I'd like to perform an STB extraction using Noman's Tek; with MHRB, Spado lye and Bartoline low odour white spirit.
There's something I'm not sure about, and I did find nothing about it on the Wiki or forum.
I know that I have to take an extra care about lye and wear every protection posssible, but does Lye remain dangerous once diluted to the water?? Would it burn my skin immediatly too??
Is the lye dilution moment the more dangerous, or is the whole process highly dangerous please?

When dissolving lye in water, a lot of heat is released and it can spatter and start to boil, so yes, this is a very dangerous moment!

The dilute solution is also still very dangerous, it turns fats of human tissue into soap and quickly dissolves skin, eyes etc.
Once I was careless, a few drops had spilled down the container I was holding without gloves...no fingerprints for a few weeks!

I'd rather spill hydrochloric acid on my hands than lye. So always take the utmost care!

Im no chemistry expert by far. But i like to keep a weak acid and base on stand by to neutralized any spills. Like vinegar or sodium bicarbonate I burnt my hand once very similar how what tryto said its so easy to do gloves were a must since then

I would like to highly recommend to all and especially newcomers to the extraction process to use sodium carbonate in place of lye. It has two advantages and one disadvantage. It is MUCH safer; if you get it on your skin, it will not burn and if you get it in your eyes or mucus membranes, it will sting a little but if you rinse with water, will have no lasting effects. Unlike lye, no matter how much you add to solution, it will not destroy the spice. The one disadvantage is that your soaks will take quite a bit longer as it is a weaker base.

Sodium carbonate is fairly easy to obtain but if you don't want to order chemicals on the internet or at your local chemical supply, you can get baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) at a grocery store and convert to sodium carbonate. Put tin foil down on a cookie sheet, place a thin layer of baking soda on the tin foil and bake at 400F for 2-3 hours. You can test it by placing a very small amount on your tongue and it should have a noticeable bite to it as opposed to baking soda.

When using sodium carbonate to basify don't you have to use a more dmt soluble solvent like dcm? and does it get it to a high enough ph?

I've been interested in attempting a sodium carbonate stb for a little bit but dcm seems hard to get.

Pickling lime would also be a good alternative to lye.

^^ heating a thin layer of bicarb for about ten minutes in a dry, stainless steel frying pan is also effective for making sodium carbonate.

When lye is in solution at ratios used in extractions it is still quite dangerous to you. When handling it wear proper PPE, at minimum gloves and eye goggles. An apron ideally as well.

Additionally (NOT alternatively) keep a bottle of dilute acid nearby like vinegar. This is to quickly neutralize spills to make them safe to clean up. That is to say if you spill lye solution on the floor or counter you can quickly neutralize it to clean. The vinegar should not be thought of as a PPE measure. If you're handling the stuff vigorously enough to end up with solid lye or lye solution on your skin then you're doing something VERY WRONG.

I see it as ideal because it's saturation pH is plenty high to freebase DMT, but not high enough to damage the molecule, that and it's super cheap. As far as solvents, all the regular suspects are viable because you are literally extracting the same thing. The difference is what's left in solution.

Glassware sometimes fails unexpectedly, or accidents happen for whatever reason. But, yeah, all the more reason to have the PPE on and vinegar close at hand. Or use a safer base.

I was under the impression that you can't over basify a solution. In other words, better to use more lye than less lye, and the spice won't be effected. Also, more base will break emulsions.

So, does over-basifying hurt the spice or the yield?

Thanks

Always wear gloves and goggles and clpse toed shoes

Most definitely if the pH gets much higher than 13, any base will start tearing apart all sorts of complex molecules including DMT. This is how old fashioned soap is made. If you pour nearly saturated lye solution into a fat/oil and stir, it will rapidly rip the long chain hydrocarbons apart. The same holds true for acids, but on the opposite end of the pH scale. If someone with more chemistry credentials could, please verify this. I do have under my belt, two years of high school chemistry, two semesters of inorganic, and one semester of organic.

This is one of the reasons I advocate not using strong acids and bases, especially for beginner extractions. Using weak acids and basis in nearly fool proof. It just requires a bit more patience.

what are peoples experience using potassium hydroxide as a base?

I have no experience with KOH in extractions, but comparing the chemical properties of NaOH and KOH, I doubt that one would see a substantial difference except price.

Lye is especially dangerous when in solution, because it is more likely to find its way into your eyes in that form. Dry lye pellets are much less likely to get into your eyes and stay there long enough to do damage. Lye dust on the other hand is a real danger, but you should not encounter that when using pellets or prills. Be careful that dissolving a lot of lye at once may cause a fine mist of lye solution droplets to appear, as the dissolving lye pushes dissolved air out of the water, causing fine bubbles to rise to the surface and pop. This mist can get into your eyes, even if wearing safety glasses. Good ventilation is important. Breathing lye mist is also highly unpleasant to the throat.

Lye is really most dangerous to your eyes. A burn wound to your skin will heal over time, your fingerprints will return, but your eyesight will not. Your eyes are not as easily repaired as your skin. Be very careful with them!

