Yes, an A/B would be more suitable. Bear in mind though - you'll probably have a load of tannins to deal with.

Check your workings. Your results correspond to 0.3%, which seems reasonable if you got a decent effect with 25g.

Thanks a lot for your help downwardsfromzero, you've solved my problems.

Aeroman, just a thought from my side: If you can't pull enough DMT to super saturate your NPS in your freezer, make a mini-AB.

Take a small amount of vinegar and add to your solvent after the pull. Your solvent should get milky, and after some shaking and waiting it should get clear again. now all alkaloids are concentrated in the vinegar.
You can use the same small amount of vinegar over and over again to wash all the different solvents you've been using / trying the last days.
Then basify the vinegar and pull again at high temperature with your favorite NPS. This time you should get a higher concentration and thus have better chances for freeze-perspiration.

That sounds like a good idea, thanks der-seemann!

I finally succeeded in extracting crystals from tepezcohuite!!!

I won't be doing that again though, lol.

The nexus wiki is very accurate, I managed to extract 135 mg of stuff from 450 grams of mimosa bark, my maths skills are low but I think that makes 0.03% DMT but re-xing removed 60 mg of that after the spice crystals had dissolved.

I'll have enough spice for one strong trip, I'm going to enjoy that!

Even though it took 18 litres of water, half a litre of vinegar, 48 hours of acid extraction and several days of NPS pulling, I feel like all that effort was worth it, I have learnt loads. When I get hold of some root bark, I'll no longer need to do any experimentation.

Thanks again to those who helped me out.

I'll continue making aya brews with tepezcohuite from time to time, it is certainly strong enough for intense breakthrough trips at 20 grams+ of bark and extremely cheap.

Pretty HUGE mind-melter needs answering please:

A friend of mine is wondering -- is it possible to lose literally ALL of your yield by being too aggressive with defatting? 3 defats of 150mL xylene were done on about 1L of Acacia Confusa acid boil brew. About 500mL of greasy, oily substance was removed by doing this. Some heat was used at times during the defats, and a hand mixer was used to blend the xylene with the acid brew. There was emulsion at times but nothing that did not settle out pretty quick with heat. Xylene was clear throughout. After basifying this mix, it was impossible to pull anything at all, zero or extremely small yield basically. This bark is of known good quality and the exact same bark has produced 4 or 5g from 1kg bark, boiled and reduced exactly as it was this time round, and then basified and pulled exactly the same way also. Can 4 or 5 grams of spice be simply lost this way (defat) so easily? Only difference before, the time that yielded 4 or 5g from the same amount of bark, was this:

The mix was defatted once with 150mL xylene, used heat. Big emulsion on first defat. Heat was used to settle it out. Xylene turned yellow. 1L of brew was then split into 2 jars because it was a little too thick to work with and friend was worried this would keep causing emulsion during defats. Some water was added to each jar, along with a touch of acid to make sure mix was still at ph3 in each. Each jar was then deffatted 2 more times with about 100mL xylene, room temp. Again, about 500mL of greasy and oily fat was removed in total from the 2 jars. The 2 separate acid brew jars were then combined again, and reduced back down to 1L before proceeding to basify. Again, this produced 4 or 5g of very white and nice clean crystals.

Thanks for any help...this is a huge confusing thing. Essentially the exact same process was followed except for defat stage specifics, and one yielded great and the other not at all. Crazy.

It seems a bit odd for the alkaloids to disappear into the xylene defats from an acid phase. What acid was used? Maybe DMT/NMT acetates are somewhat soluble in xylene so that using an overly large volume for the defat has dragged them all out there? In any case, you'd better have kept the defatting pulls.

What was used for the base? Is there any other detail that may have been overlooked?

[/quote]
It seems a bit odd for the alkaloids to disappear into the xylene defats from an acid phase. What acid was used? Maybe DMT/NMT acetates are somewhat soluble in xylene so that using an overly large volume for the defat has dragged them all out there? In any case, you'd better have kept the defatting pulls.

What was used for the base? Is there any other detail that may have been overlooked?[/quote]

Thanks again downwardsfromzero!

The xylene (liquid) defatting pulls were totally evapped. Nothing. Friend has evapped his xylene defats before, also nothing, so that's simply consistent. The actives were NOT taken into the xylene, as you said that would be pretty odd...but...they could have certainly been lost in the oil layer it seems, which was sadly pitched. My friend is thinking that the actives got caught in emulsions within the greasy oil layers. Earthwalker's tek makes a warning about this yield loss (over-shaking/stirring) although it has to do with mini A/B in that tek. Does that sound possible -- ALL actives gone, lost in the fat layer/emulsions and pitched without even realizing? NaOH is the base, and muriatic acid as acid.

