aga
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Found in the Bin !
Finding a heavy-guage 20+ litre aluminium cauldron (with lid) by the bins today has given an inordinate amount of glee and pleasure.
The joy of receiving a soxhlet rig, or a graham condenser is far overshadowed by this Free find, and it's basically just a big pan (with lid) !
Currently it's half-full of 8% white vinegar fizzing madly with CO2 having had rather a lot of sodium bicarbonate thrown into it.
When it stops fizzing, it can go directly onto the fire in one big pot !
Happy days !
(finally aga's Cauldron has come home)
[Edited on 29-3-2016 by aga]
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JJay
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I found a 50 liter stainless cauldron a couple of days ago. I think it was originally designed for mixing ceramics. It is welded to a stainless stand
and has a lid that clamps onto it. I have no idea what I am going to do with it.
Coincidentally, I just got a graham condensor and ordered a soxhlet rig.
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Texium
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I've found a couple of nice things at my school that were being thrown out. One of which was a very nice glassware drying rack, which was only being
thrown out because a couple pegs were missing and apparently my school blew some extraneous money on buying new drying racks for all of the labs in
one hall that had been recently renovated. I also found a an old hotplate that happened to be the same type as the one that I have (minus the
stirrer). It doesn't work, but it's nice to have around for parts. And I'm allowed to take empty reagent containers home, so now it looks like I buy
my sodium chloride from Sigma. 
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Daffodile
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I found a 4L 'cauldron' on sunday. Not as good as any of your finds, but still good enough for me. I've got some compost nitrate stuff that needs to
be boiled down soon, and it looks like this will do the trick.
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Maker
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I got my hotplate stirrer, a centrifuge and an endoscope from the skip at the local hospital recently  . The hotplate looks a bit rough but is fully functional. The centrifuge is absolutely mint, and the endoscope looks
unused but without the video processor, it's useless to me  . There was a big
centrifuge too, about 3 feet across but I couldn't move it. Over the years I've has all sorts of great stuff from their skip.
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NedsHead
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I occasionally come across useful stuff at the scrap yard, it's kind of like finding things in a giant bin...? anyway, here's my latest acquisition
 
it's a working 10A 260v variac I got for nothing
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aga
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Beauty !
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Texium
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Cool old variac, does it work?
I have an old variac too, and all it needed was a good cleaning and a recalibration of the brushes to get it working again. It just wasn't making
contact anymore.
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NedsHead
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I haven't powered it up yet but I had a friend test it for me and he said it's in good working order and just needs a clean up.
He suggested I add an isolation switch, circuit breaker, ammeter, voltmeter and put it all in a box to make it safe, so I have a new project!
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Sulaiman
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I have found that at home switching on a large variac often causes a circuit trip
at work with higher current feeds a similar variac would not trip the supply
so if you have occasional power trips at switch on, don't worry.
(worst case is closing the switch at the point of voltage crossing zero I believe, even with output set to zero)
there are remedies, but I just carry on regardless.
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valeg96
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Jut briefly sharing my experience. When I was still in HS (now I'm a first-year in Industrial Chemistry at uni) I almost got hold of a huge load of
old reagents, including some palladium stuff, that my school wouldn't use and wanted to throw away. Long story short, the vice-headmaster kept
postponing the day she'd lead me to the place the stuff had been stored, and when we finally went it had been dumped already. So she gave me a random
sack of lab trash that had been forgotten in the cellars and when I got home I found a kg of Baker CaO analysis grade (partially decomposed into
Ca(OH)2), a 150mL clear ground small neck glass bottle and an autoclavable 100mL bottle with lots of sodium turnings in it, under oil. A modest catch,
but that was very satisfying!
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NedsHead
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Quote: Originally posted by zts16  | Cool old variac, does it work?
I have an old variac too, and all it needed was a good cleaning and a recalibration of the brushes to get it working again. It just wasn't making
contact anymore. |
My variac had the exact same issue, last night I gave it a good clean, recalibrated the brushes and it's now working great, I found it would trip the
breakers if I push it to its limits so I backed it off to a maximum of 286v with overwind and no more issues
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