Mercury(II) nitrate synthesis with subsequent Al/Hg producing. Video manual.

[MadHatter]

Why fool around with thermometers? . This just in: 200 + mercury switches from Ebay, total cost around 12 euro. Containing around 80 grams of mercury, from my calculations. It will be a bit of a pain in the ass to get it out of there, but I'm a busy bee . I'll just crush them up in a plastic container and filter out the mercury through a filter paper with a small hole in it.

 

[JohnWebb]

I've been looking at these Mercury switches on Alibaba and they don't look like they are any big. Can there really be around 3 grams of mercury in one?

 

[JohnWebb]

I mean 0.3g

 

[csigger]

Is 36% concentration enough?

 

[ASheSChem]

no, you need 60% you can buy that on internet

 

[s3v3n]

I did it with 38% and it took almost 3hrs to dissolve everything so its really slow but IT worked for me

 

[csigger]

I used 36% nitric acid. The mercury disappeared from it in about 5-7 days. There was some white powder at the bottom. Does this mean the mercury nitrate is done?

 

[G.Patton]

probably yes, have you filtered and checked the reaction yield? You can check result by melting point determination (see Analitic section). Hg(NO3)2 has 79 *C m.p.

 

[purple_rain]

Could I use more dilute nitric acid? Where I live you can't buy nitric acid without a license and my school has nitric acid but it's 0.1M or 0.01M I think (I haven't checked in a while so I may be wrong but I think it is something like that) so I could take a small bit. Same goes for sulfuric acid - my school has some that is also 0.1M or 0.01M so I could take a little but would it still work for neutralising the final solution with the amphetamine in it?

 

[dazrich]

nitric acid (fuming) 150gr sodium bisulfate 43gr nitrate salt, potassium, sodium. easy distilation setup with correct precautions for gas. mix salts in boiling flask and heat until salts liquify and starts giving off that nasty brown gas. cold water through condenser and about 15 to 20 ml of nitric acid in collection flask at the end.
dont use your best boiling flask as the leftover salts turn solid when cold and because i couldnt be assed to google best way to remove them, i ended up smashing the flask.
also i broke the second flask and i swear i hardly touched it...
apart from that its a simple way of making fuming nitric acid.