Had a sep funnel quite literally disintegrate in my hands last night, losing part of the result of one of my projects. Had been using it just fine up until then, no damage apparent to it, went to turn the stopcock again and it just fell to pieces without even sufficient force applied to it to turn the teflon stopcock. Must have been badly tempered glass. Thankfully it was not the first solvent extraction, something like third or fourth so there would have been most of anything extracted already extracted before it happened, so I shouldn't have lost too much, and thankfully the worst of what was in the funnel was petroleum ether (not a true ether of the kind R-O-R, but an antiquated term for light petroleum spirits C5-C8 or so, not greatly dissimilar to lighter fluid for petrol lighters, so, aside from a bit of stinging when it got in a little cut on my finger caused by either the glass, or dicing up some chunks of borohydride, no harm done, not to me at least. Although now I can't get any idea of the percent yield of the reaction once everything is isolated since some of it went down the sink.)
Just glad that it was one of the last solvent pulls to be done on the post-reaction fluid and so going to have contained little of the reaction product, since the post-rxn mother liquor had already been extracted with several portions of pet. ether. So not all is lost. And I can always re-run the reaction itself (which I intended on anyway, both to test different variants of the catalyst itself, for optimization of the reaction and also, to test how many times the catalyst itself can be recycled, optimize rxn time, heat and how much catalyst with respect to substrate is required) Still, a bastard to have lost the separatory funnel.
Thankfully I had a backup, although all the same, I've ordered myself a new one, a bigger one too that can deal with bigger volumes of liquid at once, the one I have coming is a 1 liter, whilst the one that broke is half that.
