Toko Mouth

Here’s some photos I took at my parents crib at Toko Mouth. A crib by the way (for you non South Islander’s) is a term we use for a holiday house. Toko Mouth is situated at the mouth of the Tokomaririro river 45 mins drive south of Dunedin.

The mouth of the Tokomairiro river

My parents crib at Toko Mouth

Stock pot chemistry

First came the number eight wire, now comes the stock pot 😛 We needed to scale up a reaction in the lab (potassium permanganate oxidation), so instead of repeating it a gazillion times, Sally suggested I got a big pot and scaled it up 🙂 Since giant beakers from Aldrich cost a fortune (and break easily), I went and found the biggest, baddest, cheapest stock pot I could find at the Warehouse (NZ equivilent of Walmart), stuck a mechanical stirrer in it, heated the blazes out of it with a regular sized heater stirrer and we had a massive scale (by our standards) reaction vessel 🙂

Stock pot chemistry

Nick White helped me with some of this work as part of his summer project.

Nick White and the stock pot