Day 1 and 2 of Copper (II) Chloride and Iron Lab

On Thursday and Friday, my lab partner and I performed an experiment where we produced copper from an iron nail and copper(II) chloride. On day one, after we passed our pre-lab quiz, measured about 4 grams of copper(II) chloride, and placed it in a baby food jar. It was a vibrant blue. Next, we added 50 mL of distilled water to the jar and stirred it until it dissolved. We then placed an iron nail that had been polished with steel wool in the jar to sit overnight. Within in minutes it looked like this...

You can see that the copper immediately began to form. On Friday, we came back to the lab and found our baby food jar like this...

 In order to separate the copper from the rest of the solution, we pulled out the rest of the iron nail, washing off the remaining copper on the nail with distilled water back into the baby food jar. Then, we siphoned off the solution of iron (II) chloride into the sink, careful not to lose any of the copper the reaction produced. We then added hydrochloric acid to the baby food jar to wash the copper and also siphoned it off into the sink. Lastly, we washed the copper again with distilled water and siphoned off the water. Finally, we left the copper in the baby food jar and the nail on a paper towel to dry. We will finish measurements this week.