What are you guys up to on a Friday night? (Pics)

[Frit Buchner]

I'm working the kinks out of this vacuum set-up and once I have 1/2L of distilled water I'm going to run some chloroform that needs distilled for a future project. I'll do a proper write up on that when I'm done.

 

[Frit Buchner]

On another subject, anyone know how to turn a pic when you upload it? I've never had this problem before on this board

 

[SoldadoDeDrogas]

I see this is a few months ago, so if you haven't figured it out yet, open your pictures in paint and you should be able to rotate it clockwise 90. Nice stuff by the way :}
I don't mean to ask any security questions, but do you get your gear from online orders or can you find things locally? For example the "hobby shop". My brain wont let me try to go without trying to improvise first, but I'm quickly learning this is a bad approach when it comes to chem.

 

[Frit Buchner]

Amazon and eBay all of it. I've got glass pieces off of Amazon that were shipped from China. Great deals if you can wait 3 weeks or a month. I got a nice 3-neck and an alihn condenser for $20/PC they are Deschem brand. It's scary until you look at the stuff and see 200 were sold this month and that is just 1 specific piece by 1 brand. 1000 erlymeyer flasks were sold last month. 900 seperatory funnels. 350 complete distillation kits.

 

[Frit Buchner]

There's things you can improvise, but you can't improvise a vacuum distillation kit or a reflux under inert gas setup. Get yourself a 20-30 piece set. Just buy it. Have it sent to your grandmas if you got to. That can be configured to 100 reactions. You can improvise off of it quite a bit. I've got about that and there's not much I can't do.
On another note, my biggest kinks were;

A) this hot plate stirrer is garbage. This is the cheap one you see sold everywhere for around $40. Skip it. It has a thermistor in it that doesn't let it get hotter than 100°C. It claims to have 250 watts of heating power, but I assure you, looking at the element there's no way it is 250 watts. It has about 5 wraps of fishing line size wire around a cardboard circle that is aluminized on one side and bare cardboard on the other. It wouldn't boil a cup of water. Ever! I got a real one used off of eBay, 650 watts and it will boil water in 2 minutes. It was missing a couple of screws and the stir mechanism needed a little work, so I complained and got it half price, $50 delivered. A note; if you're stir mechanism won't go slow, inside this one is a variable resistor that adjusts with a flat head screwdriver. Turn it up.

B) I heated it another way and 3 times in a row boiled the water into the condenser. You can't pull the vacuum line off if it starts getting vigorous. It's got vacuum on it dumby! You need a valve but until you got one, unscrewing the thermometer housing will work and you can even control how much you let off and maintain some vacuum