Nitromethane is the coolest most exotic, most expensive, and most powerful racing fuel in the world. It is also kind of mysterious liquid. The video we stumbled upon below shows how nitromethane is made in a laboratory and perhaps it explains why the stuff is so God awful expensive. The process and the components are interesting and unless you are some sort of total idiot you’d never consider trying this in your garage with a propane torch. The good news is that you’d have a hard time buying several of the main ingredients here and the yield on the raw materials is pretty tiny. But there’s proof positive shown at the end of this video that the final product of the mixing, chilling, heating, and boiling is actually nitro. It sure acts like it.
The only reason I passed high school chemistry is because of my wife, who was then my girlfriend and lab partner. Without her knowing stuff and being smarter than my 6th grade brain could be, I’d likely still be trapped in Mrs. Donovan’s class. During college I had a work study job (along with my diesel garage job) where I started as a bottle washer in a lab and then graduated to library assistant copying research articles and stuff for a scientist who was doing all kinds of biochemical experiments. I still didn’t have a freaking clue about chemistry but I was good with the Dewey Decimal System so that was a win. But back to the video.
Just to reinforce the point, please do not try this at home At best you’d fail and make some sort of a toxic substance that you’d probably dump down a drain and wreck the water. At worst you could really do harm to yourself and your property. To me, the value in this video is seeing the process and envisioning what it would take to make thousands of gallons of this stuff. Is this how they make it on a large scale? We have no idea but we do know this is how they make it in a lab. Science!
Great idea…let’s turn thousands of “meth” into “nitro” labs. If they don’t burn, poison or blow themselves up we’ll all be happy drag racers. Yippee!