40 Aldrich has a blog and on that blog they peddle their deepest wishes, like being able to competently compete on the level of, say, Strem. 
Well, the compound on the right is the new “yellow” Aldrich tetrakis – which is clearly not fucking yellow. The compound on the right left, still in its bottle, is the same motherfucking compound from Strem.
It’s good because 1. Strem uses advanced technology to seal their bottle, called sealing wax. 2. They tape the package to a cold pack and 3. They cover their shit in real organic Argon.
Of course, you can make your own.
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Two rights make a wrong?
Oops
If it’s yellow use that fellow,
if it’s brown put it down.
Mitch
are there still people buying their metal catalysts from anybody except strem? Having Pd, Rh, Ir, Ni(0), Ru in Aldrich bottles in your lab is a sure sign that your reactions will not work. Pd/C from Aldrich is about the only one they make that can be trusted.
on the other hand, Strem has sold us some so called (R) ligand that was actually (S)… oops!
I got sent 5g of IMes.HCl (which was black, it’s white when I make it and I’m not a good organic chemist) in a bottle labelled as SIMes.HCl, which is what I ordered. doh.
I always assumed Aldrich bought their stuff from Strem, unsealed the nice strem bottles and emptied it into an aldrich one, in which it decomposed on the way to you.
lol
hrm,
maybe this explains the yellow color of the “aldrich” tetrakis on thier blog. Freshly dumped into a wieghing boat from the strem bottle.
I was at a local U some years ago giving a short presentation when a nice fellow came up to me and struck up a conversation. He introduced himself as Mike Strem. We had a long talk about his business and my talk and stuff. On the other hand, I have never met Mr. Aldrich.
(Don’t get all hatin’. The last part is a joke.)
what cat. no. is the brown stuff?
What do you mean?
I mean that old crappy brown stuff is still marketed next to new yellow. One must be carefull what he is actually buying.
It’s the product number listed from Aldirch’s blog as being the new awesome yellow shit.
Have you personally contacted their customer service line and advised them of the problem? They clearly recognise that their tetrakis is not as good as their competition’s, but if people don’t complain, why would they change their processes?
From a practical point of view, why is this still an issue? It is so much easier and quicker to make your own. From my quick calculations using the prep provided via Hegedus (see Schlosser, Organometallics in Synthesis p 448)you can make tetrakis for <$10/g where aldrich charges anywhere from ~$20-$40/g (depending on the size).
It may be easier and quicker to make your own, but in the industrial world it does not make economic sense. For instance, the corporation has figured that it costs upwards of $3K to support us in the lab for one day, all overhead included. So 2 grams of the new “high purity” tetrakis from SAF is $65. Unless I can make it myself in less than 10 minutes total, it is cheaper to the company to buy it.
Going from academia, where your labor is worthless because you are there all day anyway, to industry, where you have to think in terms of labor cost as usually the largest component of any process, is quite a mental transition.
For instance, we used to wash and reuse all our round bottomed flasks – out of habit – until someone figured out it was cheaper to toss them out and buy new everytime.
I was referring to the academic world. Grant funding is certainly less than industrial budgets, so making it makes sense.
Someone had told her electronic techs called them suicide cords. Just a couple of feet of brown lamp cord with a two-prong plug on one end and two alligator clips on the other. Of course, in regular electrical hacking, the cord was most likely plugged into at least a 110V/15A outlet, the alligator clips hooked to the guts of some television to provide temporary power. In that case, she could understand. Carelessly touch the clips while the cord was hot, and there would be a burning smell, and, if you were lucky, screaming. Jen was not worried about that. First of all, she had her suicide cord plugged into a Variac, not an outlet. The Variac was a variable transformer which plugged into the wall but allowed only a bit of current out into the cord. The voltage was increased by turning a big black knob on top of the unit. Secondly, her alligator clamps were securely chomped onto her oil bath.
The oil bath was a Pyrex dish, flat-bottomed and square-sided, that held about two cups. Immersed in the bath was a silver curlicue of resistance wire whose ends rose up through a couple of stabilizing tubing clamps to be bitten by the jaws of the gators. When Jen turned the Variac knob, power flowed into the wire coil, heating it and the bath liquid. The whole assembly was just the right size for heating anything up to a 250 milliliter flask, so it occupied the same hood space for months and months. No farting around with the wiring needed.
The heating bath should have been filled with silicone oil. Clear, nonflammable, nontoxic, designed for just this application. Unfortunately, it also cost a couple of hundred dollars for enough to fill up the glass cup. This was steep for something that could spill and go down the little sink in the back corner of the hood. Steep for Jen’s boss, Professor Stingfellow, who was Puritanically parsimonious with his money. His group knew that if they petitioned to obtain any reagent Sigma-Aldrich charged more than fifty bucks for, Stringy would tell them to go to the chemical morgue in the subsubbasement and either find it, an acceptable substitute, or the building blocks from which to make it. So long ago some desperate graduate student, recalling his mother’s kitchen techniques, had gone out and shoplifted a can of Crisco from Stop & Shop. This marvelously inexpensive substance was even better than silicone oil in that Crisco returned to the solid state at room temperature. This meant that the cool and solidified oil bath could be taken out of the hood any old time you needed the space and tossed in a drawer without causing a huge slippery mess. The drawback was that Crisco burned. There was still sooty evidence of this in a rough ebony patch way up inside Jen’s hood where some predecessor had come in one morning to find his refluxing reaction gone, the clamp holding his flask melted, the flask itself empty and on its side at the bottom of the now Criscoless bath, and the whole of the inside of the hood coated with the greasy blackness of whatever Crisco became in flame.
