Searched around and decided on CYB's tek.

1. Added approximately 50g of mimosa in the mixing jar (1l capacity)

2. Heated a mix of 200 ml of tap water and 60 ml of acetic acid (9%) to just about boiling and added that to the mixing jar.

3. Shook the bottle and kept it hot in a heath bath (2-5min shaking- 2min soaking in hot bath) for a total time of 1h

4. Heated 120 ml of water and added 35g of table salt - and poured the saline solution in the mixing jar

5. Measured 50g of lye and dissolved that in a 200ml water - then poured the caustic solution in the main jar and topped up with 120ml of water.

6. Shook the bottle for 2-5min and then heated for about the same time - did this for 2 hours.

7. Added 50ml of n-hexane and mixed by turning end over end for about 1-2min and then the bottle was placed in the heating bath - did this for about 40min


8. Pulled the hexane with a glass syringe and sprayed in a glass, because it was too yellowy milky, then from the glass i put it in a small dish and left it in the freezer


9. Did the pulling 2 more times.

Results :

1st pull:

2nd pull:

3rd pull:


What did I do wrong? I think I sprayed some of the black stuff too... sigh

Currently the small dishes are outside in the open drying (temp is 8 C or 46 F) I guess i should re-x

Seems fine, except for the accidental transfering of the basic liquid together with your solvent. When that happens, you need to do a sodium carbonate wash on your solvent before evaporating/freeze precipitating.

What you can do now is redissolve in small amount of warm naphtha, wash with sodium carbonate and freeze it or evap

By the way, I would NOT trust that bottle`s cap to be touching the solvent and rest of the liquid.. Instead of turning end over end, maybe stirring in round motions or something similar to prevent contact of incompatible material

As end says...all looks fine.
I would grab the nice white crystal while they are still there. (make sure all is dry and solvent free)
Scrape the rest of the coloured goo seperately and perform a very small Re-X with say 20ml of warm Hex.
Other than that, a pretty successful extraction.

you could get away with using slightly more hexane. making it a little more easier to seperate from the base solution. Dont overdue it, but adding more hexane wouldnt hurt.

Contamination is almost guaranteed with those caps. There is a plastic ring on the inside used to seal the cap. Aswell, most are painted on the inside. If it is aluminum then that is a huge problem.