I made a still using a 5 gallon bucket full of snow, EJ brandy bottle (receiving bottle in snow), a jack daniels bottle in a hot water bath at 210*F, and a bissell 12 amp bagless vacuum hooked up to the EJ bottle and some 1/2" rubber hose connecting the top of the jack bottle through the vacuum hose and into the bottom of the EJ bottle. After about 1 hour the bubbling around the boiling stones stopped i ended up with an EJ bottle with clear liquid in it and a jack bottle with a very small amount of piss colored oily feeling stuff at the bottom. I used O’Donnell 20%. Did I successfully remove the oil from the hobby fuel or did I F*** things all up?
If it is just oil thats left in the jack bottle, did I mess up the nitromethane or cause it to react with the methanol in any way? I plan to try and distill the methanol out of the clear liquid tomorrow at about 150*F with the bissell vac lol hoping to get almost pure nitromethane. Any thoughts suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
I forgot to mention the resulting amounts.
Started with about 300ml of 20% hobby fuel and ended up with about 220ml clear stuff and about 20ml oily stuff. some is missing i know but i think my vac ate it
i think i will do the next step without the vac, that way i know the boiling points… im new at this stuff
The bissell vac only pulls a few inches of water vacuum, and so did not help. It is a big explosion hazard, so do not use it. For vacuum distillation, use a venturi pump – they only cost about $5 new.
You separated the methanol and the nitromethane from the oil. However, to separate the methanol and the nitromathane you need a much better distillation rig, with a fractionating column and a thermometer.
Be aware that nitromethane is toxic, flammable, and can explode with more force than TNT. I myself would not want to use improvised rigs made of glass bottles and vacuum cleaners to handle it! If you are new at this stuff, you should get a real chemist with real apparatus to show you how. It is kinda hard to learn from your mistakes!
You also might want to practice fractional distillation with other, less hazardous liquids before moving on to explosives.
Also be aware that nitromethane is cheap and readily available if you want some.