Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Does this company sell to individuals?

Taslem - 12-1-2012 at 19:21

Does http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ sell to individuals such as home chemists? Or are they more of an industrial service?

Bot0nist - 12-1-2012 at 19:36

No, they don't. They wont even consider it, no matter how good your line is. There is a few good online sources that sell harder to get reagents to individual hobbyists in convenient quantities. E-bay is of course one, but the number of good sites are diminishing. Use The Forum Search Engine, and browse through 'reagent and apparatus acquisition' sub forum. Both of the sites I am thinking of are discussed often.

benzylchloride1 - 12-1-2012 at 23:35

The crazy thing about Sigma Aldrich was that it was started by Alfred Bader in a garage. One of the first products they offered for sale was N-nitrosomethylurea for diazomethane production, also made in the same garage.

fledarmus - 13-1-2012 at 05:11

I actually got to meet Dr. Bader once, when I was in grad school. He made a practice of dropping by when professors were winding down their research labs getting ready to retire (as my advisor was), and would pick up any compounds they'd synthesized in sufficient quantities to be useful to somebody else. These became part of what was later called the Sigma-Aldrich Library of Rare Chemicals, and were parcelled out and sold to whoever was interested. It used to be really interested to browse through the SALOR catalog and see what sorts of structures had popped up.

plastics - 13-1-2012 at 05:36

Quote: Originally posted by Taslem  
Does http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ sell to individuals such as home chemists? Or are they more of an industrial service?


Sell something to an individual? You need a letter signed by HM The Queen to get their catalogue! ;)

zoombafu - 13-1-2012 at 14:02

No they do not. They will only ship to a commercial address, so If you could somehow buy a commercial building and set up a yournamehere's lab LLC, that would work, but otherwise they will not ship to you.

entropy51 - 13-1-2012 at 14:13

Quote: Originally posted by Taslem  
Does http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ sell to individuals such as home chemists? Or are they more of an industrial service?
Snort! ROFLOL. LMAO. You must be living under a rock. If you had bothered to search the forum for "Sigma-Aldrich", you would already know the answer and would not be cluttering up the forum with dumb questions.

Quote: Originally posted by benzylchloride1  
The crazy thing about Sigma Aldrich was that it was started by Alfred Bader in a garage.
Amazing isn't it? Paul Janssen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Janssen ) started Janssen Pharmaceutical the same way.

But that was in the 1950's. Even in the 1960's I could order chemicals from Fisher and other companies, many of which no longer exit. Anyone here ever heard of Eimer & Amend?

It's a different day, thanks to liability concerns and drug cooks.

[Edited on 13-1-2012 by entropy51]

Hexavalent - 13-1-2012 at 14:45

Agreed, entropy51. This has already been covered several times;

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=18461#...
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=18065#...
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=412&am...
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=17891#...

These came up as a result of approximately 10 seconds worth of using the search engine, and are certainly not the only ones with this information out there in our little piece of cyberspace.


ScienceSquirrel - 13-1-2012 at 15:18

Going commercial is the answer.
When I was a hobby brewer I could only buy from hobby shops.
I turned small scale commercial last summer. Since then I have been approached by commercial suppliers that would never have talked to me before.
If you have the qualifications, can acquire suitable premises and make something that they might want to sell on eg t-butyl lithium, S7, C60, etc then you might make it in to the magic circle...

entropy51 - 13-1-2012 at 15:32

Quote: Originally posted by ScienceSquirrel  
Going commercial is the answer.
Well, it isn't the only answer, now is it?

Most of the members here are not active experimenters. They talk about chemicals that they wouldn't know how to use if they had the moxie to obtain them. OMG, I sound like len1.

Those members who are active experimenters probably can get 90% of the chemicals they need for their hobby. Many difficult chemicals such as bromine are easily made from OTC materials.

It's all in knowing where to look. People are forever asking for sources of 35% H2O2 and KMnO4, both of which are OTC. There are lots of suppliers that will deal with individuals and many of them have been named on this very forum!

ScienceSquirrel - 13-1-2012 at 16:08

I agree with you that a lot of members do not know where to look for things that are under their noses.
Intelligence and a bit of ducking and diving will get you a lot.
You can do a lot of inorganic complex type chemistry with things that are readily acquired. I have posted about lots of metal complexes that can be made from things that are readily available and their sources.
But if you want to deal with Sigma - Aldrich and their ilk then you need the dreary details of business name, address, etc.