My old man just helped come up with a perfect solution to a pesky little problem that has been bedeviling me for some time.
In the meantime before I decide on the (and find a good deal on ebay for) right replacement powered vacuum pump for high vacuum, I've a venturi pump of lesser power but still rather vital for me, for when I need not the full force of a high powered vac pump, and as a backup that cannot break down, because it has no moving parts, and is powered by the venturi effect, a water aspirator type that uses high pressure water flow to pull a vacuum.
Problem is, the attachment port for water inflow is JUST too much on the wide side for the water hose that supplies the flow to pull the vacuum, so he suggested (my old man) that I soften the tubing with hot water.
So I did, and at the same time as I immersed the tubing end in boiling water, I had the idea to force the glass to contract by running it under cold water, and the combination of his idea and my adaptation in the use of cooling the glass to shrink it momentarily, giving a tight seal when the two regained thermal equilibrium worked a treat. Got some hose stuck on nice and tight now; just as well, because I've a reaction mixture to perform a distillation on, and it has a compound in there that is modestly sensitive to oxidation in air, and the reaction doesn't need to be heated excessively. And both the liquid portions (it needs also to be free'd from some methanol for my product to crystallize), I'll be wanting to recycle the two reagents used, any that haven't reacted since both are valuable and rather watched and hard to get. One of them very watched and very difficult to obtain safely, so as I can't simply heat the mixture, and distill off the methanol then the....other two components of the reaction...I'll distill it under vacuum, leaving my product behind in the pot and then be able to strip the methanol out by vac distillation at room temperature, and if needs be, finish off the reaction with some MW irradiation.
Although thanks to a bit of overheating, accidentally on a portion of my reaction mixture, I'll need to perform a recrystallization from boiling hot isopropyl alcohol and freeze out the product in fractions, and subsequent vacuum-filtration at each stage to purify it. A bit of a setback, but shouldn't be anything I can't fix.
And at the very least, I'll have to recover a certain nitro-compound, of a rather expensive and difficult to get nature (no, not a nitro-explosive, it isn't explosive at all, not that kind of nitro compound, but its still watched whenever the chance for big brother's evil eye to spy on transactions involving it occur. Thankfully mine is clean, not that I'm up to no good with it. ) So I'm definitely not going to let any of it go to waste, and recycle every last drop possible, after removing the rxn liquors from my project and recrystallizing the solids left behind, which will be where my desired product is.
So my old man really came up with a good one there, and I a bit of improvement in the use of the cooling water bath for the vac aspirator and shrinking it. So a combination of vacuum distillation and shock-freezing out my product ought to come through for me just nice.