Personally I find the most important reason to wear gloves when handling lye is for eye protection. You see, while lye does not cause too much damage to the skin immediately, it does cause skin fat to saponify, ie. turn into soap. Soap is notoriously slippery and this makes your hand very slippery. Holding a beaker of lye solution with slippery hands greatly increases the chances of dropping it and having lye solution splashing everywhere, including into your eyes. Rubber gloves will not become slippery upon contact with lye solution as much as your hands will, so they make working with lye solutions much safer.

I advocate always using a secondary containment for lye solutions, for example a bucket. Keep your lye dissolution cup and your extraction jar in a bucket while transporting them or working on them. If anything breaks or spills, it will be contained in the bucket.

Handling lye is not the only potentially dangerous activity in these teks, handling volatile and flammable solvents also requires judicious care. Keep away from sparks and open fire. Ensure proper ventilation so that fumes cannot build up to noxious or explosive concentrations. Always employ a preheated warm water bath to heat flammable solvents, never heat them directly on a very hot surface or even an open flame.

I don't think STB teks work well without lye (NaOH) or KOH (which is fine as a substitute). The strongly corrosive action of lye helps to digest the plant matter and frees up the dmt from its cells. Weaker bases like washing soda might not cut it. They have sufficient ability to turn the dmt salts found in the plant into freebase form, but you would need to first boil the plant material in a slightly acidic solution to bring out the dmt salts from the cells into the solution.


I think that boiling a bicarbonate solution is just as effective and may be easier in practice, especially since a solution is the goal anyway. You don't have to dissolve all the bicarbonate (baking soda), just keep boiling until all the bicarbonate has dissolved (and converted into the much better soluble carbonate).


The dmt molecule is quite stable at high pH at room temperature. The one thing that should not be underestimated is the corrosiveness of hot lye solutions. Overheating a strongly based plant soup does negatively influence the result of extractions. Mild overheating first causes impurities to be released from the plants into the naphtha but serious overheating may also damage some of the dmt. It is easy to overheat the base soup locally when you add lye pellets to it. Around the dissolving lye particles, a hot and very concentrated lye solution forms locally. Avoid these problems by only adding pre-dissolved lye solutions to the plant soup, never add solid lye.


Soap is made through hydrolysis of the ester bond between glycerol and fatty acids that fats and oils are made of. Soaps are basically the salts of fatty acids. But dmt is not an ester, so it is not affected by lye in this way, nor will long chain hydrocarbons like naphtha or the hydrocarbon chains of the fatty acids themselves. As long a the lye stays reasonably cool, it won't do much damage beyond munching through fats, proteins and cell walls (all of which are esters and amides that can be hydrolyzed by strong bases). Your dmt will be safe.


This I agree with. An A/B extraction takes a little more time, but it is safer to perform and will generally yield cleaner end product than STB teks.

Yea, I performed a STB extraction years ago on the advice of an impatient friend and I will never do that again. The end product required a lot of cleanup. It was a gooey dark red mess. With the extra clean up, it ended up being much more work and time than just doing the A/B extraction. My yield suffered from it as well.

Thanks everybody for the high quality answers, it's all clear for me now.
I finally think that I'll go through the A/B road cause I'm a very careful person, and I use to work on electronic stuff for exemple, but accidents happen. I'd like to avoid products that dangerous.
What A/B Tek would you recommend for a noob please??

It always tickles me just how much bicarb fizzes even when you pour boiling water on it! But I wanted anhydrous sodium carbonate, hence the frying pan

To make a concentrated sodium carbonate solution, one can presumably carry on dumping in the bicarb as the difference in solubility is very large. Add too much and it'll crystallise into a solid lump on cooling, of course. And beware, boiling, concentrated sodium carbonate solution will be VERY HOT!

I would recommend that you read through at least a few of the teks, take some notes, and try to get a general understanding of how the process works. All of the A/B teks are essentially doing the same thing with different chemical tools and slightly different procedures. If you find one that makes more sense to you, go with it. The first one that I used, I don't see on the Nexus (QT's DMT extraction guide for students).

There is one of the teks that specifically calls out vinegar as producing lower yields. There is some truth to this, but if you do five washes with ample amounts of vinegar and let them each sit for three days, you should get the same yield as stronger acids. Also, this only holds true if all the plant material is ground down to at the very least a coarse powder. Vinegar will not penetrate the plant material very well just as sodium carbonate doesn't work well for STB.

As stated above, you want to get a good grasp on the general idea of the teks. It's a bad idea to take on a lab procedure that you don't understand. One of my chemistry lab instructors would not allow us to start a lab without rewriting the procedures in our own words. It was tedious, but essentially made it so that I could perform the lab without referring to any procedure with the exception of referencing numbers.

If you don't have some general understanding of chemistry, I would also recommend that you watch some of the chemistry videos on YouTube before starting. Specifically, the videos on acids/bases and polar/non-polar solvents.

I plan on writing up a tek at some point that is super noob friendly as well as educational and uses chemicals that can be obtained almost anywhere in the world, but I doubt this will be ready any time soon.