paraffin

[iconoclastica]

My source of chemicals (Magnacol UK) has stopped shipping internationally. Could anyone advise me where to buy paraffin embedding wax suitable for microtoming in Continental Europe, OR provide a recipe for to make it from raw paraffin?

[Alexander]

https://shop.es-drei.de/laborhilfsmitte ... uettfaehig

https://www.laboratoriumdiscounter.nl/d ... gramm.html

You will find several offers on Ebay as well.

Just to name some.

[iconoclastica]

Thanks, Alexander, but these offers are about pure paraffin, which I had no trouble finding indeed. Paraffin embedding wax is not pure paraffin, but has additions to facilitate harmonica ribbon formation (e.g. natural rubber, as I came to understand recently). I do not have experience with the embedding wax kind, but I am about to try my microtome first time and I 'd like unnecessary obstacles avoided.

[Alexander]

The expensive microtome paraffin has typically some DMSO mixed by. DMSO is readily available. A more classic way is to mix some bee wax to the paraffin.

[Ilikeplants]

In the past, I have used pure paraffin and obtained ribbon sections with a rotary microtome. It may be a little more finicky, but certainly doable for a lot of samples (my class in uni all used it instead of Paraplast)
Also, without DMSO and the other additives, I was much more comfortable using it (some researchers I have worked with prefer it because of health/safety).
If I were you, I would try using it as a dry run, its cheap enough and may work for what you need.
Sorry, I have no knowledge of Paraplast or other distributors in Europe.