I can't imagine it was the number of defats done (4x) that caused this, as friend has done 3 defats before in similar fashion, also mixed aggressively w. heat, although with much thinner mix (reduced way less, with way less plant dust) and had no issues on yield at all. Is it a bad idea to reduce 96hrs of boil (about 8L result) on 1kg of ACRB down to 1L? This could be the problem. So much oil and plant dust in there when reducing that hard. When reducing 72hrs (6L) down to 2L instead and working 2 separate jars, there was no yield issue with 3x aggressive defats w. heat. That's all my friend knows. Damn near the same degree of defatting was done in that scenario with perfect yield. Is something funny happening when over-reducing? Thanks

Acid and base both seem fine, then.
It is with some disappointment that the fundamental adage of extraction gets repeated here:
"DO NOT toss anything until you're certain you've got the goods!"

Maybe there's also a lesson in there about doing big batches
A reminder: https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m....80.9Cspreading.E2.80.9D

Salutations,

How is it possible for the naphtha in a STB extraction to "sink" and be irretrievable in, say, a mason jar? Ie; if you were to add 500mL of naphtha to a jar containing mimosa root bark and NaOH solution, then after agitation you retrieved all of the naphtha from the surface layer and only got 300ml back. The polar layer had shrunk, some naphtha had sunk and disappeared into the jar.

What are some causes of this?

Thanks

Some of the naphtha sticks to and/or gets absorbed by the bark particles.

Q for the pros:

I performed 2 extractions this year both using Noman's-- 100g mimosa each. My yields for both were 0.5-0.6g of nice white powder and around 0.2 hard, fatty yeller-type crystal; so ~1.4g TOTAL.

Not feeling so good on that % overall. I have 300g of mimosa left and would like to get the most bang out if it that I can. I have a small kitchen, a small child and a small amount of free time in my day, which is why I settled on Noman's. The less complex the extraction the better. Anyone have improvements on the simplest extraction tek for best yields?

With my recent bark I also don't get over 1.5% border max, some bark simply is like that I suppose. One could call it medio, seen lower numbers mentioned. The thing is one starts to question methods and don't really knowing if it's method or bark potency. I've now shifted to cold soaked finely shredded wood for 1 month in pH 2.5 phosphoric acid, curious what that is going to give. The coffee filtering was a breeze even with a lot of dust.

Hey everyone! When someone performed Cybs ion tek on MHRB, what would they do if they got clean crystals after freezing, siphoning and evaporating remaining NPS for no less than 24 hrs...
BUT when they scrape, the product is both crystaline and gooey (small spots of dark red goo collect on the razor as we go) Same outcome with a pull that dried for several days vs 1 day.
There was no 'soup' visible in the NPS pull for sure, so I'm concerned with what it may be. This is also someone's first extract, so they wouldn't mind taking additional precautions to clean things up.
Cake was baked just like the recipe said, lye base, VM&P Naptha, but did not evap test the naptha prior.

The red goo might be some oxidized / polymerized DMT.
Oxygen is (to some degree) soluble in naphtha. That means, while the DMT is in solution in the naphtha, some oxygen from the air will move in the solution and converts the DMT in yellow/red goo.
To minimize this, use a baker just big enough to fit your naphtha volume and cover your baker while the naphtha is cooling. Then quickly decant / pour off as much naphtha as possible and evaporate the remaining traces from the crystals asap without raising the temp too much.

If you filter the cold naphtha with the crystals it's even better but you might loose some traces of DMT.
First make sure the crystals are floating in the cold naphtha and don't stick at the bottom or walls. If necessary scrape them and gently swirl around.
With a buchner vacuum filter the vacuum will suck out as much naphtha as possible.
But also using a coffee filter works great. Pour the solution with the crystals in the filter and then gently press the filter between paper towels. They will suck out most of the naphtha. Then open the filter and dry at the air.

To clean what you have now: simply dissolve the crystals and goo in a small amount of warm naphtha. The red goo will not dissolve and settles / sticks at the bottom of your baker.
Now decant the warm naphtha with your DMT into a new baker and slowly cool the naphtha to as cool as your freezer will go. Remember to avoid new oxygen entering the solution by covering the baker.

