hello all i have figures out a cheep way to seperate you fluids with out having a sloppy mess and having to buy an expensive sep-funnle. what i have beed doing is drinking a lot of quart jugs of milk/oj lately and been saving them up to use to extract. what the cool thing is they are hdpe! and when full they can be sqeezed to let the top layer to flow off. also you can poke a small hole in the botom of the jug with it sitting in somthing for it to catch you mimosa base solution and right be for the solovent get too low move it to some thing to catch it and repeat till you get the base solution all gone!!!! also i have been lookning fot a cheep pipet and no sucsses! well my spice is amazing and i love it!!!!!!!!!! so off to hyper space!

If you use the hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide) as your base, the mix is a solid (of sorts) and the naptha cleanly and easily pours out without much effort

I've used some 'inventive' methods for separation in the past, but a good 1000ml sep funnel is well worth the $40 it costs in terms of exacting your technique. I grabbed one from http://secure.sciencecom...atory-Funnels-C2613.aspx and then built a stand for around $8 from hardware store parts. Best investment I've made, especially for A/Bs.

Just to be clear, I don't work for The Science Company but I've had good experiences buying from them.

-JM

What I've used to do was to get a few 1 liter ziplock bags (or bigger/smaller, depending on the amount of liquids), mix everything in them and wait for the layers to form, then over a jar or some other container cut a small piece out of the bottom corner of the ziplock bag and just drain the bottom layer fluids away.

Im not sure will the ziplock bags be able to handle lye or acetone containing solutions though

DEFINITELY NOT!!!

Please please please nobody EVER EVER put a solution of caustic chemicals (ESPECIALLY LYE) into a ziploc bag for separation!!! (if you like having skin on your hands)

Lye solutions have been known to eat through the bottoms/walls of MASON JARS Please don't ever think it's ok to put something like that into a plastic bag!!

-poorfish

theorically lye shouldn't eat plastic bags,maybe naphta and apolar solvents should.. anyway i say you that i often moist my hands of lye solutions many times and nothing happened,just wash fast and well your hands.. and when i was a stupid kid i picked chunks of lye directly from the lye's can with my bare hands without damage haha this is stupid i know,and i say you don't try this at home but i think that the dangerous of some corrosive chemichals are a bit of hype.
i moisted my hands with diluted and concentrate sulphuric acid and no dmg if you go to tap.

nitric is more corrosive and muriatic too if concentrated,diluted not so much. concentrated ammonia and h202 is a bit annoying if concentrated too.

What i'm trying to say is don't have too much scare of chemicals,a bit of scare is good, especially for your eyes, and glasses are always good thing, i don't like gloves couse it's more difficult to work with them and couse my hands would be more damaged by them that by the chemicals (secret is..don't moist your hands with chemicals!). it's like when somebody doing nitroglycerine is overscared by it and shiving will risk to drop all on the floor lol

Go to a perfume/makeup store, or a walgreens or something (...internet?) & ask for eye droppers!
They come in small to pretty big sizes.

Or get a pipette & a pipette pump!!
Set of 5 Mohr's pipettes = 12.70
10ml pump = 7.50

Whole page of em!

Love things that make my life easier!!


WS

I’ve been working with the milk jug with a hole at the bottom as a ghetto sep funnel for some time. Only good for a single use really (at least the way I have been working) but works very well.

It is important to note when using this type of ghetto sep funnel that the flow of liquid out of the bottom can be quite erratic. Watch yourselves! Pay extra attention and ensure you are wearing protective gear.

Another possible source for cheap pipettes you might like to look in is art supply shops.

I found some pipettes at my local garden shop.

Isn't the point of this forum (among other things...) "harm reduction"?

So what happens when someone reads the post and thinks "hmm separatory funnel = $$$$, plastic bag = nothing" and pours a strong base solution into a ziploc for separation and it melts through the bag all over their hands/body?? (If they're using a ziploc sep funnel, you can bet they aren't wearing gloves or an apron BTW).

Warnings about the caustic natures of various chemicals are not "hyped up," they are strongly worded because for every person who tried to warn potential idiots; for every well-written warning, there are 10 posts from people saying "Oh yeah, I did that once, and I didn't die you'll be fine."

the science company is cool, I got a 1000ml sep funnel that I love plus the stand, clamp and beaker for cheap on ebay.

also at Maya you can get a free disposable pipette with order.

bag wouldn't melt by NaOH and i said chemichals like sulphuric acid and lye is not true they boil on your hand digging it, they're armfull but if you wash your hand fast almost anything will happen to it.

Whilst small amounts of NaOH are unlikely to do much serious damage to your skin it is not a reason to stop being cautious. NaOH is dangerous. It is easy and reasonably cheap to get decent protection. It is easy to work whilst wearing protective gear.

https://dmt-nexus.me/for...aspx?g=posts&t=14486

Please people be sensible!

If you don’t believe in using what are generally accepted safety precautions please keep it to yourself.

^^^^^ Very true
Gloves and goggles are not expensive, it only seems logical to take precautions to protect your body. Just because you got away without any repercussions now, does not mean an accident isn't waiting to happen later. First time I worked with lye, I was shaking like a leaf thinking about the nasty things it could do to me. At this point, I never use lye anymore. Too much of a pain to find, and there are plenty of other bases that work just as well, if not better.

When things go wrong, they can go wrong badly. For example lye dripping out of a zip lock bag (damaged by solvents eating away the plastic) and then having the lye splashing into your eye. I guess you will feel pretty stupid when you have to explain to other people that you got blind in one eye because you used a cheap zip lock bad without wearing any eye protection thinking you 'could wash it off your hands'.

Zip lock bags aren't made of HDPE but from plastics that can be eaten away by the solvents we use for our extractions. Not only is it dangerous for leaking spills but we also have the worrying fact that these plastics could end up in our final extraction! Smoking plastic is VERY bad and you should do anything to prevent that. Making statements like "I did something stupid and got away with it" doesn't change the fact that you did something stupid to begin with.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Looks like this is just natural selection waiting to happen..