Had to pay my old man the rent today, and whilst I had enough, had most of it on me in my wallet, but another 180 in the bank, of which I had to pay him 40 from that too. But I got a real shock when I went to check my receipt to see exactly how much was left. Because there had appeared another £265.something or other (that was left, after paying him the additional 40. And I have no idea why. Quite delighted about that. That means I should be able to afford both the heating mantle(s, even) that I need, or one with built in mag stirrer (elsewise I can build the stirrer portion myself, its just a matter of sticking a sparkless motor and variable controller for it in a box that will tolerate the heat and not block the magnetic field, and attaching some powerful permanent magnets (or even do it with electromagnets if needs be, but some powerful AlNiCo ones would be ideal since they have IIRC one of the highest Curie points of the high powered magnet alloys. The Curie point is the temperature at which permanent magnets become susceptible to demagnetization. And AlNiCo based ones are particularly resistant to it. Which of course is ideal for applications such as magnetic stirrers which are going to regularly and repeatedly be exposed to high temperatures like stirrer-hotplates/heating mantles with mag stirring since of course they are there right under a heat source that may well get cranked up to a few hundred degrees 'C.
Woke up today to find that some mail had arrived for me, and that my Thiele tube had arrived.
(a piece of scientific glassware used for analysis of the melting point of compounds, small samples of the substance to be tested are placed in a thin capillary tube made of glass, strapped to a thermometer after first being fused shut in a flame (the capillary tubes are made of soda-lime glass and very thin walled with a narrow internal bore as well, so this is easily done) and then oil is poured into the thiele tube and the side armature is heated (looks like a triangular section, the hollow ends being attached to the body at top and bottom) to create convection currents which efficiently and evenly distribute the heat and at not too fast a rate, so as to permit observing the moment the sample begins to melt, and when it does so fully giving the MP range. Impurities almost always depress the melting point of the substance being tested so it helps, especially used alongside other techniques to test the purity of substances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiele_tube