No, don’t throw them out! Send them to me.
Don’t overlook the non-chemistry community who (i.e. chemical engineering) would much rather buy the material and get on with life.
I also bought Ni(COD)2 from Aldrich. Damn, that was a mistake. Sticky brown gunk anyone? Fortunately it works adequately for my purposes. Incidentally, anyone have any tips for storing the stuff so it doesn’t degrade in a matter of days?
Under nitrogen and keep away from light. It helps, but once radical damage set in…
Store it cold, too. That helps delay the inevitable. I have had a bottle of Ni(COD)2 from Strem for about two years in our glove box’s freezer without any degradation. Also, do not make fun of Ni(COD)2. It can hear your insults and decompose instantly. Treat it like you would your mother. Do not talk back to Ni(COD)2. It will tell your lab’s bottle of t-BuLi to Molotov cocktail your home later. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
You have a freezer IN YOUR GLOVE BOX? Bastard. Oh well, I have had adequate success lately with parting my NiCOD2 into several little brown vials in the glove box, then taking all but the one I’m using out of the box and storing in the -20 degree freezer. This requires opening them to air for a second as you crack them open and stick them on the ‘box shelf, but it seems to be better than leaving them sealed in an amber vial in the box.
I attribute my PhD to Strem. Tricky Pd-catalyzed cross-coupling was a major part of my research and I don’t think I coulda done it without them.
I’ve met Mike Strem before and I love him. Every time I go to a conference I thank the people at the Strem table for being so awesome.
Every time I go to a conference I bitch at the Aldrich people for being so shitty. Unless I absolutely have to, I refuse to purchase chemicals from Aldrich. I hate them, they make shitty compounds, usually screw you on the amount they send you, and charge the fuck outta shipping. So yeah, FUCK YOU Aldrich.
If you’re not getting your metal compounds from Strem, you’re a fucking idiot.
That being said, I love TCI as well.
Stay classy.
Mitch
I like Aldrich because we get free next-day ground shipping from them since we’re so close to Milwaukee. Instant gratification is a wonderful thing. Never had much of an issue with their organics. However, their TCNQ is green. GREEN. Bah! TCNQ should be amber in color (the green is due to trace radical anion).
Other chemical companies to buy from (or not):
Strem: Organometallics, ligands. They even wax-seal their ampoules. They loves their wax over there.
Acros: n-BuLi, Belgian waffles
Frontier Scientific: anything with boron- boronic acids, esters, and the like. Also awesome(ly cheap) for some porphyrins and phthalocyanines. They also sell tetrakis- do not buy it.
TCI: Some of the stuff they sell is waaaaaay cheaper than aldrich, but it’s a crapshoot.
Alfa Aesar: I have never had a reason to buy things from them unless they were way cheaper than Aldrich. Their organometallics suck suck suck.
Gelest: Anything with silicon or tin. Cheaper and better than everyone else for silicon reagents.
Oakwood for TBSCl. Cheap and reliable — and a Tenderbutton tip!
Oakwood rocks for TBSCl, Tf2O, and pretty much any peptide coupling agent. Stupid cheap. Their silyl triflates, however, can be hit and miss.
I order all of my antibiotics from TCI as they are ridiculous cheap, but they are almost always contaminated. I have to recrystallize them before use, but I still come out ahead.
Would also add the following quality suppliers:
Silar for silicon materials (not as well known as Gelest but been around just as long – they do custom organosilane as well)
Synquest for fluorinated stuff
Polysciences as a good list of ‘can’t find any more’ bioliogics/dyes etc…
Love the honesty in some of the statements above (not sure I have seen a chem blog with 4-letter words in it that are not acronyms…)
Good to keep these lists handy!
KC
Amen for Synquest — they are awesome and responsive (but expensive, as befits a custom manufacturer.)
Anyone have thoughts on Pressure chemicals? Their metals sure are cheap.
They’re awesome. When our group had to make our own Grubbs catalyst (we needed, like, a kilo of it and the patent on it limits the amount suppliers can sell), we bought like 200g of RuCl3*H2O from them for a good 20% of what it would have cost from Aldrich. I haven’t bought any Pd compounds from them but I’ve heard good things.
We order most of our polymer standards (which we use in reactions) from them. Good stuff.
Oh Snap! Damnnnnnnn…….Damnnnnnn…..reactions not working. Carpenter blaming the tools! You gotta store that shit properly man. your lab is hella loaded so buy another fridge!
Strem is pretty good but if you need uber high purity you have to go to Aldrich. Strem has screwed me a few times and it takes for god damn ever to get anything from them.
I needed a higher grade of material so I called Aldrich. They put it in their catalog! Sweet deal…..I don’t have to spend bullshit hours in the lab making it and columns suck balls.
Chi town!
there ya go. Reposted.
Awesome! Thanks dude!
Strem red sealing wax might be recycle from used Maker’s Mark bottles. That could be an uptick for working there. As for Aldrich… There are industral chemicals whose smallest size is a plastic tub. Irganox-1010 antioxidant and Tinuvin UV absorbers come to mind. Dig the ~100 gram Aldrich prices for
pentaerythretol tetrakis(3,5-di-tert-butyl-4-hydrocinnamate)
2-(2H-benzotriazol-2-yl)-4,6-di-tert-pentylphenol
How much value added is a (maybe) bulk recrystallization? If Aldrich inventory is running low, Aldrich prices for said item can zoom to the moon – all the market will bear. When the good Dr. Bader ran Aldrich you could lift a phone and talk to the Founder himself. Now you get Professional Management crapping on the other end of the line as improved means to deteriorated ends.