Fun with Chemistry, or how to make anti-chipmunk Pepper Spray.

[C2H5OH]

The chipmunks have been getting really bold at my mother's bird feeder. She honks a horn at them and they don't go away. At this point, they won't go away unless she sprays them with vinegar. She asked me how I could make pepper-spray to hit them with. Here's what I came up with:

@Solfy, check my chemistry, please...

The best solvent for extracting capsaicin is ethyl acetate. The cheapest I found that for is 30 bucks a liter, or so [hey, it's cheaper than I can make it myself]. The third best is acetone. I have about a liter of that stuff that I bought for something else, years ago, still hanging around, and no actual use for it.

Get a big jar and grind/mash up a couple of kilos of hot peppers. Pour in the acetone. Seal it up for a couple of weeks, so the acetone doesn't evaporate. [At this point, you must be very careful, or you will 'pepper-spray' yourself. With great agony.] After it's been doing it's thing for a while, pour the acetone through a funnel with a coffee filter in it, to take out the (now rich in capsaicin) acetone, and press it down to get it all into the glass bowl you're collecting the stuff in. Set that bad baby outside (covered so it doesn't get too contaminated). Let the Acetone evaporate [it's not an environmental hazard, since your own (and every other damn bit of wild-life) produces acetone as part of its metabolism].

Then buy the cheapest vodka you can get as a liquid spray carrier. Pour it into the glass bowl, then into the spray bottle, Ma wants Pepper-Spray, Ma GETS Pepper-Spray!

The chipmunks won't feel very well about what ma wants to do with them....

[Solfy]

Why go through all the nonsense with the acetone? You can extract straight into ethanol. Yield won't be as high but the labor is significantly shorter. Solvent exchange is a waste of time and material.
Do you have a soxhlet extractor lying around? No? You can heat up the mix if you're impatient but without a condenser mind you don't drive off all the alcohol.

I'm also questioning how effective this will be for spraying the critters without pepper spraying Ma. I think you'd be surprised how much overspray the average spray bottle puts out.
I suggest taking the pepper-laced ethanol and spraying it on the bird seed. Let it dry and fill the feeder. Pepper-laced bird seed is already a commercial product since mammals don't like it but birds don't care (how much they don't care is controversial, but what isn't?).

Or get an outdoor cat. We didn't really have chipmunks until my neighbor's cat died. He went through half a dozen a week it seemed, littering their front porch with the tails.

[Flying Squid with Goggles]

Originally Posted by Solfy

Why go through all the nonsense with the acetone? You can extract straight into ethanol. Yield won't be as high but the labor is significantly shorter. Solvent exchange is a waste of time and material.

Yeah, I agree, I very rarely extract anything from plants in solvents other than ethanol. Algae's different, I do wind up using a lot of Xylenes there, but you're not trying the crack the cell walls here, the plant's making plenty of capsaicin available in extracellular tissues, there's no need to muck about with acetone or ethyl acetate here, you'll get plenty with a mortar and pestle and good ol' etOH

[AHunter3]

Apple cider vinegar is a good option also. It has the added bonus that you can use your leftover chipmunk spray to flavor your own food

[silenus]

For that matter, why bother to make your own? There are a buttload of ghost pepper "sauces" and extracts on the market. By the worst one you can find, dilute it and lace the seed with that.

If you are making your own, do the "straight to ethanol" thing. Put on a respirator, grind up a bunch of ghost peppers, add cheap vodka. Steep, filter then spray seed. Dry. Then and only then do you remove the respirator. I would also recommend that Mom wear gloves when filling the feeders.

[C2H5OH]

Originally Posted by Solfy

Why go through all the nonsense with the acetone? You can extract straight into ethanol. Yield won't be as high but the labor is significantly shorter.

So, any cheap rotgut of 80 proof or higher?

You can heat up the mix if you're impatient but without a condenser mind you don't drive off all the alcohol.

Seal it up in a jar and cook it with the sous-vide machine for a few days should work.

Or get an outdoor cat. We didn't really have chipmunks until my neighbor's cat died. He went through half a dozen a week it seemed, littering their front porch with the tails.

Outdoor cats eat the birds. Defeats the purpose of feeding the birds. Plus, outdoor cats have very short average lifespans around here, given the road traffic and coyotes.

Originally Posted by silenus

For that matter, why bother to make your own? There are a buttload of ghost pepper "sauces" and extracts on the market. By the worst one you can find, dilute it and lace the seed with that.

Tried that, before. The sauces, even diluted, tend to clog the sprayer.

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Solfy

Do you have a soxhlet extractor lying around?

Homie version; two stew pots and a bag of ice. Dump your booze in the smaller pot, and then in go your peppers in a colander with a coffee filter. Put the lid on upside down and dump some ice cubes in it. Set the small pot on spacers inside the big one with water as a double boiler. A thermometer is handy but not essential.

In a well ventilated and expendible area, gently warm the double boiler until the booze is just simmering. I would suggest an electric hob. If you smell alcohol, turn down the heat. Keep adding ice cubes to the lid. No more than an hour of that should wash out all the hot stuff you're going to get.

Rather than torture the little bastards, spray it on whatever they are walking on. They'll get the message mighty fast. Or you could skip the shed explosion and just get an electric fence box for about $40 off ebay. The tiniest cheapest model turned down to the lowest setting is going to be more than enough to knock a chipmunk into next week and they won't be back.

[C2H5OH]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

Homie version; two stew pots and a bag of ice. Dump your booze in the smaller pot, and then in go your peppers in a colander with a coffee filter. Put the lid on upside down and dump some ice cubes in it. Set the small pot on spacers inside the big one with water as a double boiler. A thermometer is handy but not essential.

