I don't know why I basified before salting the crystals out because 4 or 5 good salt manske removes mostly everything needed before final basification.

I just decant/siphon the old salt water and replace it with new salt water after it has been in the fridge. No filtering at all.

I am thinking after the final basification I will pipette the freebase crystals on to a plate to dry, then I will have dried sodium carb and harmala crystals. Then I take acetone to remove harmalas as the wiki states it as "Reasonably soluble in acetone (at 25°C, acetone can dissolve 4mg/ml mixed harmalas"

This equates to 4g per 1l of acetone. If you have a big batch, you can filter the large crystals with t-shirt then dry and acetone the smaller crystals. You can even use acetone to remove whatever crystals are left on the t-shirt from the filtering of large crystals after collection.

Is there another solvent with better solublity? Does this sound practical to you?

Instead of dissolving your freebase harmalas in acetone, just wash them with water a few times to remove sodium carbonate (add water, let alks settle, decant water, repeat). Then dry them out. There's no reason to use acetone during any phase in a harmala extraction.

Yay! That is awesome, it went straight over my head and I didn't realize.

Do you think the moderators ought to update the harmala teks? I did a search and SO many people have complained about how filtering rue is really really irritating and time consuming. It would save a lot of people hassle just as I have found.

I just realized what you said about washing sodium carb with water only applies to freebase as washing the harmala hcl salts with fresh water will dissolve them supposedly... but I tried this and it seemed the salt crystals stayed pretty stable, it was only when I put a lot of HCL in that it dissolved. I will just evap harmala salts along with some salty water.

Sorry for striking against the hairs:

There are no good solvents (that I know of) for FB harmalas, 4gr per 1 liter means it's a poor solvent.
And why would you fiddle with acetone that much to escape from a simple filtering? I never had any trouble of a kind filtering FB or salted crystals.
Acetone, man


Harmala salts dissolve completely in a plain water without any help of acid. What you say (that you need a strong acid to get them dissolved) is quite shocking and indicate something is seriously wrong. I can only think of that you have FB and salt-crystals mixed up. It is FB that needs acid to get dissolved in water.

Yes as slewb cleared up for me acetone is unnecessary. What were your yields like? I filtered and got 1/4 of my yield was still left in the water because needles/shards were to small to be caught.

Sorry I was thinking of freebase as I wrote it and got confused.

All that is needed is as slewb suggested, to wash the freebased crystals with water or just decant basified water and add new water then there is no filtering required. Salted hcl crystals are another matter through as they (as you say) can't be washed with water. Tehy would have to be filtered or dried to leave some salt with the product.

Thanks

usually between 5 and 6 % rueHCL.

Sorry I did read Slewb's posts days ago but meanwhile forgot he covered the item about the acetone

mystery resolved

Thanks, it would be great if the mods uploading these teks on to the wiki for some variation... it may help a lot of people.