I tried the FASA method for the first time and something musht have gone wrong (aka I fucked up)

To start, I got my MHRB from a reliable european vendor in shredded form. I ground it all to a fine powder with some fibers in a blender.

Acetone was dried with anhydrous MgSO4, and with that a saturated citric and fumaric solution was made.

I took 200g of the powder(I hate very small scale extractions so I went with 200g since it seemed like enough to not be inefficient from filtering, recrystalization, ... loses (I didn't want to have to scrape miligams of DMT from filter paper)

200g of MHRB was placed in a jar and covered with CASA solution, enough that it was about 2cm above the plant material when it settled. Mixing every 45min I waited about 2,5h per pull and did 4 pulls so far. Every pull provided me with some dark red colored liquid which I then filtered to remove any remaining plant material. What remained was about 0,8L of red acetone, the color was intense and even with a very bright light it was impossible to see trough the container.

Being paranoid about possible water from the air getting in to my acetone,I opened the jar and placed it in a container with about 100g of magnesium sulphate and closed the lid. After 12h the sulphate gained an aditional 1,3g in weight which was presumably water acetone pulled from the air and from the plant material from the extraction.

Satisfied with the fact that I had 0% water in my acetone now, I added 200mL of FASA which contained about 1,4g of fumaric acid. It was not dropwise as I was concerned about water again so I just dumped it all in, not caring about pretty crystal formation as I was going to make freebase anyway.

A bit more than 2 days later I poured off the liquid (in another container of course) and scraped what looked like very shitty oily crystals from the bottom. They were not yellow but red. After drying (it fells dry and does not smell of acetone but could probably wait some more) I was left with about 0.65g of red material. It feels like some very good hash if you know the texture - a soft piece of tar that I can bend without it sticking to my fingers. It's not see trough, in fact from 30cm away it looks like a black piece of tar, only when you flatten it in a thin sheet can you see the vibrant red color. Which is see tough (no plant matter).


Considering 200g were used this seems a bit shit, with people reporting 1-2% yields, and this is a 0.325% yield and even that is in the fumarate form so in reality its less than 0.3%. Where did I fuck up? Will more dmt appear at the bottom? I'm going to do some more pulls but my acetone guy screwed me the last second so I didn't have any acetone to do a few more pulls so that's happening tomorrow since my acetone is drying now.

Another thing, how do you people recycle the acetone afterwards? Considering you use an excess of fumaric acid every time you have to remove it somehow before adding it to a fresh batch of MHRB. Should I just use a base to salt it out somehow?

Any help is very much appreciated, and I'm glad to provide more information about the extraction.

I retried everything and now have fumarate again but am afraid to try the fumarate to base so I don't lose another gram of DMT.

Nothing is lost, it is just still in the solution. Must find a way to extract it, it seems your ether isn't working that well though so perhaps you could source another solvent even though you don't want to

It might not be lost, but nobody knows in what form it is, or what it even is, if freebase was in there I see no reason why ether or acetone did not work.

I'm starting to think there is a problem with what I'm getting from the FASA method, I'm not even sure it's fumarate. Chemicals have chemical properties, and those properties don't change fumarate should dissolve in water, but every time I try I get this gray mess and no matter how much I shake it never fully dissolves. Some of it forms fine particles that nearly instantly clog up any filter paper.

Do you have any idea on what I should do? I don't mean with this stupid-mysterious-inseparable-garbage, but with my remaining MHRB. If I take pictures of every step in my method surely somebody can figure out what the hell is going on. I'd like to keep switching methods of extraction as my last option - chemistry does not just "not work" for no reason, and if the tek is correct this should not be happening. Also I'm very well stocked on reagents for FASA which I would rather not have to give away. While I don't have bulk amounts of other solvents, I have access to a lot of chemicals for troubleshooting if someone can recommend anything - to test where things are going wrong.