As EW says...Around 60g per litre of liquid should do it.
You don't want to saturate it completely.

One more question,
In the pdf tek when it says "shake" for the DEFAT & the
PULLS, how hard is it safe to shake without getting any emulsions ?

It depends on many factors.

Getting an emulsion is not bad per se, it is only bad when the emulsion doesn't go away. If the emulsion doesn't break after 15 minutes of standing, there are some tricks, like heating in a water bath, adding more salt to the aqueous phase, adding more lye to the aqueous phase (particularly effective) or using ultrasound. I've even heard of people putting a vibrator into the emulsion to break it down successfully.

If you are working with materials that create impossible to break emulsions, the only wise thing to do is to not shake but swirl the two phases, vortexing them against each other.

Thanks for the reply.
Im familiar with emulsions, but only with
liquid-liquid a/b extractions.

I just don't want to shake it too hard & end up with a homogenized
mess that I cant seperate.

So what i want to know is how hard/vigorous is it safe
to shake without having to mess around adding extra salt, lye
hot water baths etc... Or worse ending up with an unseperatable
homogenous mess.

EDIT: I guess its a bit difficult to try to explain how hard to shake something
without showing it physically, lol...

Btw, i would be using toluene or xylene for initial pulls & evaping, then
re-crystallizing with hexane via freeze precipitation.
So I would not need heat for the initial pulls.

cheers.

Very basic question here, but didn't see it asked. Is it for any reason a bad idea to freeze-unthaw inside my extraction vessel, as opposed to transferring it afterwards? Looking forward to seeing how this goes, thank you Cyb!

If your extraction vessel can stand thermal shock and water/ice expantion, it's alright.

Hi all. After doing a lot of reading, I will be trying my hand at this wonderful tek sometime during the coming weeks. This seems to be a staple tek with great yields, easy to obtain materials, etc. I still have a few quick questions though.

1. Pressure cooker for acid cook
I noticed a few people have been using a pressure cooker to speed up the acid cook in A/B extractions. Having recently bought one primarily for mushroom cultivation, it would be great if it could be used instead of the 8 hour acid cook described in the Max Ion tek. In one of the other threads, I found that 3x40min cycles at 15psi would be sufficient. I assume this will work fine with this tek as well? I will be doing the repeated freeze/thawing at the start as well to help lyse the cells. I will put the acidic bark solution in a 2L glass jar with the lid cracked and covered with foil.
Additional question: I assume it is better to do these 3x40min pressure cooks and allow the solution to cool back down to room temp and stir inbetween, rather than doing one long pressure cook?

2. Question about basifying step
The tek states the following:


Is too much heat actually detrimental to the extraction process in this step, or is this just to prevent burning yourself or cracking thin glass? I was thinking of using boiling water for the heat bath (not on the stove; I'd boil water first, remove pot from stove, place jar in heat bath, replace with fresh boiling water whenever it gets lukewarm). Would this be okay?

Yes. Just warm is OK... Top up with hot water when you need to...hot tap is fine...doesnt need to be boiling.

Don't do pressure cooks. The long acid soak can be shortened if you need...it is there to help lyse cells and convert to salts.

Thanks for the fast response!
I guess I will just go with a regular acid soak then, at least for now. Maybe I will experiment with pressure cooking later on after I've performed the tek a few times. It just seemed like it would be quick and efficient

Thanks again, I will post back with results in a little while

Why not using pressure cooking ? IME, it's not detrimental and it surely helps to lyse cells.

hey all,

Just finished my 6th pull using this Tek to the T using 100g shredded ACRB. Things are looking good! Combined pulls 1-3 and 4-6. Both trays are saturated with milky white and started forming crystals during the cold fan before freeze precip. I plan to do a few more pulls later this evening when I have more time, but I am excitedly anticipating the results as this is my first time performing an extraction.

Will post yield and results in a few days once RE-X is complete.

Thankyou cyb for this easy to follow tek and for the chemistry lesson too

Peace

EDIT: Also, I found using a crockpot for the water baths worked well. I felt safe using it when heating naptha as it is an indirect heat source and no flames are used. You can control the temperature on it and the one I have holds my extraction vessel perfectly.

