Buying and shipping glassware can be costly. Do you think a crystallizing dish is worth it? Is there anything special about that makes it much better than a pyrex pan?

Or what about just a glass petri dish?

You can get pyrex snack bowls at walmart that atr almost idemtical. And come with lids.

$1 at the Super Market or Charity Shop

There's no substitute for a nice large, glass scraping surface.

These are even better...

I don't get all those flat bottom lovers here. I prefer a concave dish. It has no corners.

Evaporating dish w/ a rubber policeman is what I would call the ideal.

There's no real need for the lab glassware, you can DIY it fine, but after two hundred years, I think those chemists have figured out what works pretty well.

Blessings
~ND

Yup, i've used those airtight snap lid dishes for the few extractions i've done. Has always worked great for me. Some will be against it because of the rubber top and fumes from the naphtha/etc, but they always worked well for me. :

From my experiance ..That pirex dish in photo with red plastic top bought at Wallmart is great for evaporating or freeze precip in freezer..
BUT...The plastic lid is far from air tight!..
I solve this problem by putting two zip lock freezer bags around it then putting in freezer ...

If you dont air tight freezer bags.. you may stink up the freezer with napatha fumes and thats no good for food!

I like my crystallization dishes. They are made for it. I bought some on ebay for cheap. They have all sorts of sizes to choose from. Some with lids.

Glass with a glass lid. No naptha fumes in your freezer. No plastic dissolved into your dmt.

Shouldnt be a spextacular concern as kt's very cold. Athough if you're paranoid you could separate with al foil.

Glass dishes work well. Those red lids not so much. The few times I used them they were not airtight & the evaporating naphtha from the blower in the freezer got on the lids & ate the plastic.

Crystallization dishes IMO are worth it if you can find a good deal. No curved edges or corners to scrape.

You could always just freeze precip in a small jar & use acetone to recover the product & evap that in a baking dish rather than deal with saran wrap or moisture seepikg into the tray.

Well I finally got one, but it has the problem that pyrexs have, which is this curved corner here.



The flat razor blade can't deal with the round edges either. Unless you have a perfectly fit curved blade, you're going to deal with loss or lots of awkward scraping.



So, it's not perfect, but it'll work if you want a small space to work in.
I hope these images have been very helpful.

Just flush it with ethanol then evap to move the dmt from the side to the middle. Then scrape again.

Use a spoon to scrape the rounded corners - if you get the right spoon it will fit the curvature perfectly.

I agree with the plastic lids being bad - naphtha condenses on them and starts to dissolve/warp the plastic.

I use those rectangular casserole Pyrex, sometime the ones for pie. The smaller the vessel, the harder it is for me to maneuver and scrape. Plus, surface area aides in drying, imo.

I also just use cling film, careful not to slosh things around during freeze precipitation.
-FF