Well I wanted to post this in the extraction forum, but I'm not a vetted member yet, so I'll post here.
EDIT: My lab glass just arrived, I've been doing my extractions using milk jugs and a turkey baster, so I have not used my glass for ANYTHING yet (though I'm hoping to start distilling solvents for purity tonight
), hence the reason I'm looking for some answers.
I have done many STB extractions, always with preground MHRB, lye, and naphtha. After a year or two hiatus, I tried to extract again the same way as always, and...yielded next to nothing. After a lot of reading, I'm 99% sure it's locked up as DMT oxide (that lovely orange oil that forms during the drying stage of the crystals, and from personal experience and research, forms rapidly when heated with a fan blowing over the wet crystals), which isn't soluble in naphtha, explaining why I was yielding almost nothing (in the future, I'd like to use my new lab equipment to dry under vacuum while at comparably low temps). Further reading seems to suggest the possibility of using acid and zinc to revert DMT oxide back to freebase DMT, which is a step I'd like to add into my new extraction process.
Now, I have never done an acid stage, so I did a bunch of reading about different teks, etc, and according to the 69Ron tek, you can use acetic acid (possible substitute being HCl or ascorbic acid) and elemental Zn to use up the extra oxygen atom attached to DMT oxide. Using this knowledge, my proposed basic procedure is as follows:
1. Heat powdered MHRB and muriatic acid (or whatever acid you guys recommend) under reflux, 3 washes.
2. In Erlenmeyer flask, combine 3 washes, and add a bunch of zinc, set on stir plate for several hours.
3. Filter out what zinc/plant matter I can.
4. Mix NaOH with deionized water, mix with acidic aqueous solution.
5. Once basified, extract with preferred solvents (likely first xylene to get jungle alkaloids, then pull pure dmt from jungle with heptane, mix/match)
So things I'm looking for help with
1. Is anything fundamentally wrong with my basic steps? I know I'm missing the defatting step of the acid phase, but I really don't care about doing that considering I've had zero problems with this bark in the past (and old hippies routinely let me know it's the best DMT they've ever smoked, so I'm not worried).
2. What acid would you recommend to protonate and then reduce the DMT oxide back into freebase DMT?
a. Assuming I'm using muriatic acid as my acid, will using a Dimroth style condenser prevent the release of (the majority of) HCl fumes? (I lack extensive formal chemistry training, so there are areas where I have great knowledge, and others where I don't even know what questions to ask)
Anyway, hope to hear from you guys soon. Thanks, and keep on kicking ass and taking names!