So in my last video about calcium acetate, I mentioned I would eventually get around
to making it from Tums, but I wouldn't be really sure when that would be.
Well, it turns out that I did it right away.
To make calcium acetate, we're effectively just reacting calcium carbonate with
acetic acid, which is basically just vinegar, but to do this, we need a source of calcium carbonate.
In the previous video, I used eggshells as my source of calcium carbonate, but
Tums are actually mostly calcium carbonate, so they're also a pretty good source.
The problem with Tums is that the calcium carbonate only makes up, like,
half of the mass of each tablet, and the rest of it is something like sugar.
We can't follow the same procedure that we do with the eggshells, because if we
don't take out the sugar, and we start to boil things down, the sugar will actually
break down, and the whole thing will become a huge mess.
In the end, though, the procedure's almost the same, we just have an added step at the
beginning, where we have to burn away all of the organic material.
Like I said in the previous video, the purpose of making calcium acetate is to
make flammable jelly, and also to do a dry distillation to produce acetone.
So, for this, I use the ultra strength Tums, which have about one gram of calcium carbonate per tablet.
As usual, some things aren't shown here, and I also used
eighteen hundred milliliters of 10% cleaning vinegar.
You could also use regular 5% vinegar, but if you do, you'll have to boil off a lot more water.
The first step is very simple, and we need to bash up and crush all of the tablets,
and I find the easiest way to do this is to put them into a plastic bag, and then smash them with a hammer.
This is what the tablets looked like when they're intact, prior to crushing them
with a hammer, and this is what it looks like after I'm done with them.
You'll notice that there's still a lot of large chunks, and that's ok, we really
just don't want to have any full, intact tablets left.
After it's all been crushed up, I pour them all into a stainless steel pot.
I start to heat up the tablets using a camping stove and, this must be done
outside, because it's gonna produce a lot of smoke.
It actually takes quite a long time to heat up, so just to get things going, I
start burning the tablets on the top using the torch.
I then shake around the pot to mix things around, and then I repeat the process and
char the top stuff again.
Eventually after enough heating and time, the Tums should start to smoke a lot.
This is good because it means we're getting close to igniting it, but ideally
you don't want to produce this much smoke.
So, coming back to the torch, I start to heat the top layer again, and we try to
get things ignited. Eventually you'll see a flame forming, and this is good, so just
keep blasting things with the torch and keep the heating up.
As we continue, you see that the Tums start to char, they turn black, and
eventually they turn white.
The white stuff that's left over is the calcium carbonate, and this is what we want.
Eventually, we'll get to the ideal point, where the Tums are simply just burning,
and not very much smoke is being produced.
So, at this point, we have a nice Tums fire going, and we just have to wait for the
majority of the sugar to burn away.
At some point, it might start to smoke again because the oxygen can't really
make it to the bottom, so to try to remedy this, I poked the large chunk to
break it into smaller pieces.
As I do this, and I expose the bottom layer to air, you can see that the flames come
back, and the smoking decreases again.
Eventually, we'll get to a point where it looks like everything's mostly just ash,
and there's not much smoking or flaming going on.
At this point things are still burning, and we need to break up the large chunks
into smaller pieces, and keep the camping stove going.
As we continue heating and stirring things, everything
will become more or less grayish white.
I kept the heating up, and I occasionally just tried to use my pestle to crush the
larger chunks into smaller pieces.
One thing you should keep in mind is at this point the ash is still extremely hot,
so you really should avoid touching it.
Eventually, we'll get to a relatively uniform gray powder, and at this point
we're pretty much done.
The powder is gray because it's a mix of calcium carbonate, unburned carbon,
and other byproducts, but unfortunately the camping stove doesn't
get hot enough to burn away everything.
If we used a hotter heat source, we would ideally be left with a pure white
calcium carbonate powder, but this is more than good enough for what we need to use it for.
I actually weighed out everything, and the mass of this gray powder
is about a hundred and seventy five grams.
Ideally, if each tablet you know contained one gram of calcium carbonate,
and we have a hundred and sixty tablets, then we should have a mass of
a hundred and sixty grams, but clearly there's about fifteen grams of some other stuff present.
