SWIM moved to another country and is now starting to look for what products are available around

he saw in hardware stores they sell two kind of solvents.. One is something like 'de-sulfured heavy naphtha'

would that be a normal naphtha? I know that the clean evap test is always a must but SWIM was wondering if there was something negative about it before he would buy it.. first he wondered about the 'de-sulfured' in the label (if that makes sense in english).. Is it because any possible sulfur was eliminated from it (which would be a good thing I guess) ?

What about the 'heavy', maybe its just because its a mixture of the solvents with more carbons such as heptane and octane instead of pentane/hexane?



and the other solvent SWIM found, and wondered if it would work for jungle spice, is a mixture of metanol and toluene... SWIM guesses that metanol is miscible in water, so how would that work, actually? Would the metanol in contact with the water mix with it or would it continue in the toluene layer? Maybe if metanol evaps more quickly than toluene, SWIM could simply evap some of it before.. or is there any other way of separating the two? Or should SWIM just forget about this one?

SWIM also saw acetone and on the label it only says acetone. How can SWIM know if its pure or if it contains water/alcohols?

thanks

you can always try distilling your solvents

The one that is mixture of methanol and toluene sounds good. Methanol is miscible in both toluene and water, but it likes water slightly more than toluene.

I would advise washing this solvent with water a few times. Water will take away the methanol and will leave toluene floating.

Alternatively, one could just heat up the toluene to 60 C to boil off all the methanol. But this approach is going to smell a bit.

SWIM has never tried either approach because he never had to. But they should work. Just try on a small sample of the solvent and see if you end up with some volume loss. The volume loss should be attributed to the methanol that got washed away.

yes SWIM really would like to always distill his solvent but he has no money to get some sort of distillation apparatus at the moment



excellent, thanks a lot for the tip.. I guess SWIM would use the water technique because toluene smells quite nasty, SWIM would like to avoid that..


what about the naphtha, 'de-sulfured (or de-sulfurated)' and 'heavy', does that say anything to you guys?

The "de-sulphured" bit is reassuring, it's fine.

But the "heavy" part does not sound good. this naphtha may take ages to evaporate, it will very likely contain longer hydrocarbons, maybe on the C9-C13 range (just like the turpentine substitute solvent). If that is the case, it will be a poor solvent for pulling spice, it could do a fair job on recrystallisation.

It does not sound too amazing though.

hmm... but having longer hydrocarbons, appart from taking ages to evaporate, also means spice will be less soluble in it?

because if its just an evaporation issue, then its no problem, SWIM has patience and anyways doesnt evap all the way as he uses freeze precip... but if solubility is very low, then thats not so nice

SWIM will keep looking a bit more for a lighter naphtha then, thanks a lot