I’m feeling rather proud today. I love doing soxhlet extractions. Bad thing about it is that everything is usually glass, and so fragile and small. This made me think about building a soxhlet from all tri-clamp pieces. It took quite a while, but I finally worked out a design that will accomplish this.
I have designed a completely stainless steel, all tri-clamp system, complete with vacuum takeoff.
Really nice thing about it is that the whole extractor portion is only 29" tall and consists of a total of only 15 pieces, and every piece is tri-clamp. Once you add a boiler pot, and a reflux tower, it is still less than 5 feet tall, and 19 total pieces. As configured, this would hold only about 60gm of material, but it’s a soxhlet…change your sample. I could scale the design up to hold a whole lot more, but I am a personal extractor, not big time.
BTW: don’t rip on me about clamps and gaskets…I didn’t include them in the count, because I am referring to major pieces. There would be 18 tri-clamps and 18 gaskets.
I should be ordering some needed pieces, and I assure you that they WILL be coming on a slow boat from China. That said, I will probably have this thing built and running in a month or two.
Damn, I feel like I actually accomplished something today.
Located all of the pieces. Placed my order. Now I wait. I expect that I will have all pieces, and will complete assembly by mid-August. Once I have it assembled, I will post pictures.
New to the forum, but joined specifically because of this posting. I’ve been following Evolved Alchemy’s work for a while now and checking into their stainless soxhlet setups and, as a DIYer and small scale extractor of various herbs, it just isn’t in our budget to purchase something from them.
Following this thread, and will be super grateful for any photos/parts lists/web resources to point me in the right direction to designing something like this!
The photo above is an older prototype. My most recent version is somewhat smaller. I will have it in my car, at Detroit, on Saturday August 17th. I will be attending the cup on that day.
I have completed initial tests, and it works. Got function using 91%ISO, under vacuum. Used that because it would be the hardest to make work…and it did, so all is good.
I see this thread is a couple of years old, but I’d love to see what you’ve come up with since then! I’ve looked at pricing on stainless soxhlets, and building them is the obvious way to go. I’m ready to start sourcing materials, and appreciate any tips or direction w/ this project! Thanks in advance!
I have not gone any further than “proof of concept” with my testing. The overall cost for a 1.5", small sample, setup is around the $2000 mark, depending on choices made for operation. Truthfully, my stuff has just been laying around, gathering dust, I have been inactive.
I’d love to know more about what you have on hand if you might be interested in selling, and/or have some suggestions for sourcing these materials-any tips at all are helpful! If you have any time to chat, feel free to look me up on social media w/ the same name. Thank you in advance!
I too made a vacuum soxhlet, very useful for limiting the upper temperature level of the solvent. i was running powdered mushrooms but they clogged the gravity flter part like a MOFO. i had a valve which diverted the fresh distilled solvent to another container when you were done
