Cleaned the acid-soaked mixed iron oxides crud cake from a pair of buchner funnels and gave them a thorough scrubbing out under the tap with hot water using a handy little tool for scrubbing glassware clean, that is essentially a long, flexible spring-like coiled wire with two brushes, one either end and of different sizes for getting into different sizes of joints, tubes, holes etc., the wire part is flexible and it coils up and moves round when compressed through the lengthways axis to scrub away crap. The Buchners are a pain to clean, the top part that holds the filter paper is fine enough, but the stems of them are a pain, in these two because they are ceramic rather than glass and its impossible to see what your doing through the walls of the stem.
That, and extracted something from the reaction that was being worked up into toluene, tapped off an as yet unknown s olid, although suspected to be iron oxides, hydroxides or hydroxide-oxide mixed something or other. Will have to test a small sample by placing a spot on a bit of metal or glass and heating from below, or in a length of glass micro-capillary tubing to determine whether its something like an iron oxide or something like it, and after loading the tube and gently driving off moisture and solvent in the sample, heat it in a gas torch flame, weighing before and after to determine how volatile this unknown precipitate is. If its inorganic oxide floc of some kind then it won't lose anything noticeable, and I'll be able to vaporise it if its organic, or at least burn it to a char of inorganic, graphitic carbon. weighing a lot less than the starting sample, should give me an idea of whether it is an impurity thats passed through the filter or if its what is meant to be there, whilst I dry the rest of the toluene with some calcium oxide (quicklime) and then add anhydrous isopropyl alcohol containing hydrogen chloride gas in solution, so as to keep everything dry and be able to distill off the solvent and recover my product before final recrystalization.
