Fantasma4500 - 10-12-2016 at 07:48
so im turning some methanol into trimethylborate, seemingly low conversion rate but plenty to colour the distillate nicely green, upon second
distillation i got a lot of bumping going on and i solved it incredibly easily
the bumping comes from the glass flask jumping up and down impacting the metal hotplate
to counter this you just make a loose ball of aluminium foil, squeeze it a bit and press the flask down on it, flawless heat transfer and the bumping
has reduced noise by approx 98% and supposedly towards 0% stressing of the glass (which constant impact of the glass supposedly will do)
is there no handy tips thread on this forum or is it simply discarded as ghetto setups too crude for the finer alchemists?
aga - 10-12-2016 at 08:40
Bumping tends to reduce rather a lot with the addition of anti-bumping/boiling chips.
Quite often, simply adding a couple of stirbars works pretty much the same.
A few times i've used bits of smashed up housebrick, although that won't work for everything.
I suppose stuff like this is regarded as 'basic stuff you learn from experience' which might be why there is no dedicated thread.
Might be an idea to add it to the Wiki as "Common Gotcha's".
My handy tip contribution :-
"ALWAYS remember to close the stopcock BEFORE loading your addition funnel".
(especially if it's the HCl addition funnel in your chlorine generator)
Chlorine - 10-12-2016 at 11:00
A bit of an addition to Aga's comment, but i always save broken glassware and use the shards for boiling chips, saving me the money of buying premade
boiling chips.
My tip:
To keep your dessicants dry, add some electrical/teflon tape in the threads of the cap.
Fantasma4500 - 10-12-2016 at 23:00
yes heard of glass too, but im just getting some pedantic issues adding stuff to a reaction flask that isnt supposed to be there and can cause
problems later on
i found it very handy to have a spraybottle with water standing around, like if you stir something with a spoon you just spray the spoon off so the
chemicals drips back into the beaker
one cool effect i found back in time when i did some distillations that was required to be without water i washed my distillation bridge and tried to
pour some acetone into it to flush out the water, where the acetone would then evap a lot faster from the distillation piece
the acetone vapours however made the water coalesce and drip out
Crowfjord - 11-12-2016 at 06:06
The older tips and tricks thread can be found here.