I finished my first extraction pretty successfully. Results with pics:

HERE

I am on my second extraction and I'm having an issue getting the pH above 12. I started with 40g Lye mixed in 100mL cool filtered water. At this point the pH was 11.6. I continued to add Lye mixture (10g Lye and 25mL cool H20) 3 times more checking the pH each time and it remains at 11.6 - 11.7. What should I do to bring the pH up?? I have calibrated my pH meter 2 times during this as well to make sure its not my meter.

Also, there appears to be a small amount of Naphtha sitting on the top that I must have missed from defat. Could this have anything to do with it?

Please help! I'm waiting to do the 2 hour water bath...

Above pH 11 is enough for the reaction to take place...you're OK
The small naphtha layer will be OK...it will come out at the the pull stage.

THANKYOU for the quick response! I was getting nervous. I owe you much gratitude for this TEK

Having only done A-B teks, can someone confirm if should there be distinct layers in the aqueous phase. Having adding the 50ml of acidic solution and the 1 litre of Salt solution to the bark solution, there seems to be light tea coloured layer sitting on the top half of a denser layer of bark at the bottom half ? This seems in accordance with the instructions, but other STBs I have looked at seem to maintain a paste like consistency as does the image in the Hybrid ATB 'Salt' Tek because that only uses 100ml of salt solution

Is the 1 litre of NaCl solution in order for the DMT ascorbate has some H20 to be suspended in ? Should I expect after adding base and solvent that there will be three distinct layers (bark at the bottom, tea coloured water and then solvent ?....I guess this is a hybrid TEK after all and so not to expect the same as a standard STB

Used 300gm of powdered acacia bark with about 500ml to cover during the freeze/thaw phase.

cheers

Ahhhhhhhh - now the base has been added it is now just one dark mass !

I should have realised that the basification would dissolve the bark into the aqueous layer.

In any case, thanks for this method Cyb and to awesome sharing of knowledge in this thread.

Interestingly, the defat yielded almost no fats !

Goddamn it though, I put a layer of warm Shellite onto the base tea and agitated accordingly and left the jar while I went to work and when I got home, the entire Shellite layer had evaporated !

It was very warm weather and the lid was just sitting onto he jar (not screwed on tight),so essentially the Shellite has evaporated into the air as it would on a plate. My question is "where has the dmt gone". I could not see any distinct layer siting on top of the bark tea, so assume it has merged back into the base solution and has not been 'lost'.

Thanks Cyb for this (reportedly) great tek! I'm planning on doing my first extraction and will probably use your tek, although with alterations - one being that I'll be working with tea and not bark, as I've already made tea.

One thing, however, I don't understand:

Why would that be so? When extracting 100g bark instead of 50g, you have twice as much DMT in the soup, so if you use twice as much naptha, twice as much DMT should migrate into it, and you should end up with the same DMT concentration in the naptha.

The precipitation of DMT from naptha depends on its concentration, not the volume, because the volume is global information, and the dissolved DMT molecules only have local information of their immediate surroundings to base their "to precipitate or not to precipitate" decision on. Therefore 2g DMT should precipitate from 100ml naptha as well as 1g DMT does from 50ml.

If that wasn't the case, you could always split the 100ml naptha into two equal parts and precipitate them separately, having a setup consisting of two dishes, each holding 50ml naptha with 1g DMT dissolved in each. The DMT would precipitate, because the two 50ml solutions wouldn't remember that they came from 100ml that was split in half, so they would behave as if they hadn't.

I don't see why this tek couldn't be scaled up the usual way - X times more bark -> X times the volumes of everything (which implies the same concentrations) and give the same percentage yield with the same number of pulls.
Of course there is the practical consideration of finding large enough vessels, freezers etc.

Yes, the DMT didn't evaporate with the solvent. When you put DMT-laden Shellite in a tray and evaporate it, the DMT doesn't evaporate with it, but stays in the tray. And so it did here, but in this case it went back into the basic solution.

It may have only been in the shellite in small quantity. Experience has shown that it is perfectly possible for solid DMT to end up floating on top of the base soup when leaving the NPS to evaporate s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y. As depicted in this recent, only partly intentional experiment: