PoorMansChemist

Thank you to everyone for the feedback on the vacuum pump question!!! Just as I suspected you guys were very knowledgeable about the topic. I decided to go with a rotary vane pump to begin with and I am going to get a diaphragm pump down the road. I also got a cheap hand pump as a backup. Anyways all this stuff should be here in a few days. Woohoo!

It rained all day yesterday so I wasn't able to get a lot filmed. Going to try to finish something up today. The first attempt at making the Schiff base has officially failed but that's OK. I learned a lot from the attempt. I may pivot a bit and try to make salen and then fool with doing tryptamine based Schiff bases once I've got the basic Schiff base production method down. I am still deeply puzzled as to how the people who wrote this paper were able to keep this tryptamine-salicylaldehyde imine stable in hot acidified ethanol for two hours. But they confirmed the product using several instrumental methods. So either something about sticking a substituent on C5 of salicylaldehyde stabilizes the imine or once formed the Schiff base is stable in those conditions. It seems like it would have to be the latter. Their yield was about 70%-ish on these preps so presumably they got some beta-carboline product as well.

I want to establish in my experiments that whatever we get to precipitate in the end isn't a complex of one of the reactants with the metal cation. So I will try reacting the metal with each of the reactants to see if anything happens. Seems like a simple way to possibly demonstrate that any precipitated product isn't just unreacted salicylaldehyde or tryptamine forming a complex with the metal. We shall see.

Next week I have family stuff going on so I may not be able to do much this weekend. But after that life goes back to normal. Woohoo!

3 days ago | [YT] | 32

PoorMansChemist

Hey guys I need some feedback about vacuum pumps. So a new Mysterious Benefactor that we will designate as MB3 has chipped in to help the channel to the point that I can actually afford to get a vacuum pump (and probably a sonicator too) even after buying two other expensive toys (the furnace and the microscope) relatively recently. God knows we've needed a vacuum pump in the worst way so this is quite amazing. Be sure to drop a thank you for MB3 in the comments and then do another one to thank all the other independent and Patreon/Subscribe Star Mysterious Benefactors who keep this channel on the air. You guys are absolutely fucking wonderful and English doesn't have words that can adequately convey the depths of my gratitude and thankfulness for each and every one of you. Also to all the viewers because without you we'd just be screaming science into the void and the channel would be pointless. Seriously guys I can't tell you how touched I am and how much I appreciate you all. 🥰🥰🥰

Anyways so vacuum pumps. I've heard a lot of horror stories about people spending a lot of money on a vacuum pump only to have it crap out after using it 3 times. I don't have nearly as much experience with vacuum pumps as I do aspirator systems. It's not that I don't use vacuum pumps a lot. At my job I use one frequently. But using it and knowing enough about it to know that buying it isn't just setting money on fire are two different things. What features should I be looking for in a vacuum pump? Can you guys who have more experience recommend a particular vacuum pump that I could use for low pressure distillations and things like that? If you just put the product name in the comments I can Google search it since YouTube probably won't let you post links in the comments despite me changing every setting I can find to let you. Thank you for any advice you guys can give!!! 🥰

5 days ago | [YT] | 42

PoorMansChemist

Finally went through and organized my collection. Everything is in alphabetical order and its fucking beautiful. 🥰 I have one more shelf of equipment to transition out of there (the one with the funnels and transfer pipettes) and then I will have completely separated all of my chemicals from my equipment.

Ive posted pictures of my collection before and I've had people ask me about the shelves tipping over. The bottom shelves always have a lot of heavy stuff on them. You can see in one picture that one set of shelves is way down with rain water. At some point I'd like to replicate some alchemical preps and they always call for rain water. Alchemists use rain water kind of like chemists use deionized water (so more or less for everything). The other set of shelves is weighed down with bulk chemicals. The shelves are also tied to the walls with cables. They're hard to see but they're there. I've taken a lot of precautions to store things as safely as possible. 🙂🙂

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1 week ago | [YT] | 83

PoorMansChemist

Okay so I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys about this tryptamine Schiff base thing. Much of it confirms suspicions I already had. Based on your feedback I'm going to try this reaction two different ways. I'm going to do it the way you guys suggest and I'm going to do it the way the paper says and we're going to compare what we get. Because the protocol on the paper is kind of weird. I would not have thought it would take that much heat for that long especially given the fickle stability of tryptamine. Also some of you have mentioned the tryptamine cyclizing to a beta carboline. I'm sure that's happening to some extent but it should be a minor product. Should be. After all we are going by the exact same protocol that was used in the paper and unless there is something special about having nitro or chlorine substituents at C5 of the salicylaldehyde that prevents cyclization of the tryptamine then I dont see why what we are doing with unsubstituted salicylaldehyde wouldnt proceed more or less the same way. But it does seem weird that it works doesnt it? If anyone has any thoughts Id love to hear them. I depend on you guys and your expertise when we hit issues like this. What do you think we should do?

1 week ago | [YT] | 31

PoorMansChemist

This is the general protocol that I am following for the Schiff base preparation. All of these salicylaldehydes are substituted at C5 (one of the meta carbons) of the benzene ring. I do not have any aromatic aldehydes that are substituted at C5 in my collection except for 3,4,5-trimethoxybenzaldehyde and there is no way in green hell I am sticking that on to the end of tryptamine. It wouldn't create some kind tryptamine NBOMe nightmare because it would still be an inert phenmethylamine not a psychoactive phenethylamine. But my assumption that the greater the steric bulk of the N-tryptamine substituent the less active the compound has already turned out to be incorrect.

This is taken from the paper "Synthesis, structural characterization, and anti-ulcerogenic activity of schiff base ligands derived from tryptamine and 5-chloro, 5-nitro, 3,5-ditertiarybutyl salicylaldehyde and their nickel(II), copper(II), and zinc(II) complexes" Its DOI is 10.1016/j.poly.2009.10.004

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 43

PoorMansChemist

In theory this should be our tryptamine-salicylaldehyde Schiff base in acidified ethanol. If anyone out there has any feedback on how this looks Id be much obliged! I may try repeating this and using thin layer chromatography to try to track the progress of the reaction. But for now we will soldier on.

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1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 44

PoorMansChemist

What sodium bismuthate does to plastic. I'm not sure how it got cracked but it wasn't falling apart it was still a single solid piece. 😲

1 week ago | [YT] | 32

PoorMansChemist

100 grams of arsenic trioxide. 🥰 This is from a new supplier. To my knowledge I have not gotten anything from them before.

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1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 38

PoorMansChemist

A subscriber sent me a new toy! And I have 100 grams of arsenic trioxide arriving later this week!! Found some for sale on eBay.

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 60

PoorMansChemist

Despite my best efforts I was not able to get a video finished yesterday. I ended up going down a rabbit hole with trying to make sure these tryptamine based metal ligands 1) were not controlled substances and 2) could not be construed to be analogs of controlled substances. So far as I can tell there is nothing legally hazardous about making these ligands. Tryptamine Schiff bases aren't psychoactive (so far as I can find) and every tryptamine hallucinogen I could find were all amines. None of them were imines. So I think we are OK to proceed. I'm sorry it's taking so long but I wanted to be VERY VERY sure I was not about to do something incredibly stupid like film myself making something legally questionable and then uploading it to the internet for the whole world to see.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 49