The chemist gets the hang of pH-ing

The chemist gets the hang of pH-ing a batch of meth and after that it is a snap.

It is not really the “best” as if you choose it so much. The pH of blood is 7.03. Arguably, the equimolar combination of a strong mineral acid, HCl, with a weak organic base, “meth oil”, should make an ionic salt with a pH less than 7. Less than 7 is acid.

You do it with a pH meter or the papers. Sticks, really.

You do it by adding acid dropwise to the product oil or by running HCl gas into a solution of the oil in a suitable dry solvent, such as diethyl ether.

If you do it the second way, the solid meth HCl comes out of solution and falls to the bottom, so you can’t really go wrong. The first way requires adjusting the pH of the aqueous solution of meth oil, with water, and conc. HCl, which is 35%, with the rest water. It is a gas dissolved in water.

Likened to the boiling point of a pure substance, the temperature or the pH just changes when there is one phase, like liquid. When there are two, like boiling has liquid and gas, the temperature remains constant. That’s how they know that Concentrated is the same as 35% HCl. This weight percent acid mixture boils at a constant temperature.

Adjusting pH with an eyedropper is trickier. The solution is not going to do anything about you adding more acid when it is already neutral. That will ruin it. It takes about a drop of acid to neutralize a milliliter of oil. That’s why you must first split the batch of oil into two separate containers. It is easy to go over on the amount of acid, and, you must use the correct equipment. And, this is simple equipment. It’s called ‘technique’, so, get a disposable pipette, with a pipette bulb, and practice transferring water around, and, don’t EVAR tip it back so that the water runs into the bulb. Meth that tastes like rubber rubs me the wrong way. When I shoot it I can taste it.

I believe it is just phenol red. A bottle of two ounces will do over 1,000 tests. That indicator has to be made up, probably. Dissolving an indicator up in water or alcohol is simple, but it may require the use of an analytical balance. This one says something like, “turns from red above pH 7.5 to orange below 6.5”, and the recipe is in a book. There are hundreds of them. That is the ball park. I do not even appreciate someone marketing pH sticks, because that white plastic is never going to degrade, and it sits in the trash looking like nothing else. And, it costs a lot for just a few. And, I want to go postal on my supposed friends who run a hobby business without offering all the little items to do the job for practically free, and yet I’m a chemist and yet I am some kind of fucking retard they can go and just overcharge and just loves to pay for the privilege of getting busted.

So, the type of dispo pipette is a certain type about nine inches long, and there is technique so pouring acid out of a reagent bottle, you take the pennyhead glass stopper in the back of your hand between the fingers and hold it there while you pour. If I saw your technique I’d probably freak out. That’s okay. Make friends with your chemistry teacher. He’ll be glad to show you. Don’t say Meth. Don’t even say, “You know what I mean?”

Don’t go in and out of a stock bottle of reagent, contaminating it. Pour some out, in an evaporating dish or a 50-mL beaker, and, when you are done, sacrifice it. Pour it down the sink and hit it with water.

Use the back end of a melting-point capillary tube to sample the dope. There is no sample size too small. The same amount as a piece of a tear on your cheek against a white porcelain background like a spotting plate, is plenty. You do not let a lot of solution get drawn up in a narrow glass tube by capillary action. We do not soak our pH stick in the batch. We do not beat the dope out of used indicator strips and fire it. We do not return colored solution to the batch.

Keep a flame going at all times. It is a lab. No soot. An alcohol lamp charged with methanol, it’s dry, and a blowpipe will allow you to fashion glass items. One of these is a drawn glass capillary. Pull a piece of tubing and it will make two of them. Cut tubing with triangular file, scratch, both thumbs, break away from you, sudden. Scratch goes on the outside, away from you. Don’t even do this on thin-walled capillary tubing. It comes in precut lengths of four inches under the name, “boiling-point capillary tube”.

Make a line-up of dots of indicator ready to use, and go to them in turn. They represent the whole half-a-batch. They will tell the story of the dope being brought to the correct pH. Add the drop of acid to the batch, bring a fleck to the table. A teeny-tiny narrow tube will hold less than a drop. I don’t know how you cut a drop, maybe by touching it to the side before it is a whole drop. Surface tension will cause the drop to spread out on the glass. water sticks to glass better; mercury sticks to itself better. There are twenty drops to a mL.

We don’t want to get Munsoned out here in the middle of nowhere. Put that flame out. I was just kidding. Are crazy? I am about to whip out the acetone. Read my lips: It’s F L A M M A B L E. Place the metal cap over the wick and don’t you ever, EVAR blow that flame out, srsly. Light it with a match. I’m a sulfur freak. If it’s a bunsen burner (hooked up to a propane tank with a gum rubber tubing hose), use a striker. The goddamn acetone doesn’t have to be dry! You get those crystals back later. A little bit melts. Do you want your dope to be on America’s Most Wanted?

You get SWIY’s oil in the first place by steam distillation.