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Borosilicate hydration bottles

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fractals4life

fractals4life

Titanium Teammate
Hi all,

After discovering here the possible thermal fragility of mason jars I’m looking to upgrade my MHRB extraction vessel.

Mason jars are also annoyingly wide and produce quite shallow non polar solvent layers so it’s more difficult to avoid sucking up soup.

So I’m looking to upgrade my extraction vessel and see a variety of 1l borosilicate “hydration drink bottles “ out there that seem to be nice and skinny to produce thicker, easier to pull, NPS layer. They also look to provide a good surface area when tilted for swirling mixing during pull ( I’ve not done the maths to see if the shape actually does give a surface area advantage though ).

Has anyone tried these? They typically come with a silicone outer sleeve too. Might this be advantageous from either a non slip or thermal perspective?

Is it ok to post links to auctions / sale of perfectly legal glassware here?

Many thanks,

Frac4
 
I am also thinking about this alot. I am an engineer and that makes me have to get into details of just about everything I am interested in - for this I am thinking about things like what glass is best, what are the options, where to get it. How to best setup your process so that the extraction layer is in just the right spot. And I have never done an extraction so for me I do get quite nervous and this makes my need to do research even stronger. I will say that I do very much enjoy the process of doing research.

That being said if I come across anything that looks interesting for the glass I will come back and make a post. I do often wonder - do people use wine bottles, or vinegar bottles... there are many items that we can get through the grocery store that come in glass and I don't think that there is much risk using these beyond the possibility of shattering the glass because it is not strong like lab glassware. It could happen if perhaps the mixtures are getting very hot, say from the lye and it ends up stressing the glass. That does worry me - wait, strike that, everything worries me!

In this lab where I worked for a while we had many people getting cuts so we found these "cut resistant" gloves that were for handling glass and they were really tough. A tiny bit thick, but not like some kind of ski glove or mitten. Kind of thick like a construction workers glove would be. Cheers!
 
Engineer here too, and one that knows their glass.

The thick bottoms of many soda glass containers tend to become an area of high stress when thermal shock is applied as the glass inside does not heat up the same as the glass outside. So expands less and stress is set up. This is why when jars fail it tends to be the bottom that drops out.

Soda ( AKA “ordinary” ) glass has a much higher coefficient of thermal expansion than borosilicate, typically 90 PPM per degree C as opposed to 30 or below for borosilicate.

So these thin, even, walled borosilicate bottles seem ideal from a thermal shock tolerance point of view. They seem to be made with the intention of infusing fruit etc with boiling water to make a healthy drink and some even have graduations on them to keep track of hydration throughout the day.

The only thing to watch out for is the stopper I suppose, avoid any aluminium ones as the strong bases will eat them while making hydrogen! Another popular stopper material is bamboo, that might not like strong base either.

I obtained one such bottle yesterday ( with a stainless steel stopper ) and have found it satisfactory so far, the NPS layer was definitely deeper and easier to pull from. I typically recovered 45ml of the 50 I put in per pull. I did find the silicone sealer ring had a tendency to fall out the stopper so watch out for that. It was a bit cheaper than a boro reagent bottle and came with a neoprene sleeve that kept the soup warm during its hot acid soak while I went out for some chores ( I’m using cyb’s hybrid salt tek ) .

Cheers,
Frac4
 
Where I live mason jars are around during the fall as people make fall recipe's... I have had some ideas of "McGuyvering" up some extraction rigs for ACRB as well as HBWR seeds or even Yopo seeds.

My job for many years was to design and build fixtures, machines, tools, etc. to help workers with the assembly tasks that you will find being done in most manufacturing production sites around the world. A super fun job and very rewarding. So when my interests in extractions started to grow so did my imagination. Problem is back then I could design anything and have it made and of course the company was paying for everything. Also I never had much to do with anything glass and I can imagine that you can't fabricate it as easily - or as I typed this really it is that any fabrication with glass would employ processes, methods and techniques that I am not familiar with. They could be cheap and easy to find people just like I know people that can weld steel or machine it, etc.

When I read the various techniques I guess there seems to be a few steps in the processes that can be tricky to handle such as the extraction of one fluid layer off of another layer or filtering mixtures. Again as I type the and think about it perhaps it is not as in need of help as I initially thought but it sure would be nice to have a way to very efficiently and easily sperate layers. I have learned as an engineer to never assume, always ask, test, verify. One process that is truly effective is to simply talk your way through something (kind of like what I did here) as if you are explaining it to someone, you will quickly find where your assumptions are breaking down, etc.

So again just thinking here in the moment I wonder if there are any 3D print materials that would be safe around these various solvents and mixtures commonly found in these extractions, I would have to imagine that there is, I mean damn if that technology is not advancing fast, you can 3D print metal - real metal, as strong as metal parts manufactured via traditional means. Anyway then I could see a simple valve design that could screw onto a regular soda bottle, here I am picturing a plastic soda bottle with the bottom cut off so that you can pour the mixture in or heck, just put the mix in, screw this valve in place, invert and wait for the separation. Perhaps a taper fit into the neck of a wine bottle or something similar so that we are using glass. In both cases you are basically mimicking a real separatory funnel. That would be kind of cool.

I would imagine that some other common and useful chemistry glass equipment could be mocked up and replicated for low dollars, using local items and perhaps working just as good as the real things.

Any thoughts? For me, I would enjoy designing and making this stuff as much as using it and the eventual products that come from it.
 
The trouble with 3d printed stuff is it has a pretty rough surface so will be horrible to clean, and difficult to see through when trying to judge when you're about to start draining your precious, product containing, NPS.

Also it's quite tricky to make vessels liquid tight unless you have your printer dialled in pretty good.

Otherwise PETG filament is pretty nice to print with and probably resistant to quite a few solvents. but the feeling here seems to be that DMT can leach plasticizers out easily and subsequently ingesting them is bad.

Metal 3d prints cost a fortune per cubic mm to make and tend to be sintered powder that is then dunked in something lower melting point... have a look at shapeways.com for lots of info on the technologies and prices around.

Also anything bigger than a trinket takes hours to make (I have built a 3d printer and run it for a few years now).

Nice idea but, IMHO, glass really has got much better properties and, if you factor in time to trial and make alternatives, mass produced labware is good value really.

I'm currently trialing this sort of thing:

as an extraction vessel. The shape is nice, it's borosilicate, it can be found much cheaper off amazon, and 50ml NPS forms a layer about 20mm thick, definitely easier than a 1l mason jar to pull from IMHO.
 
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