Homebrew Layout Fluid Experiments

[hman]

MEK is pretty nasty stuff, probably best avoided.

Peroxide hazards associated with butanol are news to me. What kind of btanol ... n-butanol (1-butanol), isobutanol (2-butanol) or t-butanol (tertiary butanol) was supposed to form the peroxides?

Back in grad school, a lab were I worked used t-butanol to safely (ie, SLOWly) react leftover potassium and rubidium for disposal. "Smaller" alcohols would have reacted explosively with such alkali metals.

 

[TIM-RANEY]

Sorry - I am just a bit lost on some things, so do tell what is "RIT" dye.
Regarding the substances, I think shellac is harmless. IPA is not (harmless), but I do happen to be the guy who tried drinking it for real! [Ref: 1]

Dykem has the following..
Ethanol (64-17-5) That is like the active ingredient in Jim Bean. We know what it does!

Butyl Acetate (123-86-4) It's a high boiling point nail polish solvent, also found in fruit, candy, ice cream, etc.

Butanol (71-36-3) Like IPA with an extra carbon, it's biofuel for cars, paint thinner and used in brake fluid.
Highly alcoholic aroma for perfumes, is also a nervous system depressant.

Nitrocellulose (9004-70-0) Highly flammable explosive gun cotton, it is the cellulose film lacquer deposited from the solvents.

Isopropanol (67-63-0) IPA - the three carbon alcohol I use it too!

Propyl acetate (109-60-4) Another ester solvent with a sweet smell used in flavours - probably not harmful in small amounts.

I don't know what the code numbers in brackets mean. Maybe one of our experts in chemistry can tell us. Even I dozed off in chem lectures, I don't think they mentioned these.

[1] Food and drink in the work area! (IPA + ethanol + methanol)!

Graham: "Rit" is a brand of fabric dye available in the US. Here, you can buy it at grocery stores, Walmart, etc. Arts and crafts stores have it too. Besides its use in dying fabrics, woodworkers use it for home brew wood dyes. It is available online too.

 

[homebrewed]

MEK is pretty nasty stuff, probably best avoided.

Peroxide hazards associated with butanol are news to me. What kind of btanol ... n-butanol (1-butanol), isobutanol (2-butanol) or t-butanol (tertiary butanol) was supposed to form the peroxides?

Back in grad school, a lab were I worked used t-butanol to safely (ie, SLOWly) react leftover potassium and rubidium for disposal. "Smaller" alcohols would have reacted explosively with such alkali metals.

2-butanol can be dangerous under some circumstances according to this. The greatest risk of explosion is when it is distilled, presumably to purify it. If not destroyed beforehand, the peroxide concentration goes up until the distillation unit goes bang.

I haven't seen any issues regarding other isomers.

 

[hman]

WOW! Thanks. As I've often said, majoring in chemistry has taught me to stay away from chemicals!

 

[homebrewed]

WOW! Thanks. As I've often said, majoring in chemistry has taught me to stay away from chemicals!

I hear you there! Near the start of my retirement I worked on developing procedures to de-layer integrated circuits using a process called CMP, chemo-mechanical polishing. Don't want to go into the weeds on this (nothing proprietary, just want to keep this down to a few paragraphs), but one of the problems of de-layering IC's for failure analysis purposes is the selectivity issue.

There are many different materials used to make IC's and they have different polishing (or etching) rates, so it can be quite a challenge to reverse the manufacturing process. CMP is used to make modern IC's but a number of the chemicals used are known carcinogens. The machinery built to _make_ IC's takes this into account, but the DE-processing tools available don't. So one of my goals was to use food-grade chemicals to do it. I had good success. Among the numerous approaches I tried was to use a certain famous brown soft drink because it contains phosphoric acid. Believe it or not, it was too aggressive for my needs! Something to think about the next time you consume one.

On the other hand, salts of some of the carboxylic acids found in fruits were quite useful. Some readily form complexes with copper ions, which was perfect for my needs.

Sorry, probably TMI, but it provides some insight w/regard to my chemistry paranoia. I regularly worked with some really nasty items like concentrated hydrofluoric acid, HCl, fuming nitric and fuming sulfuric acids, 30% H2O2 and the like but never had a significant incident over the span of about 40 years. I did learn to respect 30% hydrogen peroxide after I added some to a small amount of hydrochloric acid. I was looking for a gold etch. Anyway, the solution soon decomposed by releasing chlorine gas (in the fume hood). The reaction showed me that oxygen, if properly motivated, can pull the hydrogen off HCl and release elemental chlorine!! Something to think about the stuff we breathe. And why green algae want to get rid of it.

 

[hman]

Congratulations on having found benign chemicals to do the job! I've heard of using citric acid (lemon juice) to clean copper. Didn't realize it was also an etchant. Probably not too significant when cleaning copper-bottomed cookware ... but the layer thickness of ICs is a LOT thinner!

 

[ericc]

So I have a small bottle of blue Dykem which has lost its color. It works very poorly now. I know what to do as soon as one of my blue pens stops working. Or black, or red, or whatever.

 

[graham-xrf]

So I have a small bottle of blue Dykem which has lost its color. It works very poorly now. I know what to do as soon as one of my blue pens stops working. Or black, or red, or whatever.

Hi Eric.
One of the things I feel a bit unsettled about is how long my 236mL (8 fl oz) plastic bottle of Dykem will last if left to itself. I would be using it up very slowly. I have heard that Dykem deteriorates if you don't use it up, but I don't know how true that is. So what you say is from direct experience, for which I thank you. Perhaps other HM long-term users can let us know whether Dykem can have years of shelf life.