In a well ventilated and expendible area, gently warm the double boiler until the booze is just simmering. I would suggest an electric hob. If you smell alcohol, turn down the heat. Keep adding ice cubes to the lid. No more than an hour of that should wash out all the hot stuff you're going to get.

Many asphalt plants have something like that in their QC/QA lab. I've used one many times. They use much more... uhh... Boomy solvents (benzine, xylene, etc...) than ethanol. Much more safely than your home-made version.

[C2H5OH]

@Solfy, how about if I mash up the peppers, soak 'em in acetone for a few days (to get the higher yield), then pour in the 80-proof rot-gut, and let the acetone evaporate out? I have no shortage of acetone to waste, here. (I also have a bottle of xylene to waste, here, too, but that's not so environmentally benign to allow to evaporate.)

Or mash the peppers, pour in some acetone, then pour in the bottle of rot-gut, then seal up the jar I made the stuff in into the sous-vide bath at 185F (which is the temperature you have to cook veggies at to break down their cell walls), then, after cooking it a few days, let the acetone evaporate, leaving an 80 proof ethanol-water, and (hopefully) butt-loads of capsaisin solution. Then filter out the pepper-mash.

I just bought some hot peppers at the local produce market today, and I'm hoping to start this abomination of an experiment, tomorrow. But I can wait a few days for your input.

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by C2H5OH

Much more safely than your home-made version.

Now where's the fun in that?

[C2H5OH]

Big bangs are fun. Being at a safe distance from them is even more fun. I made a big bang once from an empty CO₂ cartridge and black powder. I tossed it into a quarry and stepped back to where I was out of the ballistic arc from the explosion. I nevertheless heard a shrapnel chunk go whizzing by a couple of feet above my head. Safety first! Always make sure you're out of the ballistic arc of any big bang you make, and you'll be around to make many more big bangs in the future.

[silenus]

[mjmlabs]

I'm all for Recreational Chemistry [done safely by those who know what they're up to], but if you have coffee filters (or even a fine-mesh strainer) and a funnel, you have all you need to solve the clogging issue with the off-the-shelf solution. No need to reinvent the wheel ... unless of course you really really want to, in which case hey, go nuts.

[Solfy]

Originally Posted by C2H5OH

how about if I mash up the peppers, soak 'em in acetone for a few days (to get the higher yield), then pour in the 80-proof rot-gut, and let the acetone evaporate out?

[ mother voice ] You're going to do what you want anyway so why are you asking me? [ /mother voice]

"The best solvent for obtaining highest concentration of capsaicin in water was ethanol."

[C2H5OH]

Originally Posted by Solfy

[ mother voice ] You're going to do what you want anyway so why are you asking me? [ /mother voice]

"The best solvent for obtaining highest concentration of capsaicin in water was ethanol."

Thanks! That bit of info didn't show up in my google search. Only that Acetone (which I have) was number three on a list of best solvents for extracting capsaicin on a list that didn't include Ethanol. Cheap rot-gut it is!

BTW, you can ignore my question about sous-viding it at 185F. I didn't realize until long after I posted it that that's above the boiling point of both solvents, and I don't want to create a bomb. I don't convert between C & F very well in my head, except at very specific temperatures that were used in certain tests I routinely did in my construction inspector days, where you never knew whether the plant QC/QA lab you were working in would have a C or an F thermometer. I'll have to cook the peppers first, then extract 'em and just sous-vide the mess with rot-gut at a lower temperature.

[Flying Squid with Goggles]

Originally Posted by C2H5OH

BTW, you can ignore my question about sous-viding it at 185F. I didn't realize until long after I posted it that that's above the boiling point of both solvents, and I don't want to create a bomb. I don't convert between C & F very well in my head, except at very specific temperatures that were used in certain tests I routinely did in my construction inspector days, where you never knew whether the plant QC/QA lab you were working in would have a C or an F thermometer. I'll have to cook the peppers first, then extract 'em and just sous-vide the mess with rot-gut at a lower temperature.

Also, you won't need to worry about cracking open cell walls, most of the capsaicin is going to be in tissues holding the seeds - 'placental' tissue and fruit flesh; it'll be in the extracellular matrix anyway, you won't increase your yield by cracking the cell walls and you might even decrease the concentration of it that way

[C2H5OH]

NM, mistaken early post. See next post.

[C2H5OH]

Update: SUCCESS!!!

After over a month of soaking in cheap booze, the liquid is hotter than the hottest sauce Taco Hell has, and the squeezed out mashed peppers are quite mild and nearly tasteless. It seems to have extracted the vast majority of the capsaicin, so using acetone would have been overkill.

The brave chipmunk that won't leave the bird feeder unless my mother practically has to try to hit it to get it to go away is in for a nasty surprise when she sprays it with that stuff. Bet it won't be so brave, after...

BTW, rereading the thread and rewatching the video silenus posted:

Originally Posted by silenus

That was NOT a big explosion. It was supposedly two and a half tons of explosives. A US military 2000 pound bomb (total weight, the actual HE in them is less than half the total weight) makes craters the size of a typical city block, and the visible shock wave (where the air is compressed to a point that there will be no survivors) extends much farther than that (see this video at the time linked). They would have been turned into a fine mist at the distance they ran to. That probably wasn't any more than about 10 pounds of HE, if that much. Just look at what Tim McVeigh did with under a ton of HE (pic is of a badly broken building, no gore).

[claudius]

So, you're not going to use a tactical nuke? Too bad, that would have been glorious!

[Jaglavak]

Whats that you say? Glorious?