June! It's cubane time again

Hello everyone!

The goal for the new Big Cubane series was to make 100g of cubane by the OpenSauce festival (July 19-20th). .Oh no...... that's somehow only a month away so it's a very tight deadline!!! But I'll do what I can!! ((Will I be seeing any of you there in San Francisco in July??))

So yes the next video is doing Steps 4 + 5, which is the diels-alder step and then the deprotection. But! We don't have a lot of material (I mean, we have quite a bit but this series is meant to be BIG cubane!), so most of my time has been taken up doing a whole second run to get more tri-bromoketal so we can double the amount of material we can work with. It went well... mostly.... but the important thing is that things are working, so we're on track for Cubane, even if we're not on time. But hey, 1 out of 2 ain't too bad....? (The gif is me running the bromination for a second time last week)

What else is on the list? Well I finally got my hands on some Oleylamine, a chemical that was holding up the synthesis of the perovskite nanocrystals I made one video on so far (remember the bird nest video??). It was quite a while ago but it would be cool to finish that project - I bought some expensive ceramic media for my ballmill a while ago so it'll be great to use it and hopefully make more cool glowing things!!

Finally- I really enjoyed using the induction furnace to get to very high temperatures in the latest Yellow Pigment video. Assuming I have some rough way of doing temperature control + measuring and I fix/repair/overhaul the cooling water system, is there any project suggestions for what I could do with it? I assume it can get to 1600 degrees C but maybe could be hotter?? Could be very interesting to use (once again, assuming I can control it...)

Thanks for your support as always!

-Tom