I wish my foot would hurry the flying fuck up and heal already, enough to get a lift down to the cashpoint so I can find out my bank balance. I know I've got a good few hundred, possibly as much as a grand, or more, since I've been stuck in the house and spent very little for quite a while, largely because I don't know how much exactly I have.
I want to be able to hurry up and buy myself a new vacuum pump, of the diaphragm pump type, and one thats both able to give a powerful vacuum and ideally one with a built in vacuum/pressure gauge in the unit itself, and adjustable vac regulator built into the pump. I've seen some on ebay that have this sort of setup, and whats rather neat, is that they have both a vacuum and a compressor function, two separate outlets that can be used for both functions, one compressor and the other for pulling a vacuum. No oil needed, being a diaphragm pump and what is especially neat is that there are some like this with a teflon-coated interior, which is intended to help protect the pump internals from the kind of nasty, reactive, corrosive gases, vapors, mists etc. that are likely to end up needing to be vacuum-distilled, such as when purifying over the counter 98% sulfuric acid, which has a very high boiling point, but can be distilled in vacuo, and I'd definitely like one of those for the lab. Cost is about half a grand to 600, USD.
And it'll be useful for something I've been meaning to get around to for quite a while, namely converting a couple of gallons of antifreeze undiluted concentrate to 1,4-dioxane, a cyclic diether, by using strong, hot sulfuric acid to dehydrate and condense two moles of ethylene glycol with elimination of H2O, and distilling off the dioxane as it forms, for a rather nifty little process for metallothermic reduction of alkali metal hydroxides to alkali metals using magnesium dust mixed with the hydroxide, after roasting the latter to dryness and mixing the two as fine powder in a crucible, covering it with a slab of stone and weighting it down, just before the strip of magnesium ribbon inserted into the charge to ignite it burns into the mixture, which then undergoes a thermite-type reaction and reduces NaOH to Na metal and Mg(OH)2, or KOH to potassium metal, rubidium or caesium hydroxides to the respective metals, producing a pretty much homogenous, cement-like slag that has the alkali metal dispersed throughout it, which is then put into a blender filled with inert gas and ground to dust.
It appears that the physical chemical properties, be it surface tension, polarity, density or whatever other property responsible, or properties responsible, makes 1,4-dioxane the perfect solvent for the refinement process on the slag, which involves adding the powdered slag to a wide-necked flask purged with argon gas, which has been partially filled with 1,4-dioxane so as to cover the slag completely and give at least a couple of inches overhead, and then heating the flask to the melting point of the metal, which is made easier due to its being finely dispersed within the slag, the dioxane also provides a protective blanket over the reactive metal.
All nicely electrolysis-free, a lot of fiddling about avoided for molten salt electrolysis cells etc. and good yields, starting from two kinds of drain cleaner and antifreeze, resulting in both large quantities of alkali sodium/potassium etc. and the 1,4-dioxane which can then be recycled by distillation and reused either for the same purpose or other things.