Or some of the naphtha evaporated.

Swim from Germany has tried to extract some spice from 3 year old MHRB. STB with clean lamp fuel / petroleum and a mini a/b with naphtha.
Swim got just a very little amount of pure white spice and thinks a good portion must have oxidized or polymerized over the time. Swim wants to get this too (maybe treat it with zinc) and wonders what NPS is best to pull a wide spectrum of alkaloids. This petroleum and naphtha seems to be very selective for real spice only.
IIRC aromatic NPS will work better, but it's hard to find anything suitable, especially nowadays with lock down.
As swim makes a mini A/B anyway, the first NPS doesn't need to be 100% clean and safe.

Any ideas what to use and where to get?

In US you could buy Xylene for home purposes, but in Germany there is nothing like this in a Baumarkt.

I think the best bet would be to buy Toluene at a Chemical store - you dont need any permission for that. It would act just like Xylene, but it will evaporate faster, while Xylene would take ages or intense heat.

Still if you dont have any Chemical store nearby, that s not easy then :/

Maybe you can buy it online here or here or here. These seem like accessible for hobby purposes. But with these it may be a pain for phase separation, placing stuff in a lab-grade super sonic bath was the only way to get a real separate within minutes. No idea if it would have been impossible otherwise. In case dont mix to strongly, but then efficiency may be reduced of course.

Hi. I've been reading this forum for 10 years. Never made an account. Enough I should prob make a welcome post. I've come for help.

I did an AB extraction of about 10-12 feet of cactus a few weeks ago and it was all using janky equipment. Plastic bottles and stuff I read about how to cook meth. Anyway, the only real problem was that I couldn't separate the different layers well in the xylene to acid separation because of both having a shit sep funnel made of a syringe attached to a coke bottle and because it was cold out and my hot water bath wasn't deep enough. Also I used pool pH test and couldn't tell easily how much HCl I needed to pull the alakloids from xylene. So there was spillage of xylene, and NaOH into the final product. Along with the final product having somewhat too much HCl. I dried out a little bit at the site which formed crystalsand then had to move on to the next city.

Next 2 issues. I stored it in a screwtop wine bottle because there was residual xylene on top and thought plastic bottle would leak.

Now I'm worried the lid dissolved a bit of Aluminum into the product? There are no holes though it so maybe not. Not sure what alcl3 would smell like?

The solution was set out in the sun for days and refused to evap, then I realized the HCl was preventing the water from evaping.

Jumping to now.

Few days ago I took part of the solution and added baking soda until the bubbling slowed so the solution could evaporate.

Question 1: does that mean part of it is freebase? And is it getting destroyed by heating by drying at boiling temp on hotplate or oven? I still have about 1/3 of the total liquid not dried.

Question 2: I wonder if it would be a better idea for me to do an acetone wash of all the product and will that remove AlCl3 if there is any?

Or, should I use some other method to precipitate out the aluminum. If there is any.

Also isn't there a way for me to test if any aluminum did come off the lid into it?

Details: the product dries with some burnish brown at the edges and whitish crystals in the center. I've tested it with strong effect from salt pinch size doses. I'm worried about taking a full size dose incase it's not healthy. The taste is of table salt and mildly sour, as expected. Probably like half of it is NaCl.

I'm basically semi homeless, living in New Zealand(from USA).

I usually just extract the cactus w lemon and dry that into a resin but I wanted to do a step better this time.

It has been a couple years but I was halfway into a chemistry degree in school, even if it doesn't sound like it. So I will understand a decent amount of chemistry language. Hope you understand I overestimated my ability but it was a lot of cactus and work and valuable reagents I'm trying to make the best of.

After this I would hope to do this again more properly and then see about making DMT from some acacia in this country. I've talked to someone who claims that is doable but I think australia would have more of them.

Thanks and to post an image do I have to use a file hosting site like imageshack? I really hope someone can help me with this soon.

Mixing NPS

I have some limonene for "full spectrum" extraction, but it is not really much. Can i mix it with (much cheaper) naphtha to have a bigger quantity of NPS for easier handling? Also the amount of limonene that gets trapped in the basic soup will be less this way. The naphtha that is trapped doesn't matter.
I'll salt the goodies anyway with acetic acid to get them out of the NPS, so bigger quantity is no problem here.

Will the dilution with lets say 50 : 50 naphtha hurt the solubility a lot?
Anything else to keep in mind?