Very nice find on that computer IQ
I need to get some more of those wine carboys myself actually. I can't STAND wine, even the smell knocks me sick, but those things serve just fine for keeping my heavy metal-laden toxic wastes in. I need a fair few more though, because I keep the types of waste separate rather than dumping everything in the same containers, that way when enough of whatever is in the things builds up, its both easier, more practical and cheaper to do the recycling and reclamation of the metal contents. With a complex soup of all manner of nasty ass heavy metal trash it would have to be a multi-step more complicated process depending on the metals present in the waste, and thus make the refining more expensive. Things like mercury, lead, cadmium, manganese etc, and especially mercury and arsenic are too valuable to just ditch in the local toxic waste section at the town dump and so I make every effort to recover them, as I would uncommon elements like thallium, although I've never actually had a use for thallium, and it is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking awful stuff.
I want a sample for the element collection, but I'd be perfectly content to let it rest in a display case in a sealed vial under some inert gas and leave it there, since I don't have any chemistry use for it, and quite honestly I'd sooner not go anywhere near thallium-based organometallic chemistry, its a quick-fire way to dying horribly and slowly. Same for organomercury anything. I'll use Hg for some electrical purposes, and if I have nothing better, amalgam-based reducing agents although I bloody hate the likes of aluminium amalgam reductions, they are so messy, create so much ugly pain in the ass semi-solid highly toxic slop as wastes and the workup is a total shit. So its a last resort when all else fails or everything else potentially usable for the task is lacking from the stock in my store cupboards and shelving.
Keeping my metal wastes as individual element-based slops means I don't have to resort to complex multi-step refining processes and quite possibly spend more money doing it than I would save by recovering the metals.
Something nice arrived for me yesterday, although I'd bought it a fair while ago, ordered and paid for it that is. A piece of specialized glassware called a thiele tube, along with a big pack of fine glass capillary tubes for it (these are disposable, single-use items, got a 100-pack of those). Its used for allowing, due to the shape of the thiele tube, slow, uniform and steady heating of a sample of something, a solid, or potentially a frozen liquid and using a cryogen of some sort, allowing the latter slowly to boil off and the temperature to slowly rise, with the sample in a capillary tube fused shut at one end and strapped to a thermometer, the thiele tube is then slowly heated, after being filled with oil at the triangular side-arm, which attaches to top and bottom of the main body of it, heating it at a uniforn rate, slowly, and is then simply watched carefully and when the sample reaches its melting point, heated by the oil, it rises by capillary action within the sample tube, which is then disposed of (potentially breaking it open to recover any sample but in practice that would only be done for something that would be very expensive to make, difficult to obtain/make and valuable enough to make a few milligrams count since the capillary tubes really don't need much in the way of quantity to do the MP determinations.
Cost, I forget but something in the region of 20-25, although if that was dollars or pounds I can't remember. Took its time to get here, since it came, IIRC, from china.
So is my new heating mantle I think, although the pair of magnetic stirrer/hotplates I grabbed as a set are being sent from the US. Those only cost me $40-something for the two, all in all a pretty damn good deal. Similar cost for shipping but all the same, thats probably fairly reasonable.
The 1 liter (mantles are made for a specific flask size) heating mantle/stirrer was quite a lot more expensive, although not terribly surprising, still, as long as its in good working order, as it should be, being new rather than used, but all the same I bought it anyway since I had that unexpected/unrealized money in my account and I've been wanting one for ages. Actually I want several, enough for all my different flask sizes and so I can heat multiple different flasks at the same time when needed, or set multiple ones to stir, that will take a while to get all the ones I am after though, buying 1 or 2 at a time since they aren't exactly cheap. Cheapest I've seen was a 100ml size for about $80-something. The 1l one was one of the things on my most-wanted list for lab equipment and has been for a long time. But its only now I finally had the money to spend on it.
Next on the list is going to have to be a new vacuum pump, a multi-port manifold for it and pressure gauges for each separate vacuum line on the latter for doing things at different pressure levels and then finally I can start saving up for an IR spectrophotometer, something like an FT-IR or raman scanner. Haven't quite decided yet. That and a UV-Vis ultraviolet spectrometer. Will have to save up a good few hundred per machine though, and wait, watch and pick my moment for one to turn up on ebay second-hand at a price I can hope to afford. Will certainly assist a great deal in doing identification of byproducts, and identifying compounds, determining success/failure of reactions. Expensive and going to take a lot of saving, but they are at least within the kinds of price ranges I can hope to save to afford.
