[disneygurl2010]

1. Does anyone know a good free program that can draw structures on a MAC?  Paint does not seem to help on time....

2. My professor did this reaction in class but I am having trouble understanding the mechanism as well as how to name it to find it online.

[Doc Oc]

I've used a program called ACD Chemsketch that was alright.

The reaction your professor showed looks like a variant of the Williamson ether synthesis.  Start there and see if you can figure out the rest.  I'm honestly not sure what he means by tertiary ether, I've never heard that terminology.

[Honclbrif]

I'm a fan of ChemSketch too. Its from ACD labs and the freeware version  has pretty much every feature you could ever need in a structure drawing program.

[disneygurl2010]

Do you happen to know a good link or website that has info on how to download it & works?  I trid several on google but so far none has been able to work...=(

[Honclbrif]

http://www.acdlabs.com/resources/freeware/chemsketch/

[orgopete]

For the reaction, think carbocation intermediate and its chemistry.

[qbkr21]

i use chemdraw.  it is expensive but as a grad student i get it for free.  you can also do some cool NMR stuff on it.

for your reaction think about the leaving group.  the Cl- halide is an excellent leaving group.  the alcohol R-OH is electron rich and highly nucleophilic with two sets of lone pairs on the oxygen. one of the lone pairs swarms in and attacks via SN2 on the carbon bound to Cl-.  the Cl- is ejected and a positive charge is placed on the oxygen (think about the # of valence electrons oxygen has).  then there is a loss of the -H+ bound to oxygen to rid of the positive charge and create a neutral species.

1. Does anyone know a good free program that can draw structures on a MAC?  Paint does not seem to help on time....

2. My professor did this reaction in class but I am having trouble understanding the mechanism as well as how to name it to find it online.

[Honclbrif]

Insert Quote
i use chemdraw.  it is expensive but as a grad student i get it for free.  you can also do some cool NMR stuff on it.

For ¹H NMR prediction I like nmrdb.org
http://www.nmrdb.org/predictor

I'm far from current on ChemDraw but from what I gathered from my forays into it, the coupling predictor is rather simplistic*. The ¹³C predictor is pretty good though, but if you're desperate you can work those out with pencil an paper. I do like the CD MS peak predictor. It helps when I forget what happens when you've got more than one halogen in a molecule and don't feel like looking it up.

*along the lines of "hey, there's three neighboring protons so it must be a quartet, no matter that they're nonidentical. nmrdb.org will even go so far as to predict splitting patterns and coupling constants. However, as with all computed results, nothing is written in stone until you determine them experimentally.

[Dan]

I'm far from current on ChemDraw but from what I gathered from my forays into it, the coupling predictor is rather simplistic

Yeah, I gave up on that years ago. I don't get a ChemDraw Ultra license any more, only ChemDraw Std, which is quite annoying. The main tool I miss is the structure->name converter.

[discodermolide]

I'm far from current on ChemDraw but from what I gathered from my forays into it, the coupling predictor is rather simplistic

Yeah, I gave up on that years ago. I don't get a ChemDraw Ultra license any more, only ChemDraw Std, which is quite annoying. The main tool I miss is the structure->name converter.

Dan,
If you need that functionality send me the structure.