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Sorry to hear man all the best to you hope it goes well and is nothing worse than a learning experience(you burn you learn)

would friendly just reccomend to edit out those swear words man before you get disciplined by a mod or so,they dont really like excessive bad language on the nexus

keep safe and heal well man

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good to hear man im glad for you report the progress,heres good medical experts on here but a trip to the doctor would be recommended if stuff gets weird just keep it confidential with your doctor(you have been extracting which is criminal to some)if they hear lye they assume meth cook right away

sleep well man chill out relax for now see how it goes.

yea, i am glad i opted for a food-safe tek (i actually ended up getting some lime in my eye! - luckily there was no pain or injury).

especially with my foolhardy tendencies

put some raw honey on that it really helps burn wounds

1) Always wear eye protection. You're lucky none made it to your eyes b/c that doesn't heal so well.
2) Always wear gloves.
3) Always keep a bottle of vinegar within arms reach when working with lye for accidental spills.

Even if you aren't wearing gloves and spill on your hands a quick wash with vinegar should neutralize the mess before causing much harm. I didn't see you mention anywhere in the post having this with you.

Safety first!

Wow you are very lucky that in the process of flinging around all that caustic water you didnt get any in your eyes and become blind for the rest of your life. Always know the dangers of the chemicals you work with and how to treat them if there is a spill, anything less is ignorance. I imagine you learned this lesson though the hard way.

Glad you are ok and only have a few minor burns.

So does MHRB.

Yeah, eye protection! Permanent blindness is bad.

I didn't think I splashed any, but once I noticed a melted portion of my goggles as they lay on the counter, and then I realized that was probably from some time they saved an eye, I didn't even notice when it happened since I was wearing them.

I'm so glad I wore them, and had no problem shelling out a few bucks for a couple of replacement pairs!

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Never seen fight club? Vinegar man vinegar!

I'm glad your ok, researching every material you use is very important. You can get an msds for anything online for free.

Even lime can be hazardous. Don't breathe the airborne particles.

I once was sitting very relaxed in my chair, and held the beaker with lye on my right hand, and poured it on the beaker on my left hand, all that in the air. A small amount of lye saturated solution spilled on my jumper which was stretched right on my crotch from having my legs wide open in this relaxed stance. Solution dripped from the stretched fabric, onto my boxer shorts, and guess where else.

I turned pale and almost barfed when looking at the alterations that occurred within the next 10 minutes. I thought it would end up ribbed, and that the missus would like that. Fortunately, the skin fixed itself and everything was normal in 2-3 days, as if nothing happened. I guess I was extremely lucky it was just the foreskin.

Treat lye like its hydrofluoric acid people. Learn from others' mistakes!

P.S. TMI, I know, but it serves well as an example for extra caution!

When my friend uses lye he sits on the outside of a bathtub with the screen inbetween him and the bottle where he arches his arm around the screen to pur lye into the container (which is in the tub). No danger, no hassle, no stress. Enjoy

Apologies, can you expand on this some more? Does your friend use eye protection, gloves, etc? Otherwise this seems like a pretty poor alternative to standard lab safety procedures. Splashes can go right through a screen and hands would still be exposed. So I do not see the benefits here.

I think he means a glass screen.

Whenever possible, try to avoid pouring or letting any NaOH solution out of its container. Instead, rearrange the steps so that you dissolve the NaOH in the final container, then add your MHRB soup to that container.

So, instead of something like this procedure:
1. Add water to jar, then add NaOH, mix.
2. Add NaOH solution to MHRB soup.

Instead do this:
1. Add water to jar, then add NaOH, mix.
2. Add MHRB soup to jar with NaOH solution (slowly!)

This way you minimize the chance of spills. In addition, it is important to add the NaOH to water, rather than the other way around. Not following this can result in a greater chance of splashes or spills. The procedure I'm fond of doesn't require pouring any NaOH solution at any time, except for disposal.

Finally, it's best to use the lowest concentration of NaOH you can manage - a lot of teks seem to call for you to add wayyyy too much or to form a saturated solution. Not only is this wasteful but also makes things way more dangerous than they have to be. I've always stuck with just enough to get to pH 12-13, so around 30-40g of NaOH per liter of solution, works great.

As an aside, don't do anything idiotic like I did - I was once trying to break up an emulsion that formed between basified MHRB soup and naphtha, so I put my reaction jar on top of the washing machine, started it, and walked away. 5 minutes later I hear a sickening crash from the other side of the house - the jar had migrated off the edge of the washer and fell onto the concrete floor and there was 1 L of black base soup all over the place (even on the walls). It took several hours to clean it up thoroughly - had to soak up as much as possible with paper towels (placed immediately in a special garbage bag), then washed the floor with vinegar multiple times. Gloves were essential.

How scary. Thank you for making this post after having this accident. These types of reports are very important.

Glad you are okay.

On a similar note how safe is it to make food with pans that have been used to dissolve lye? Does anyone have things they use exclusively for extractions? My friend has been extremely careful to clean all his pans and spoons that lye has come into contact with but is there any chance of there being residual lye leftover? He knows that when he dissolves the lye it usually stcks to the pan for a bit. I'm not quite sure how well the body filters out lye or if it does it at all since I know death can occur up to a month after ingestion. I know there's no real chance of that happening since said materials have been cleaned pretty thoroughly but my friend would hate to have mutagenic chemicals piling up in his nervous system.

I don't think it's inherently toxic in low concentrations - you would just be ingesting Na+ and OH- ions, both of which are either already present in your body, or will be neutralized by stomach acid. Just be sure to wash your utensils thoroughly with water to dilute any remaining NaOH into trace quantities.

It's still probably a good idea to keep your extraction gear separate just in case. I think there's more danger from naphtha residue because it's not easily cleaned up with water and is a known carcinogen.