So now we proceeded on in the exact same way we did for the eggshell video, so
everything's added to a large Erlenmeyer flask.
On top of the calcium carbonate, we slowly add in about eighteen hundred milliliters of 10% vinegar.
I added the vinegar in small portions because if its
added all at once, it would pretty easily foam out of the flask.
What we're doing in this step is we're reacting calcium carbonate with acetic acid
in vinegar to form carbon dioxide, water, and calcium acetate.
The calcium acetate that's formed is soluble in water, so it dissolves into
the water right when it's formed, but the CO2 is a gas and it bubbles out.
In this reaction, I'm actually using an excess of calcium carbonate to make sure
that we use up all of the acetic acid, but that's ok because calcium carbonate is
not soluble in water, and to get rid of it at the end, we just filter the excess off.
I don't really want there to be much acetic acid left over, because at some point,
we need to boil away all of the water, and if there's a lot of acetic acid
present, then we're gonna be boiling away the acid into the air.
So like I said, everything was added in small portions, until eventually all of the vinegar have been added.
As the two react, a lot of carbon dioxide gas is formed, and what we need to do is
let it sit here and fully react, and come back to it when it stops producing so much CO2.
When we come back to it after a few hours, you can see that the solution's
actually relatively clear and there's not much carbon dioxide being formed.
Pretty much everything that hasn't reacted has sank to the bottom and we're
left with a nearly clear solution.
The next step is to filter things off to try to clear the solution, and to do this,
I just used several coffee filters and a funnel.
The stuff that comes through is pretty clear, but unfortunately even after
filtering it a few times, it remains a little bit cloudy.
The particulate that makes it through is just too small for the coffee filters to stop, and there's
really not much we can do about this.
Once everything's been filtered through, I turn on the magnetic stirring and I
start to heat things up.
What's interesting is as things heat up you'll notice that the solution actually becomes cloudier and not clearer.
This is mostly because the solubility of calcium acetate actually decreases with
temperature, so as things heat up some calcium acetate actually falls out of solution.
Once it gets pretty hot, we actually hit a point that the solution becomes totally
white when enough calcium acetate falls out.
As we continue to boil down the solution, it's going to take on a yellow color and this is to be expected.
Someone actually contacted me and told me that the yellow
color is just a property of white calcium acetate, but I really don't know.
Once the volume gets down to around eight hundred milliliters, I transfer it to a one liter beaker.
Erlenmeyer flasks are actually terrible for boiling off liquid, and this beaker's gonna work a lot better.
As we keep boiling things down, you might notice a precipitate starting to appear.
At some point, it will become very evident that there's a lot of white precipitate floating around.
At this point we're very close to being done, so you should monitor carefully and don't take your eye off of it.
Very quickly, after the first precipitate appearing, it will start to thicken a lot, and
eventually you'll be left with a sludge like this.
At this point, stirring didn't work very well, so I decided to take it off of the hot plate.
To get rid of the rest of the water, I simply poured the contents of the beaker into a container.
I washed the beaker with a little bit of water to get rid of any calcium acetate
that remained behind, but you really don't want to add too much water, because you're
just gonna have to evaporate this off.
I left it in the air with a fan on top of it for a couple days, and eventually it all dried out.
At first, it's gonna take on a very strong yellow color, but as the water evaporates,
it will slowly become much more white.
I didn't really monitor the drying process because I was working on some other projects,
but you can see here that it's a mix of white and off-white stuff.
As if fully drives though and we crush it up, you can see that we're left with a nearly white powder.
In the end, the yield was about a hundred and eighty four grams of calcium acetate.
So now after making both of these videos I have a lot of calcium acetate
to work with, and I should post the flammable jelly one soon.
I honestly haven't really gotten around to doing the dry distillation to produce acetone,
but I plan to do that sometime this week.
So as usual, a big thanks goes out to all of my supporters on Patreon,
but I have to give a very special thanks to everyone who donated $5 or more.
Like I said in a previous video, I kinda have too many $5 supporters to realistically
read out each of your names, but just know that I still love you all. ♥