SWIM made a very simple and useful improvised vacuum filtering

It just consists of an HDPE plastic jug with a hole on the side where a tube is attached. On top opening of the bottle stays a funnel with a filter paper on top. Then, with whatever wants to be filtered on the funnel, SWIM turns on the vacuum cleaner and brings it close to the tube. SWIM could totally attach the vacuum cleaner to the tube and the filter didn’t break, but one can always start careful and try to keep it a bit away and see if maybe filtering is already optimum.

A nice addition is to just attach the bottle to something fixed (a clamp, held between two heavy objects, etc), and same with vacuum cleaner, and then one can turn it on and do other things while the filtering being done.

One important thing is to make sure the bottom of the funnel is long enough and goes considerably more down than the side tube, or whatever liquid is being filtered will start going to the side tube and sucked into the vacuum cleaner. One can simply attach a tube to make the funnel bottom longer, as done in the picture bellow.



This works great for harmala filtering, but it is not recommended to use volatile solvents, specially if warm, with the risk of flammable vapors going into the vacuum source and possibly causing a fire/explosion if there are sparks. Though one could for example filter dmt that has been scrapped from freeze precipitation, this can be used to quickly dry the crystals very effectively, considering it will only be small amount of the volatile naphtha being filtered and it will be freeze cold

Try rigging it up to a facet so that the running water generates your vacuum.

thats great.. i'll be using that for my next peganum harmala extraction.

Could someone explain this in more detail? I can see how the concept works but I'm not 100% sure how to implement it.

well the vacuum cleaner vacuum is good enough for SWIM, but maybe amor fati wants to explain what he means..

btw, instead of using a water bottle, SWIM recommends using some harder plastic container, like an hdpe jug.. this way when you use the vacuum, it wont crumple the bottle.

Sorry to bump (I stumbled across this thread through a PDF of yours), but I think he meant this:

oh yeah this definitely looks very nice but not many peple will have the buchner and the glass and the stand and clamp, so it wouldnt be very 'improvised' in that case. But if possible, then that definitely looks very nice.

SWIM now has a buchner, but not the glass yet.. he uses an HDPE container, like a milk jug (PET bottles suck because they crumple up when there is too much vacuum and can spill stuff, HDPE is much better), and his source of vacuum is still the vacuum cleaner.

but yeah if you can make it like above, its definitely recommended.. Vacuum filtering in general is just sooo much better than just letting gravity work.

i dunno if glassware has been mentioned in suppliers forum, but bumped into this topic because someone else linked it in a unrelated topic, onto my point!
unitednuclear.com has good glassware, ships only to us and can though, but the glassware and stuff to do that is almost as inexpensive as making a pop bottle one, and is considerably safer.

just wanted to throw that out for anyone wanting to do that