Question
I need an alkane. There’s no suppliers that can get anything to me for a number of days if not a week.
I’m just making distillate.
I need to do some LLE related stuff, mostly just sugar and water soluble removal.
Wondering if mineral spirits or toluene will do the trick? I’m distilling it afterwards so I assume even any higher boilers will get vacuumed off by the time I’m done a second pass.
Personally I wouldn’t extract with anything that I can’t get residual solvent testing for afterwards. If you’re just making distillate, is ethanol not an option?
It’s usually a good idea to use USP grade solvent. Toluene can work, its a pain in the ass to purge.
You could also fractionally distill gasoline to get some heptane/octane.
Charcoal starter fluid is a mix of diethyl ether and heptane, another easy one to fractionally distill.
My main point is distill your solvents before use regardless.
Distill some gasoline lead free
The fraction till 75. C is benzeen free and works very well
He needs to do an LLE so he needs a water immiscible solvent to work with to form 2 immiscible liquid layers.
Naptha, from ronsonol lighter fluid- or bestine rubber cement thinner which is heptanes
a small scale simple solution is amazon. its everywhere and you can get a jug of heptane for pretty cheap
Not in Canada unfortunately
Many of the posters here are skilled chemists, but I cringed when reading “gasoline” and “rubber cement thinner”.
Myrrdin’s link goes to “heptane”, which is a blend of “normal heptane” and all it’s C7H16 isomers. I’d suggest getting normal heptane so the reaction with the heavy solvent will be consistent. BVV has “n-heptane”. Can they overnight / quick ship to you?
Sds of bestine rubber cement thinner reads 100% n-heptane
That’s just the maximum weight percent. Up to 100%
The SDS is also wrong. Under FIRE FIGHTING in section 5, it says non explosive. Heptane is explosive between 1.05% and 6.7% in air.
I asked Google: What is the lower flammability limit of heptane?
Flammability of the Product: Flammable. Flammable Limits: LOWER: 1.05% UPPER: 6.7%.
Boo LPS.org.
I think Toluene would be the best bet here. If you’re distilling afterwards I don’t see what problem it could cause. In fact some processes i’ve seen purposely use clean toluene.
Nothing you buy in hardware store or stores like that will be safe for use. They use some of the cheapest product that can be found with toxic chemicals on purpose. They want to prevent people from using those solvents for manufacturing illicit drugs products. What you want to do is just contact a cannabis supply house. They can ship it to you. What I can say is I would avoid anything in the stores. Even the pure iso alcohol should ever be used for production. There is all kinds of garbage in it.
Youre dumb and paranoid. “They” are selling tech grade solvents because they are cheaper and require less lab testing. Not because “they” dont want people manufacturing drugs. The whole world is not conspiring against the paranoid illicit drug manufacturer.
Get a hplc test done of the solvents from a hardware store VS hplc tests of n-heptane from somewhere like Sigma-Aldrich or BVV.
I’m willing to bet there’s a difference. 
All the same distill your solvents before you use them.
Oh yeah, there’s definitely a difference. But all the components will be distillable. These solvents are, after all, themselves the product of distillation.