[budullewraagh]

yesterday i decided to recover potassium chlorate/potassium perchlorate by adding match heads to boiling water, filtering out the recovered sulfur and cardboard and boiling off the water.  well, i found that as i concentrated it, the mixture (that ended up as a solution/suspension of white powder) turned a certain light blue, as seen below.  can anybody tell me what that blue is from?

[budullewraagh]

nevermind.  i figured it must have been aqueous chromium or nickel cations that were oxidized by the chlorate/perchlorate.

[hmx9123]

Are you sure there's chlorates/perchlorates in there?  I knew that match heads contained red phosphorous, and for that reason I strongly doubt that they contain chlorates.  Perchlorates I'm not so sure about, but I don't recall off the top of my head.  I've got a book with some of that at home, actually.

[Limpet Chicken]

VERY old match heads used to be tipped with white phophorus, unfortunately (for me) they were banned, modern match heads use a mixture of sulfur, phosphorus sesquisulfide and potassium chlorate for strike-anywhere matches, safety matches are composed of antimony sulphide and an oxidiser.

The red phosphorus is on the striking strip of safety match boxes, combined with a little ground glass and casein to gum the P onto the box side, best cleaned with MEK or acetone, gets close to 100% off the boxes, followed by an acetone or MEK wash and short HCL boil to hydrolyse the casein, the average yield per box is about 50/100 mg usually.

Be sure to remove the casein if you're going to distill any white P from red, as some of the WP tends to soak back into the ashes of burned glue on heating uncleaned MBRP in an inert-atmosphered test tube. WP made in that way is yellowish, slightly darker than light butter colored and requires multiple distillations to purify to a pure white/glass clear color.

Just my £0.02 on match/MBRP chemistry, I've done a whole lot of it

[hmx9123]

I just looked up my match formulas last night; they either have red phosphorous or a chlorate, but not both.  Limp is right, too, some have the phosphorous sesquisulfide.

Also, the color you're seeing may be from a dichromate being reduced to a Cr⁺³ ion or another oxidation state of chromium, as some matches contain some potassium or sodium dichromate.

[Limpet Chicken]

Red phosphorus and a chlorate is suicidal, I have toyed with this combination, unconfined, and with milligram quantities, it is so sensitive, I have dropped a smallish mass of it, not much bigger than about a quarter of the size of a pea, and it deflagrated INSTANTLY on a drop of an inch or so onto a metal plate, it burns as fast as fine Mg+an oxidiser if not faster.

matches with armstrong's composition/suicide....hmm cough too near the box and its up in flames! LOL.

[budullewraagh]

i just did this again and used a few red match heads with the white ones, which, i just realized is not necessarily a good thing.  the solution is now red, so i don't believe the red is red phosphorus, but it could easily kill me if it is.  do you think it is red p?

[jdurg]

Even if you know what you're doing with dangerous chemicals, still be careful with them.  All it takes is one little mistake and you can have a really bad night.  Trust me on this one.  I nearly had to take a trip to the ER this weekend because of a bad chlorine incident.  (I'm still debating whether or not I should see a doctor).  I was outside perfecting my chlorine gas generation techniques before I meet up with someone who will be able to ampoule chlorine gas if I can come up with a good way of generating it.  I used some powdered calcium hypochlorite and hydrochloric acid and was able to make plenty of chlorine gas.  What turned out to be bad for me was when the wind suddenly changed direction and blew a small cloud of chlorine gas my way.  I spent quite a bit of time coughing and it felt as if someone had punched me in the chest.  It has slowly gotten better, but it still doesn't feel 100% fine.  Now I have worked with chlorine many times before and have worked with even more reactive/dangerous substances, but all it took was one little mistake and I nearly spent a night in an ER.  Thankfully, my breathing is still fine and in the 36 hours since I inhaled the chlorine gas nothing bad has happened, so I'm pretty lucky.  But even when you know what you're doing, these nasty chemicals can jump up and bite ya.  

[budullewraagh]

MOMMY!!!!!!1

and i came up with this...what is the white?  sulfur or chlorate? (84 match heads in 100mL H2O strained with tissue paper twice)

[hmx9123]

It could be anything.  There's a lot of junk in matches.  If you do have chlorates and red phosphorous in your composition together, it forms something known as armstrong's mixture, and as Limp has said, it's incredibly sensitive--intrinsically unstable actually, and is on par with nitrogen triiodide (see other threads).  Personally, I'd pour out the material and only use one type of match when doing that again.  Most likely, you'll be OK because I think that most companies shy away from using chlorates in their matches nowadays, but you never know.

[budullewraagh]

wait, they don't use chlorates???  everywhere ive looked, i've seen that chlorates are used.