starway6 wrote:concombres wrote:Weigh it & see if it lost any weight.
The tray from my scale got dropped into a jar of heptane with a glob of thick yellow spice that hadn't dissolved on the bottom the other day & it came out covered in stuff that looked just like that.
It just doesn't come out as fluffy because it isn't as spread out throughout a liquid like with precipitation & doesn't have the space or time to form a nice crystal lattice.
Well..i didnt weight it at first.. but the pile crystals apeared that it could easily fill 3 or 4 500mg capsules...meaning atleast ..[one and a half to two grams of crystals]
I know guessing by eye is far from acurate.. but the pile shure did shrink!... and compress into this hard material shown in picture...
Im going to smoke some as a test im shure it isnt lye..[because of the way it melted into an amber oil]...im more carefull than that...
I expect it to be still active spice but..could something else have crystalized that wasnt very pure acacia spice?>...
These crystals i will show below percipitated while in the napatha pull...could they be NMT crystals...?
Looking at them through a jewlers loop... they apeared to be hundreds of little white straight crystal spikes...
Im going to send the pictures of the crystals while damp in bottom of napatha jar and after dryed and broken up apearing like table salt...then end result after melting the fast hardening crystals in metal dish...
Any opinions??
Looks like the chunk is just very dense compressed spice.
If it was white before melting, it may have acquired some yellow coloration from the heat & also when condensed into a small area any yellow coloration that may have been left over but not visible when spread out will be more concentrated & visible.
If your concerned about lye contamination break the chunk down, do a sodium carbonate wash, after do a distilled water wash, then re-crystallize in heptane or naphtha.
My spice even after a mini a/b & sodium carbonate wash turns out yellow sometimes & re-xing say 2g in heptane will melt the spice into a thick gooey mass. At 100°f the heptane picks up a little yellow coloration still so lower temperatures may be neccessary. Maybe 70°f.
I usually use 15ml heated heptane to melt & pick up some spice, leave in water bath & swirl every couple minutes. Making sure to remove from bath when temp of heptane starts rising too much.
Remove the 15ml via pipette & squirt into a clean pyrex dish then use a fresh 15ml to pull more from the melted spice goo.
Usually by 3 or 4 15ml heptane pulls the mass of the goo decreases & the coloration of what remains gets darker almost brown or sometimes orange.