So far as I know, propyl alcohol will remain as propanol. Of course, suppliers will have "use by" dates, but most solvents have indefinite life if kept sealed. Perhaps not so when they are mixed up with other stuff. I think what perhaps happened to your Dykem started with the Butanol.

Here I speculate, trying to think it through. Note as @homebrewed has explained how that ingredient can react with oxygen to form a peroxide. If that be hydrogen peroxide, then you have a powerful oxidizer that can bleach the colour out of dyes. I did wonder why one needs butanol in Dykem anyway, but likely "HM Cynic of the Year" would say it's only purpose was to deliberately give the dye a limited shelf life, so you need to buy more.

You can try to put some ball-point blue into the dead Dykem. If what remains can still evaporate to leave a film, that's a way to keep it going until you use it all up. More likely, the zonked out Dykem is beyond redemption, and only deserves disposal by the @homebrewed suggested "combustion"!

 

[graham-xrf]

More on ball-point pen inks.
Yes - I am still riding this experiment, in the sense of 1st try been standing around for a few days, left to itself, because I have not got around to clearing it up, and I noted changes. My wife thinks I'm in need of help..
"I don't know what's got into him"?
"Why on Earth would he want to be scratching lines and writing on metal,and then keep wiping it off"?
"He does it all reversed! He gets the ink out of the pens, and spreads it out, then he writes in it with something sharp"!

Gel Pen ink does not work- but ballpoint ink does!
At least - not in the shellac/alcohol mix. It appears to at first, but the painted layer has a grainy top surface, and a thick rim boundary. If left for long enough, gravity separates it. This would have been seen sooner if I had a test-tube centrifuge. [Is that maybe a machinist aspirational project?].

_

I did try to paint some metal with some of the separated top layer, which I reasoned would contain the traditional ball-point ink. It still appears to work in getting a quick drying layer, but this is not a good test. I should have dumped that batch long ago, and properly checked out a, clean fluid mix.

It is not yet quite right. I think the layer might still be too thick, and on that plasticized tin-plate lid from a spice can, lines would scribe just fine with a scalpel. With a carbide scriber, the layer hangs onto itself better than to the metal, so drags a line that tears a little "wider" than wanted.
I think the layer is perhaps too thick, and needs more alcohol.

The coverage is completely enough. I also painted up a layer about 2" x 1", and hardly used more than a couple of drops out of that top layer, which all started with half a gram of shellac. When dry, it's durable, and does not come off onto the fingers or clothes, When it wipes off with alcohol, it comes off easy, except for a resisting faint fine line around the paint boundary, which seems to need some more hard rubbing.

Other fluids
One suggested by @homebrewed is to get some expanded polystyrene foam (parcel packing, wall insulation, lightweight feeble white stuff), and dissolve in acetone. I consider acetone to be harsher stuff than alcohol, and I wheeze up on the fumes, so I use a carbon filter mask, but anyway, the polystyrene magically disappears into it, and the stuff that is left does leave a layer, but the fluid evaporates and thickens by itself real fast. MEK evaporates slowly, but I am not going to use it.

So another experiment is mooted, using polystyrene packing

 

[homebrewed]

More on ball-point pen inks.
Yes - I am still riding this experiment, in the sense of 1st try been standing around for a few days, left to itself, because I have not got around to clearing it up, and I noted changes. My wife thinks I'm in need of help..
"I don't know what's got into him"?
"Why on Earth would he want to be scratching lines and writing on metal,and then keep wiping it off"?
"He does it all reversed! He gets the ink out of the pens, and spreads it out, then he writes in it with something sharp"!

Gel Pen ink does not work- but ballpoint ink does!
At least - not in the shellac/alcohol mix. It appears to at first, but the painted layer has a grainy top surface, and a thick rim boundary. If left for long enough, gravity separates it. This would have been seen sooner if I had a test-tube centrifuge. [Is that maybe a machinist aspirational project?].

View attachment 361316 _ View attachment 361317

I did try to paint some metal with some of the separated top layer, which I reasoned would contain the traditional ball-point ink. It still appears to work in getting a quick drying layer, but this is not a good test. I should have dumped that batch long ago, and properly checked out a, clean fluid mix.

It is not yet quite right. I think the layer might still be too thick, and on that plasticized tin-plate lid from a spice can, lines would scribe just fine with a scalpel. With a carbide scriber, the layer hangs onto itself better than to the metal, so drags a line that tears a little "wider" than wanted.
I think the layer is perhaps too thick, and needs more alcohol.

The coverage is completely enough. I also painted up a layer about 2" x 1", and hardly used more than a couple of drops out of that top layer, which all started with half a gram of shellac. When dry, it's durable, and does not come off onto the fingers or clothes, When it wipes off with alcohol, it comes off easy, except for a resisting faint fine line around the paint boundary, which seems to need some more hard rubbing.

Other fluids
One suggested by @homebrewed is to get some expanded polystyrene foam (parcel packing, wall insulation, lightweight feeble white stuff), and dissolve in acetone. I consider acetone to be harsher stuff than alcohol, and I wheeze up on the fumes, so I use a carbon filter mask, but anyway, the polystyrene magically disappears into it, and the stuff that is left does leave a layer, but the fluid evaporates and thickens by itself real fast. MEK evaporates slowly, but I am not going to use it.

So another experiment is mooted, using polystyrene packing

Other solvents like hexane or mineral spirits should dissolve polystyrene as well. Paint thinner will evaporate more slowly than acetone but has its own distinctive odor.