Question submission for February

What fume hood specifications would you recommend for amateur pyrotechnic experimentation (typically 0.1-1g experiments)? Is there a particular manufacturer you would recommend?

Wesley Gardner

Is it possible to recover pure Ethanol from store bought denaturated alcohol by distillation? If not, why is it so?

How to remove or suppress fish smell in fish? Many sources said the cause was trimethylamine. I tried washing the fish or covering it with lemon juice. They did not work. Why?

Keith

What makes borosilicate glass so un-reactive that it can contain practically any chemical reaction? What kinds of reactions aren't compatible with it?

jason black

Will you be doing any videos with heavier elements? The only one which comes to mind is the one where you dissolved gold to make chloroauric acid.

Zach Heilman

Do you also need to compress the oxygen into a tank?

NurdRage

What is the coolest or most visually impressive reaction you've seen?

What kind of legal issues have you run into whilst you've been making videos? Are there any 'banned' chemicals (apart from the obvious meth etc...)

I need to produce more or less pure oxygen for my oxy-fuel torch. Oxygen is expensive to buy in 244cf bottles and I would like to make my own. I've seen many electrolysis rigs, but many mix the hydrogen and oxygen together to make useless HHO gas (which people then use to ruin their car engines because they don't understand thermodynamics). Can you suggest a way to make oxygen in large quantities at low costs ? Ideally using materials from the hardware store and ebay ? (I read that industrial water electrolysis uses special "Polymer electrolyte membrane" which I don't think I can get at the hardware store !) Where I am, I can pay for 500 kWh for 40$ and 40$ gets me a refill of a 244cf oxygen bottle. So ignoring other consumables (salt, electrodes, time) I can spend about 2kWh per cubic foot of oxygen. I would like to produce that 244cf within one week of run time so 1.45cf per hour oxygen production would be good enough. I learned about electrolysis in high school, I wondered if they showed us that because it was a practical way to generate oxygen but for something so common, I'm having a hard time finding information on how to do it efficiently in term of oxygen produced per dollar. Any advice about that would be appreciated !