid Fire at my local hardware store (great prices here, $17 a gallon). It said on the bottle that it "contains concentrated sulfuric acid". The strange thing is that this sulfuric acid is a very dark yellow. When I filled up a one quart glass vinegar bottle with it, it even appeared reddish (because there was enough Liquid Fire in the bottle to block enough light to make it appear red, not because of a chemical change). Does anyone know what is in this stuff besides sulfuric acid?

BTW, I LUV the taste of camel sperm so MUCH, that I've been banned for life for being a such a camel whore.

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"Nine Inch Nails is the devil" -my mom

[This message has been edited by nbk2000 (edited 12-02-2001).]

[a_bab]

Because sulfuric acid is obtained from different sulfurous ores, it usualy contains a small quantity of selenium (the red form),in a coloidal state if the acid is industrial and not purified . Other impurities might be As and different metal sulfates. My conc. sulfuric acid is brown. But this is because of the carbonised dust, I guess.

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Damn, I got a nitro-headache again...

http://move.to/pyromania

[Anthony]

I've bought dark brown and purple drain cleaner H2SO4 before. I'm fairly certain that the colour is added purposely to prevent idiots drinking it.

[DarkAngel]

The conc H2SO4 that i have doesn't have a colour.

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ÐarkAngel

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[PYRO500]

Think about it, the drain opener grade H2SO4 doesn't have to be high quality, so I think the brown may be dirt, they make dirty H2SO4 in huge amounts at phosphate plants.

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[CyclonitePyro]

I bought conc. H2SO4 as drain unplugger, and it was translucent but brown, after I boiled it it got much darker, I think I read somewhere when you boil it the organic compounds in the acid turn to carbon. I don't really like working with the dark colored acid, it does work with distilling to make HNO3, I did that twice, but for ease of mind I tried to distill the H2SO4 to make it clear. When it got really hot it wouldn't boil smoothly, it wou;d sit there and bump, every ten seconds it would just make one huge bubble like bulge that one time made it all the way up and flowed down the condenser tube, so I stopped. The next time I used really small broken glass pieces in the boiling flask to work as boiling stones, now it made micro bumps, which would have been ok but even as it was boiling like that nothing was coming over to the recieving flask. Is there any way of distilling it successfully?

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"Friends don't let friends play with
Nitrogen Triiodide"

[PYRO500]

I think that you were probably vac. distilling it, I have made HNO3 several times using H2SO4 that was brown and finely powdered KNO3 fertilizer. I had a little bumping, one thing I did is made an easy paper funnel out if notebook paper, then I put all of the KNO3 I would need in in seconds, and the heat of the reaction would take place and start vaporizing then I'd slip the ground glass joints together and draw a vac. what kind of aparatus are you using btw? I have found that smaller batches are easyer to control than large ones, and you need good water flow through your condenser. I have also noticed that you need to have your collection flask in ice water to get a good yeild. when you heat it how are you heating it a heating mantle, an open flame? what? This post has inspired me I may attempt to make a PDF on how to make good HNO3.

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[CyclonitePyro]

I'm using the united glass tech vac. distilling setup, the boiling flask is 1000ml and the receiver is 500ml. When I make nitric acid, I put the KNO3 in the flask, add enough H2SO4 so that it is a workable liquid, shake it around and try to stir it, then I put in a couple teaspoons of broken glass pieces, they help boiling a lot, it makes it biol like water. Then I turn on the vac. pump, then turn on the heat, I use a coleman single burner stove, it screws on the top of a propane cylinder. I've made nitric twice, I'm putting it in one of those acid bottles from pyrotek, I'll just keep on making it until I have enough for a nice size batch of PETN or RDX, the product was yellow and fuming a lot and it turned the tops of my pointer and middle finger yellow, dammit, I just tell most people that it was a highlighter. I can't measure it with one of my hydrometers because my only graduated cylinder got broken on the top and is now not as long as the 1.54 mark on the hydrometer, I'll get another one. After I see if it is concentrated I will make it clear with urea and bubbles. One question I have is, since you put in more than enough sulfuric acid so that the mix is a liquid, how do you know when to stop boiling so that you don't distill over some sulfuric acid. I waited until it seemed that the nitric stopped dripping because the boiling point of sulfuric is so much higher.

But my original question was just how to distill sulfuric acid because I don't like it being dark brown, I'm having no problem making nitric.

O yeah, I have this big plastic ice cream pail full of ice water, I put the receiver flask in that, and my water pump is about the size of your fist, it is this little submergable pump for garden decorations(you know those little statues that look like they are pissin in the water or spitting), that also sits in the ice cream bucket, it keeps everything real cold.


My pump pulls 20" of Hg, and I have a water trap between the vac pump and the glass vac adapter, the air is pulled in 1/2" clear hose, through a hole in the lid of a tomato sauce jar to the bottom, and bubbles through water that fills most of the jar and then into a hose on the top of the lid to the vac. pump.

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"Friends don't let friends play with
Nitrogen Triiodide"

[Spacemonkey]

I recently made nitroglycerin using the liquid fire drain opener, Ammonium nitrate, and (of course) glycerine. My "liquid fire" was dark brownish red. It was translucent but still pretty heavily colored. The nitroglycerine retained the colour of the acid and is also a reddish colour. The nitro also smells almost exactly like sheetrock used in bathroom wall construction. Nitro is supposed to be odorless at room temp so there must be some other impurities. I have tested the sensetivitity and it takes a solid, square whack from a hammer on an anvil to detonate however, a small firecracker taped to the outside of a baggie of 6 mL of nitro failed to detonate it. It is very sensetive to blasting caps though. My main concern is finding whether I produced dinitroglycerine or the trimer form. If anyoneone knows the concentration of liquid fire, please let me know.

[Mendeleev]

All the sulfuric acid drain openers are black and around between 90 and 96 percent. It is mostly likely dyes, so people don't confuse it with water, I doubt there are that many impurities. I used boiled down liquid fire today to dream of making piciric acid today. It seemed to work, see the picric acid thread.