Article Four
How To Make Nitro-Cellulose That Works
Nitro-Cellulose is great stuff! Have you ever seen those cartoons where they
leave a trail of powder in a line and light it and the flame goes all the way
along the line? Just like Bugs Bunny, you too can do it! :) Black Powder
will work, but it burns really slow and leaves a mess behind. But wait!
Nitro-Cellulose is the answer! It'll burn fast and clean and follow that
line until all of it is burned up!
Here's an example from the file HANDBOOK.TXT:
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C. Cellulose Nitrate (Guncotton)
Commonly known as Smokeless powder, Nitrocellulose is exactly that-
it does not give off smoke when it burns.
Materials-
70ml concentrated sulfuric acid
30ml concentrated nitric acid
5g absorbent cotton
250ml 1M sodium bicarbonate
250ml beaker
ice bath
tongs
paper towels
Place 250ml beaker in the ice bath, add 70ml sulfuric acid, 30mL
nitric acid. Divide cotton into .7g pieces. With tongs, immerse each piece in
the acid solution for 1 minute. Next, rinse each piece in 3 successive baths
of 500mL ater. Use fresh water for each piece. Then immerse in 250mL
1M sodium bicarbonate. If it bubbles, rinse in water once more until no
bubbling occurs. Squeeze dry and spread on paper towels to dry overnight.
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Apart from needing a good spell-checker/grammer-checker, these instructions
aren't that bad! We'll go over them again though to clear some minor things
up.
1. You don't need beakers and flasks and crap for this. Simple glass jars
will work fine. Try to use approximately the amounts suggested here,
they are really pretty good. The important part is the 70mL of Sulfuric
Acid and the 30mL of Nitric Acid. You must have 70% Sulfuric and 30%
Nitric Acid in the glass container in the ice water! If these ratios are
off, the cotton won't react properly with the acid solution. Now, it
doesn't HAVE to be 70mL and 30mL, you could just do it as 7 parts
Sulfuric Acid and 3 parts nitric Acid, just as long as there is 70% and
30% of each respective acid. And make sure there is enough acid so that
you don't run out before you use up all your cotton!
2. The reason for putting small amounts of cotton in the solution is because
you don't want a big piece in there since the middle may not be touched
by the acid solution. 0.7g is nice... if you can measure it! :) Just
use small amounts.
3. 1 minute for each piece is good, but leaving it in there for 2 minutes
for added measure is a good idea.
4. Rinsing each piece of Nitro-Cellulose is VERY IMPORTANT!! The reason is
that there is acid still present on the nitro-cellulose and you really
can't touch it with acid on it :) Also, the acid makes the substance
more unstable. So, rinse them as it says, 3 times for each piece. Try
to use fresh water each time. It doesn't HAVE to be 500mL of water each
time, just make sure they get submersed really good.
5. For the common person, they really wouldn't know what 1M Sodium
Bicarbonate is. And truthfully, if you don't know what it is, YOU
SHOULDN'T BE FOOLING AROUND WITH THIS STUFF! But of course, I know that
people are still going to attempt this process, so here is what it means:
1M NaHCO3 (Sodium bicarbonate) means 1 mol/litre NaHCO3. It's a
measurement of concentration. The molecular weight of NaHCO3 is
about 84 grams/mol. Don't worry about what a "mol" is right now, you'll
learn that if you take a chemistry class. Anyways, since NaHCO3 has
84g/mol, that means that 84 grams of Sodium Bicarbonate IS 1 mol. And
since we need 1mol of NaHCO3/Litre, we therefore need 84g of Sodium
Bicarbonate to be dissolved in 1L of water.
Confused yet? Don't be! Just do this: Get 84g of Sodium Bicarbonate
and dissolve it in approximately 1 litre of water. That's the 1M
Sodium Bicarbonate you need.
Anyways back to the task at hand, immerse the pieces of Nitro-Cellulose
in the Sodium Bicarbonate solution and dip it in and out a couple times.
If it bubbles, re-rinse the Nitro-Cellulose in water again and try it
again in the Sodium Bicarbonate. Keep doing it until it doesn't bubble
anymore. Repeat this for all the pieces of Nitro-Cellulose.
6. Now the Nitro-Cellulose needs to be dried. I wouldn't suggest squeeze
drying it, just because you don't want to loose any of the
Nitro-Cellulose. Just leave it out to dry and keep it away from flames
and extreme heat :)
And that's it! When it's dry, try lighting some of it up! It burns easily
and quickly (it ignites pretty fast too!).
This was one of the rare times where I was impressed with the directions
given by the original author. Put a mark on the wall! :)