• Thisfox
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    9 months ago

    Had to do a flame test to identify old fuel for recycling.

    Made blue dye from indigo, and red and orange dye from madder, mixing in alum and other things. Making blue is amazing, it comes out green then changes colour all at once. Get the mix wrong and you get the wrong colour… Also we boiled one batch of madder and got orange instead of scarlet, so even the temperature had to be regulated.

    Most recently, been making etched plates from the inside of soft drink cans, etching with copper sulfate (they sell it in Bunnings as a fertiliser). Lots of fun!

    So yeah mostly art projects.

    That said even baking a cake is pretty fancy chemistry.

    • j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      I make solder paste stencils from soda cans. What is special about copper sulfate? I typically use hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide just to see the progress better.