Make: Online : Use common household chemicals to make snakes

Use common household chemicals to make snakes

Whether you want to amaze your friends or freak out some kids, this interesting experiment is sure to help:

It is a "chemical snake" made by combining and then burning some common household chemicals.

Chemical snake (Google translation) - Link. Original version - Link. Thanks to Alex.

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: sleepydog on October 14, 2007 at 11:30 AM

Should the sand be dampened with alcohol AND bleach? (I'd hate to get that wrong and chlorinate the kids)

Nasypte hump proseyannogo dry sand, make it there, bleach and funnel-alcohol spare no, but of course that does not rasplylas hump. Старайтесь лить прямо в центр воронки. Try to shed directly in the center of craters.

It took me a while to figure out this warning:
Attention! Never dolivayte alcohol, after he progorit.
I THINK it says do not re-add alcohol to an already burnt snake mound of sand, or else it will burst into flames.

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Posted by: wrique on October 14, 2007 at 2:49 PM

I think the bleach reference is a google translation error. When I used babelfish, there is no mention of bleach. http://tinyurl.com/22aast

The alcohol soaked sand is presumably only needed to ignite the baking soda & sugar mixture. I can't see the need for bleach.

It would probably be best to use a combination of the two translations to figure out what the author of the page is trying to say. Or better yet, just look up English instructions for these kinds of snakes.

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Posted by: ScrappyLaptop on October 14, 2007 at 9:32 PM

Google: "Snake of Pharao"

From the prior posts I'm going to guess this one is unfamiliar, but for decades it was demonstrated in High School chemistry classes. Seems all the cool demos are gone due to liability concerns. Nowadays kids get to watch...a video. Of someone doing a paper demonstration of something really...boring.

Parents: push your School Board to bring back real science.
Kids: GET OFF OF MY LAWN!

signed,
Feeling like an old fogey.

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