For me there are just two people to buy for. And since I am currently really quite flush for my income level having used very, very little and its just built up every payday, rent and some food and drink, and the occasional few cigars is all I've spent in months, so I've got almost a grand saved up. Xmas gifts between the family tend to be a few pounds between recipients. USEFULNESS matters most, rather than sum spent. The enjoyment the giftee gets out of their gift. At least though I'll manage to be able to pay the rent, and get both my uncle and old man something they'll really like. And thats AFTER a major lab upgrade, and I do mean MAJOR. I'm thinking a spectrophotometer of one sort or another, possibly BOTH an IR type and UV-VIS, could do with a few more multi-necked flasks, some spare thermometers, both the mercury and alcohol types. (the latter have a lesser range, but the advantage that they can be used in microwave reactions, I don't know what would happen to completely glass-encapsulated metal, like the Hg in an Hg thermometer but I wouldn't use one for a microwave irradiation-catalyzed reaction.)
Might get myself a brand new microwave too, as an afterthought so I can customize it for my personal needs, already got the likes of diamond edged drills for if I need to mod the glass panel sections from previous glass-cutting this that and the other, they take a while, its slower than drilling metal or wood of course but they will bore holes cleanly through all sorts of stuff, from ceramic tiles to cutting a neat little pair of holes straight through a beer bottle (serving for a low temp-electrolysis vessel IIRC, or might have been some sort of gaseous reaction, don't remember why I did that)
They are somewhat slow though, but they will even scratch tungsten carbide, never tried to drill through it but I'd think these things could. Got some other ceramic cutter drills that look a bit more 'normal' than the glass drills, the latter look like a metal leaf-bladed spear point on a normal shaft with a hexagonal back end (that goes in the drill) whilst the others look like normal drills, in shape, I think those are not diamond edged but are coated in, from the looks of it, titanium nitride of them, since its a bright gold color where the coating is applied, and regular metal near the base where it isn't.
Seen one guy's custom-hacked microwave oven, for variable power, made to stand vertically, with a receptacle for a flask, and hole in the top for a condenser, the plumbing for coolant loops and all sorts, looked absolutely amazing, even capable IIRC of microwave-heated photocatalytic reactions. Guy made it himself. I so got to build me something like that. (which reminds me, I have some methanol to distill out of my last MW-irradiated synth, since it looks like it went well, but its having difficulty crystallizing, even at sub-zero temperatures to shock-freeze out my product, there is product produced, but its soluble in MeOH, which was added in small quantity due to the catalyst I needed to employ being glorpy and very, very viscous and nigh impossible to pour, sticks to the sides of vessels, and I had to dilute it in methanol in order to form the salt needed for the purposes of its use as a catalyst in the reaction in question, as a result the bugger is proving not to crystallize much, there is SOME, and the reaction I am very convinced worked as it should, its just the crystallization that is refusing to happen in full, due to the presence of methanol, in which my target product made in the reaction is extremely soluble. So that will have to be vacuum-distilled off, and then the product crystallized, washed with water, with dilute acetic acid (although I've successfully used GAA [glacial acetic acid, so called because it can freeze solid at a moderately lowered temperature, above zero 'C into ice-like crystals of solid pure acetic acid), the first for removal of generic polar side products of any kind, and the product is insoluble in water completely, or almost completely, even in hot water, the acid wash is for removing the catalyst, and then more water washes to remove residual acid, bisulfite (or metabisulfite) washes to remove residual carbonyl compound as a bisulfite adduct from which unreacted carbonyl compound can be recovered by treatment with weak base such as sodium or potassium carbonate, removal of the adduct scraps, and then recrystallizations via dissolving product in a bare minimum of boiling hot alcohol and after allowing it to cool, some precipitates, upon which ice-cold water can then be added to dilute the small volume of alcohol, precipitating cleaner and cleaner compound with each recrystallization. Will give me a nice chance to give my Thiele tube a first run (its a melting point determination instrument, that looks like a wide boiling tube with a ground glass neck (apparently unusual on Thiele tubes) and which has a triangular hollow glass tube attached at one end to the base of the Thiele tube and also higher up, the corner of this is heated, providing uniform heating by convection, slowly, using one of those wee spirit burner lamps, whilst the sample is sealed in a disposable capillary tube, by flame-melting the ends closed, with a tiny portion of sample placed within, and strapped to a thermometer, placed in the main bore of the tube, which is filled with oil, such as sillicone oils, which are clean and don't smoke, nonflammable etc. and the tip of the triangular outgrowth heated in the spirit lamp flame, providing slow and very uniform heating, the sample eventually reaches its melting point and flows within the tube by capillary action allowing for determination of melting point. I bought one on ebay a while ago but haven't used it yet.
Need more rubber grommet rings for my still heads, since these regularly face both friction from thermometers being slid inside them, and from being screwed onto the still-heads (they lie in the top of the screw on cap, as a seal, important especially to have a good seal doing vacuum distillations)
Need more flasks, I'd like more of the sizes I use commonly, plus 3-4 at least each of 3/4 neck 5 and 10 liter flasks, maybe even one or two twenty or thirty liter flasks for those reactions needing for a small amount of product, very low concentrations of reactants and large solvent volumes.
