How To Make Acetone Peroxide

CHEMICALS	APPARATUS
acetone	500-mL beaker
ethyl ether	eye dropper
hydrogen peroxide	graduated cylinder
sulfuric acid	separatory funnel
distilled water	stirring rod/stirrer
	thermometer

     To a 500-mL beaker add 50 mL of acetone, then stir in 30 mL of 30% hydrogen peroxide. Place the beaker in a salt-ice bath and cool it to 5° C. After cooling, slowly add 3 mL of 75%sulfuric acid drop by drop with an eye dropper. Stir the mixture continuously while adding the acid, keep the temperature between 5° C to 10° C, stop adding acid if the temperature gets to high. It is very important that you moderate the reaction, high temperatures will lower your yield and cause the formation of the less useful dicyclo isomer. After adding all the acid, continue stirring for 5 minutes. Keep the mixture in the bath for 1 to 3 hours, or even up to 24 hours. After sitting, a white precipitate should have formed. Filter the mixture to collect the crystals, then wash them with 300-500 mL of water. Allow the crystals to dry before using, keep them damp if storing. For increased purity, add the precipitate to ethyl ether and let it dissolve. Place the ethyl ether solution in aseparatory funnel and wash by shaking with three portions of cold water. Add the ethyl ether solution to a beaker and heat it on a steam bath to evaporate the ethyl ether. It should take about 3 hours to dry. You will need a graduated cylinder for measuring liquids, a stirring rod ormagnetic stirrer for mixing, and a thermometerto monitor the temperature.

     I would suggest making this explosive shortly before it is desired to use it as it is never wise to keep unstable primary explosives around too long. It can be stored rather safely under water for some time. If allowed to stand in the open it will vaporize after some weeks. If stored in a sealed container it may crystallize into the crevaces of the cap which could detonate from the friction of opening. Mixing with RDX, PETN, or picric acid will improve the stability of this explosive.

How to make a Amonium Nitrate Bomb

    

    Ammonium nitrate is used as a fertilizer and is supposed to be available from agricultural supply stores or perhaps well stocked garden shops. It may be increasingly hard to find due to its ease of use as an explosive, and especially from the Oklahoma City bombing. The government wants to make it less dangerous by coating the fertilizer pellets with a special chemical. It took me five minutes of research to devise a way of thwarting that method. The proposed anti-explosive would use a similar compound, I think it is ammonium sulfate, mixed in with the ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate is very hygroscopic, or water absorbing, so it completely dissolves in water, but the new stuff is only partially soluble in water. It should not be too difficult to crush up all the nitrate/sulfate nitrate mix, dissolve it in water, and skim off what does not dissolve after a few minutes. Of course it's not all that difficult to make your own. Ammonium hydroxide, the main ingredient, can be obtained in dilute solution as a laundry substance or as a window cleaner, it is ammonia. It is important to get a brand that does not have any fragrance, color, or soap additives in it as it may affect the reaction. More information about ammonium hydroxide is in the chemical synthesis section. The other chemical is nitric acid, that will be far more difficult to obtain and far to precious for most people to make simple ammonium nitrate with.

CHEMICALS                

ammonium hydroxide

nitric acid          

water

     

APPARATUS

Beaker

500-mL Erlenmeyer flask

litmus paper

The ammonium nitrate is formed by a simple double displacement reaction when the ammonium ion, NH4+, replaces the H+ ion from the nitric acid and bonds to the remaining nitrate ion, NO3, then the H+ ion forms water from the hydroxide ion, OH-, left by the ammonium ion. The equation is NH4OH + HNO3 = NH4NO3 + H2O

     Into a 500-mL Erlenmeyer flask , add 100 mL of water then add 100 mL of concentrated nitric acid. Always add acid to water, not the reverse, because the acid will splash when water is added. Slowly add ammonium hydroxide from a beaker to the Erlenmeyer flask while stirring by swirling the flask occasionally until the mixture is alkaline to litmus paper. Keep the flask in a salt-ice bath to keep it cool, and add the ammonium hydroxide in small portions so it may cool a bit. If the reaction gets too hot it will instantly come to a boil and splatter acid all over the place (the first time that happened to me I dropped the whole damned beaker of ammonium hydroxide when I jumped back quite startled, the second time I lost most of my product when it splattered out of the flask). Remember that red litmus turns blue in the presence of base and blue turns red in the presence of acid. Gently boil the mixture until only a crust remains. Let the remaining water evaporate or heat gently to drive out the remaining moisture, you can use an oven for this. Ammonium nitrate will draw moisture from the air so keep it tightly sealed right after you are done heating it. If strongly heated the ammonium nitrate will decompose to form nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas, and then will begin to emit white fumes. If you see white fumes stop heating because that's one step from detonation, don't get too worried though the detonation temperature is several hundred degrees above the fumes stage.

     It seems wasteful to use all that nitric acid just to make this particular substance, but knowledge is power! I have never actually seen ammonium nitrate for sale in an agricultural supply store, I have also never been in an agricultural supply store, so that may be why. This chemical is so insensitive to detonation that you could store it under your bed and have more worries about your pillow blowing up than the ammonium nitrate. When mixed with a sensitizer like diesel oil, kerosene, gasoline, nitromethane, hydrazine and the like it becomes quite sensitive.