Has anyone in Australia purchased a solvent from an industrial chemistry lab?

[MrAcuminata]

Best of luck, and let me know if you'll contemplate building a distillation set up out of copper pipe - although, given copper prices, I don't know if you'd be at any advantage over saving up for the glassware.

Hey Transform, after a bit of research on legality where I'm located, it's perfectly legal to purchase and posess distillation apparatus however use of such apparatus to distill non-polar solvents at home is actually illegal in my state, and since you need to buy the equipment online and leave a digital fingerprint there is a risk of unwanted attention if using the equipment for illicit activity. So I'm absolutely interested in the copper pipe setup. Is there a thread on here that explains it you can direct me to? Otherwise I'd like to learn about it!

 

[Transform]

Hey Transform, after a bit of research on legality where I'm located, it's perfectly legal to purchase and posess distillation apparatus however use of such apparatus to distill non-polar solvents at home is actually illegal in my state, and since you need to buy the equipment online and leave a digital fingerprint there is a risk of unwanted attention if using the equipment for illicit activity. So I'm absolutely interested in the copper pipe setup. Is there a thread on here that explains it you can direct me to? Otherwise I'd like to learn about it!

That's a weird law! What if you were steam-distilling orange peel to collect limonene? Is that illegal or not? Similarly, the pine resin I mentioned it your other thread would be either legal or illegal depending on what you intended to do with it.

Hence, if your NPS hapwened to be absorbed in some inert material, and you wished to free up that material while ensuring the NPS didn't get released into the environment, surely that would be OK?

Depending on your budget, maybe you could look into a small beverage distillation apparatus, or something intended for the distillation of fragrant essential oils. This could be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby

For more details on building your own, I'd direct you towards one of the home distillation sites, although I also once built my own copper Liebig condenser out of pipes and t-joints by analogy with the glassware design. I've also built vertical still heads incorporating a 'cold finger'-style condenser.

The main thing with condensers is being able to solder watertight joints, and ensuring your design has somewhere for the cooling water to go in as well as for it to come back out again. (I'll have to stop here, lest I write an impromptu treatise on the matter…)

Another place to check might be the Science Madness forums.

Try doing a few sketches and let us know what you come up with.

 

[MrAcuminata]

That's a weird law! What if you were steam-distilling orange peel to collect limonene? Is that illegal or not? Similarly, the pine resin I mentioned it your other thread would be either legal or illegal depending on what you intended to do with it.

Hence, if your NPS hapwened to be absorbed in some inert material, and you wished to free up that material while ensuring the NPS didn't get released into the environment, surely that would be OK?

Depending on your budget, maybe you could look into a small beverage distillation apparatus, or something intended for the distillation of fragrant essential oils. This could be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby

For more details on building your own, I'd direct you towards one of the home distillation sites, although I also once built my own copper Liebig condenser out of pipes and t-joints by analogy with the glassware design. I've also built vertical still heads incorporating a 'cold finger'-style condenser.

The main thing with condensers is being able to solder watertight joints, and ensuring your design has somewhere for the cooling water to go in as well as for it to come back out again. (I'll have to stop here, lest I write an impromptu treatise on the matter…)

Another place to check might be the Science Madness forums.

Try doing a few sketches and let us know what you come up with.

Yeah my state is famous for being a "nanny state" and it's only illegal solely for safety reasons. It appears I have a lot of reading to do before I think about coming up with an effective design for MacGyver's Distillation Kit. As always your advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[Transform]

Yeah my state is famous for being a "nanny state" and it's only illegal solely for safety reasons. It appears I have a lot of reading to do before I think about coming up with an effective design for MacGyver's Distillation Kit. As always your advice is greatly appreciated.

Yes, well - maybe too many meth heads have blown themselves and others up…

I spent an inordinate amount of time scoping out plumbing supplies, and that was well over ten years ago, during my absinthe phase. I'll try and dig up some more material on the basic principles of practical distillation with a bias towards safety aspects.

One of the major advantages of using glassware is the ability to see what's going on inside the flask and thereby avoiding boiling it dry. With copper you'd need to measure the volume of distillate very carefully, or oherwise build apparatus that includes some means of observing or measuring the level of the charge.

The other thing one has to be aware of is which solvents carry a risk of peroxide formation, and either avoid them or take the appropriate steps to minimise the risk. Fortunately, I don't imagine you'll be getting anywhere near the main culprits like diethyl ether, but it's worth bearing in mind that isopropanol is capable of peroxide formation, albeit to a far lesser extent. (Organic peroxides have a strong tendency to explode when heated in concentrated form, such as when they're left over towards the end of a distillation.)

Distilling naphtha would be relatively safe if you're following standard procedures and taking things like escaping vapours into account.

As a further footnote, it probably bears to emphasise at this point that the vapour path within the apparatus must remain unobstructed, and that one should never heat sealed apparatus, nor use open flames to heat flammable liquids (unlike some distillers of spirits might do).