And importantly, a good lab vacuum pump, my last electric one broke down and atm I have only a venturi pump. I want something like a teflon diaphragm pump, along with a trap to fit it (a cryo-trap, which one fills with for example dry ice, or if needs be, using a liquid nitrogen bath to intercept things that oughtn't to be sucked into the pump since they could damage it, things like say, fumes when distilling nitric acid, interhalogens (which are VERY aggressive, the most benign of them all will eat stainless steel in less than 24 hours and disintegrate a plastic keck clip into crumbly, white-filmy looking powdery, chunky rubbish, or cause it to split and fall in two or more pieces within as many minutes or less, whilst the worst of them...never made the likes of chlorine trifluoride or chlorine pentafluoride but have heard things. Such as it burning through several feet of concrete and continuing down after to burn through several METERS of packed gravel and dirt below, stopping only when the entirety of the spill had reacted. You don't STOP a chlorine trifluoride fire, you run like fuck and evacuate the area, naturally it isn't something I'd even attempt to make. I do have both iodine monochloride and iodine trichloride around though, got a bottle of ICl in my solvent and hazmat fridge, and that I did make myself, by packing a condenser with iodine, connecting it to a dessicant tube packed with anhydrous calcium chloride, and then to a chlorine gas generator, the Cl2 reacted with the iodine, producing a mixture of the two iodine chlorides, the ICl3 remaining was converted to ICl by standing in proximity to excess I2 overnight and then redistilled. Reminds me...I'm running quite low on iodine and will very soon need to buy more. Bought a kilo or so last time and most of it is gone. (no, not for I2/RP meth synths, iodine and phosphorus (I mean, generally, not necessarily together, usually not in fact for me at least, are very useful reagents. Got plenty phosphorus, 2 kilograms left of red, and a little bit of white, although theres another reminder, broke my retort (alembic) preparing that, cracked, resulting in a fireball of superheated white phosphorus vapor and flying phosphorus trails, which at first, seared the ground and soil clear of vegetation in the garden where it travelled over, dripping flaming, glowing, incandescent-flaring willy peter, but later, when the thermal damage was done, and vegetation ready to return, the areas hit by the burst of white phosphorus (all in all a couple of hundred grams of molten WP, suddenly got free when the alembic cracked, first loosing off an aura-like surrounding of glowing phosphorus gas then shattering into fragments, loosing off the lot like a cannon shot, which thankfully I had the sense not to be close to whilst it was being distilled. I need another alembic, this time I'll spend the extra cash for fused quartz) but once the phosphorus did its damage, the growth that returned was super-lush and vigorous, the phosphorus release obviously having acted as fertilizer and promoted growth.
But ClF3 or ClF5? shit no. no fucking way in hell would I even try to make those. There is nasty (like say, fuming, SO3-saturated 'oleum' concentrated sulfuric acid, fuming nitric acid etc, SOCl2, phosphorus oxychloride, phosphorus trichloride/tribromide etc) then very nasty but still both valid for use and synthesis, like cyanides, hydrogen sulfide gas, sodium azide, hydrofluoric acid with the greatest extremity of care) and then there is the list of things that fall under the category of 'fuck no! wouldn't touch that or anything to do with it with a bargepole, such as ClF3/ClF5, bromine fluorides, phosgene, and the various chemical warfare agents, as well as heavy metal organometallic nasties like methyl/dimethylmercury that are nasty enough to be what VX nerve agent WISHES it could be as nasty as. Not that I've any desire for CW agents in the first place. Not counting things which incidentally have teargas-like effects, I deal with enough chemicals of irritating nature, and use of say, chloroacetone, acrolein etc. as intermediates, thats fair enough.
(literally, it'll set bricks bursting into flames on contact with even dilute vapor and is more aggressive than fluorine gas, and not to mention toxic in the extreme. I've had an encounter with iodine monochloride, one of the most benign ones of the interhalogen series and one tiny scrap of a breath in escaping during a mask failure left me needing an asthma 'reliever' inhaler to breathe for about 3 days or so, in the time taken to realize it was present and my running away to a safe distance, breathing out fully and holding my breath (or lack of breath, I.e keeping my lungs empty) to repair the mask.
And that was from just the traces of fumes coming from heavily teflon-wrapped glass joints, can't use normwe know where you fucking liveal greases with it, since they are attacked within moments and turn into something like concrete or cement. That was all it took to rust stainless steel to useless rubbish, or utterly disintegrate all plastics I've tried exposing to it, bar only perfluorinated polymers like teflon (I can store the non-fluorinated ones in glass and teflon vessels, designed to be particularly resistant. The filth, ironically, after a bogus 'raid' to 'collect samples', quite illegally I might add, just opened up this and that, transferred small portions of various things into these special resistant bottles (not sure if they even are made of glass, they might be fused quartz but have both outer cap and an inner seal between bottle neck and cap that fits inside the cap made of some similarly resistant but compressible-textured inert)
And I wouldn't even try making, handling, storing or using the fluorinated interhalogens. MAYBE, just maybe some of the iodine fluorides if I had special reason to need them but I'd never make them. Fluorine gas is lethally toxic, corrosive as hell and sets things on fire at the merest, briefest touch of dilute fluorine , and it even will attack and ignite stone. Chlorine trifluoride and ClF5 are even worse, and all of them attack and destroy glass.
I've got rather a large shopping list for the lab, as well as xmas shopping. Thankfully the latter will be cheap since there are not many people to be bought for.
