cream of tartar - oil of tartr - potash - pearlash

I have observed recently that you can use cream of tartar instead of crude tartar. It can give the same results (yellow oil, transparent Alkahest).
Yea, Guys I have been thinking about this and we could probably just
come in and reanimate The cream of tartar with red wine vinegar or spiritus
of wine. Sometimes we can use certain commercial chemicals after they
have been reanimated. I think I will proceed with that process.
Somebody wrote this, I don't remember who.

Here are tre calcinations of cream of tartar:
A - melted black cream of tartar
B - little calcination of cream of tartar (bigger crystals)
C - fresh cream of tartar


Any suggestion?
Zosimo

I mean,
I didn't find nothing definitive about oil of tartar: how to prepair the cream of tartar and in wich way we should reanimate it, if we need to reanimate it, or calcinate it (to make it "magnetic" or producing toxic smoke)... to make the oil of tartar...
Commercial potash (after the exposition to the humid dew) doesn't eat or colour the glass, so is weak. Tartar from the barrels it's very difficult to find even here in Italy .

Zosimo

Found (in an ancient text of my library) !

We are investigating about the best alchemycal use of the standard, common cream of tartar?
It depends on the use of your cream of tartar:

I think that for mineral opus we can use the cream of tartar as it is, but for the production of "oil of tartar" (for instance: in primum ens) we should reanimate the substance restituting again, at least, some of the quality and the COOLNESS that was its own... with spirit of wine and vinegar. Why?
Beacause of the very common chemical method of production of the cream of tartar in wich they use a little unslaked lime to quikly precipitate it and clean it at the same time.

It's true that unslaked lime too works as a menstruum matter but, if we distill straight the cream of tartar in balneum ingis we don't know how much it will stink !
And may be it's not a good thing to ingest it.

Being on men the effect of the remedies with tartar of a refreshing or cooling quality and being at the opposite the effect of the lime (that's highly baked stones) from the past centuries they warn about it.
For this reasons it seems to me that coul be the best thing to give vinager, a very cold substance, to cream of t. and after one or two days washing it with distilled water and let it to decante after some hours. After that we should find the crystals on the bottom of the vessel and on the surface of the liquid.
Reanimated and cleaned up crystals.
Anyway, the name "cream of tartar" came from the fact that the best-looking crystals are those on the surface - like a cream on the surface of the milk - but those on the botton are of the same quality.

From this source we can produce the oil of tartar: I'll try
- calcining the empowered and cleaned up cream of tartar
- and not.
...Expecting that the glasses will be affected in some way.

Zosimo

Just a little shortcut for anyone interested the main ingredient in cream of tartar, pearl ash, potash and several other names is potassium carbonate. It is a cheap and readily available chemical and works better in its pure form.

Sincerely:

silverdragon07

silverdragon07 wrote:

Just a little shortcut for anyone interested the main ingredient in cream of tartar, pearl ash, potash and several other names is potassium carbonate. It is a cheap and readily available chemical and works better in its pure form.

Sincerely:

silverdragon07

Cream of tartar is not potassium carbonate, it is potassium bitartrate. When you heat it up and calcine it, then you are left with potassium carbonate, which is useless. The smoke that forms during the calcination is what needs to be condensed into an oil, and it can then be further rectified and purified through fractional distillations.

Also, pearl ash contains a rich variety of many different chemicals, and doesn't contain potassium carbonate -- it's mostly calcium carbonate, which is an entirely different thing to work with and can't take the place of potassium carbonate in alchemy work.

Potash is created usually from the burning of wood, and it contains mostly potassium hydroxide, which has a much higher pH than potassium carbonate.

Thank you Nick,
So let's go for the oil of tartar coming from the calcination of cream of tartar or tartar.
I suppose that "fractional distillation" means in this case the common work with tartar, the production of that gas that we freeze down as an oil in a sealed train of distillation, avoiding that other oil that distills as a liquid. Isn't it?
That's the oil of tartar that we need even for the Tugel-Moses to make the liver od sulfur, I suppose...
Gotcha?
Thank you.
Zosimo

Ouch, now I see, you said "further": it means that our oil has to be distilled again...
Anyway this is my tartar-machine I'll experiment to distill the oil.
It looks like a coffee stuff but don't mind : let's hope that tartar doesn't stop the valve you see on the right of the pic...
My be I make a little refrigerating apparel on the tube.

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Zosimo