Just had to make a weird request, a favour off my old man.
Had to beg 50p off him, but wired to my account.
Because I'm just that tiny bit short of being able to afford a 5 liter jug of 99,99% isopropyl alcohol, could afford one liter, or anything from 100ml to a liter, but for just that TINY bit more, I could have five liters. And I'm dead short on isopropanol, only got a few hundred ml of 99% and less than that of iPA that I've dried by storage over, then distillation from quicklime and even less of double-dried, first starting with 99%, then desiccation over quicklime, and finally, stored for several months over 3A molecular sieves, a kind of synthetic zeolite ceramic, basically round clay beads, in the form I have them, with the molecular structure 'tuned' to have pores of specific size, quite a feat really, they can tune them so finely, they can get within a single angstrom in diameter. So fine, they can selectively absorb water from methanol, if the right size is chosen, and anything larger than the pore size of the specification of the molecular sieves chosen, is selectively excluded, anything smaller or equal to, is absorbed.
Slow to work, they take time, and are for use on pre-dried solvents, but they are so thorough, they can abstract the very last tiny traces of H2O. In fact, they are superior for, for example, desiccation of ether or THF, for use in organolithium, organomagnesium reactions like Grignard couplings, mol.sieves take longer, but they will dry such solvents even more thoroughly than a 48 hour reflux over, then distillation from metallic potassium chips!
