how about "bestine" brand heptane? or d-limonene?
msr campstove fuel is light naptha, tho ive never used it for extraction--only to cook food!

http://heartmagic.com/EssentialDistiller.html

this is a very nice unit and it is flexible. i would like a graham condenser instead of the one it comes with. you can substitute a vigreux column for 35 bucks instead of the thru flask, and they offer optional fittings for solvent recovery , etc..

your point is moot if the solvent is not a reagent in a reaction.
extractions aren't synthesis reactions. even if you purify
your tech-grade solvent (a pointless endeavor), you'll still get impurities, as solvents are not selective.

Please elaborate on this. I always thought that the whole point of distillation is to separate different substances that have different boiling points.



But it seems that if your solvent is dirty, then, on top of impurities from the extracted material, you'll also get impurities from the solvent.

I looked into those they are good and the separator is effective for separating oils from water when distilling essential oils. The problem with that model however is that it is not suitable for essentail oil distillaion from botanicals because it's capacity is way to small. Your much better off with an alembic then that one if you want to use it for essential oils. Solvents yeah.
Distilled some cumquat brandy last night...deeeelish!

maybe I was misinterpreting what impurities were being considered; if it's in regards to the solvent, then yes.. a distillation will purify it.
but to go to legnths of purifying a tech-grade solvent for extraction is really a waste of
time and energy. besides, that time could be spent doing a re-x, which will inevitably need to be done anyway.



it's often a negligible factor, depending on the complexity of the mixture of what you're extracting. these 'impurities' in the solvent are often similar compounds, unless one buys a commercial product advertised to do a certain task.


SWIM once distilled tech-grade nitric acid, as he was attempting to nitrate hexamine in certain steps.
in this case, it needed to be distilled, because it was taking part in a reaction, where the water needed to be removed. see, this is much different application than a simple extraction

Hooooold on a minute there.

The impurities you get from solvent extraction from plant precursors are harmless organic compounds. I don't care about these impurities. People make crude water extractions of psychoactive botanicals (ayahuasca, etc.) and drink it as-is, and suffer no toxicity. But I don't think anyone here would be willing to ingest the remainder from a lighter fluid distillation...

Remember, my goal is to make medicines that work in concert with the human body, not to purify some alkaloid and put it in a GC-MS and say, "looky here, 99.9% pure N,N-DMT!" or what have you.

aha

then why would you need to distill tech-grade solvents?
i reiterate... there's no point, unless you just want to practice distillation.

your lighter fluid with so-called impurities is nothing more than
a slew of parrafinic hydrocarbons. thorough evaporation (think: fan) nullifies the
"i don't want to consume toxic chemicals" argument.

they even use a small honeywell fan to dry nanopolymers in the lab; the same method can be employed to dry the spice.

if the issue is a corrosion inhibitor in the lighter fluid, do a 5% sodium bicarb wash of the nonpolar. corrosion inhibitors typically have polar groups, and may be separated with a basic aqueous wash

^ Thanks for the info. =)


Today I had an idea, and just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried distilling some alcohol in my crockpot. Poured a bit of gin in the thing, put a small empty cup inside in the center of the pot, put the lid on the pot upside-down (so that it sloped inward), and put some crushed ice on top of the lid. The crockpot heats up, alcohol vapors collect in the pot, condense on the cold lid, fall down the inward slope toward the lid handle, drip off the handle into the cup. It actually works!

For spice extraction from MHRB SWIM uses Diethyl Ether. It evaporises completely and leaves no toxic residues. I though Diethyl Ether was widely available worldwide?

However, even if you CAN get Diethyl Ether and other safe solvents, a Destillation apparatus is allways very helpfull: Destilling off the Diethyl Ether, rather than just allowing it to evaporise away, is a fine way of recycling Diethyl Ether for future extractions and save alot of money and time.

Youtube shows how simple destilling setups can be made. So does instructables.com however some set ups use brass tubing which may be a little too reactive for the solvents that us nexians use.
Glass or Pyrex tubing would be ideal, but SWIM's not sure wether he can getb them on the cheap. Perhaps there is Tubing of another suitable, non-reactive material that is commercially available?

the problem with diethyl ether (aside from its notorious flammability) is its ridiculously high vapor pressure.
even if one were to distill it, one would lose a good deal of it as vapor.
best bet would be to use a Dewar condenser filled with dry ice:acetone when distilling low-boiling solvents.