Like many others have mentioned before, always thought it would be nice to have a "labratory" style still. So I started doing research on distilling heads, columns, condensors, ect.
Now in the sceme of things, this is no where's near the top of my "must do" list, just something I'ld like to think about down the road. And who knows, ya never know when a deal at a garage sale or going out of business sale might just land ya.
Mind you this said project would be for testing recipes to be later used on one of my other stills. For this hypothetical situation I'd be working with just one gallon wash at a time.
My first quandry is which type of flask to use as a boiler. The one I picked out is one of those triangulr shaked ones, with a 29/40 neck. Seems all the flasks that were round didn't have a flat bottom, and I was concidering using a hot plate for heating. Much cheaper then one of the lab mantles, save for some higher end lab mantles can be thermal controlled and temps set....
But here's the biggie. What column to use. For a simple pot still setup, that's pretty easy to figure, but for the reflux style...Wow!!! The least expensive seems to be the Vigreaux style column. That's $103.80 for 450mm (18"). Next on my list was the Snyder columns. Those run $68.16 per 100mm (3.9") (($272.00 for nearly 18") and then there's the Oldershaw columns. These aren't measured by mm but by plates! YES a glass column using plates!!! I'd have my choice between 5-40 plates in the column. No mention of price on these babies!
There's one other option as well. One of the companies I was looking at also offers straight columns that you can pack with glass beads. I didn't even write price and diamentions of those down, I was so excited about the plate columns! LOL
What this all boils down to (pun intended), which column is the most efficent? Which column is gonna give me the best bang for the buck? Wiether I choose using a hot plate or shell out the money for a mantle, for all you folks that had chemistry, which column would you choose?
tia,
Jaxx
Oldsman vs Snyder vs Vigreaux
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