Near the end I will take out the material so I have just "red" basic water and naptha.
When I take the naptha out I will immediately put it in another jar and I will add a sodium bicarb water wash.

Then Instead of pulling the naptha off the top, I will suction out the bottom water.. it seems to work a lot better as the basters seem to suck up too much red anytime you get close to the line where they separate. This way I lose a bit of naptha with the water rather than taking a bit of dirty water with the naptha that seems to stain everything.

Am I losing too much product by doing this? It seems to give way better whiter results for sure.

Thoughts?

Yes. The loss here would be huge.

Sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) is not NEARLY basic enough. You will loose lots of dmt into the water.
Even sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) will not be basic enough.

Only wash using NaOH (PH 12 or up) or you risk big losses of product.

Thank you for the good information. I will make sure the wash is High basic if I do that again.

From Vovins Tek.. Is it ok because of the amount?


Naphtha from step 6
Distilled Water
Sodium Carbonate
This is a somewhat new process that is not found in many of the older tek's. This process will try to remove as many of the foreign chemicals from the naphtha solution as possible. Especially the lye that was added in a previous step. The goal here is to leave only the DMT in the naphtha so that when you evaporate you end up with pure crystals.

Begin by taking about 50 ml of Distilled water and placing it into a flask and adding sodium carbonate to it. Just add a pinch to the water. It doesn't take much. You will only be using this mixture for the first wash. Do not use it for the second and third washes.

A little dab will do yah here, add only a small amount of the water/sodium carbonate solution to your naphtha. If you have 300 ml of naphtha then you want to put around 25 ml of the sodium carbonated water. Mix the 2 together and then place them in a seperatory funnel. Shake the hell out of it this is the only mixing step where the liquids separate almost immediately so no worries about too much agitation. Separate the water from the naphtha and discard the water.

For the second and third washes you want to use only distilled water nothing should be added. 25 ml per wash is sufficient. Perform the same procedure as above. You should not leave the water in the naphtha for too long. This means no sitting for hours letting it 'soak' you need to get it in and out.

Here are some threads that you might find helpful:

Information about "Relationship of pH to freebase dmtee:"
pH 8 --> 17%
pH 9 --> 67%
pH 10 --> 95%
pH 11 --> 99.5%
pH 11.6 --> 99.9%
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=62564

Discussion about variations in ratio:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me....aspx?g=posts&t=6247

More discussion:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=26259

Best regards

I recently did such a wash for the first time and ended up with some losses, but not enough to really concern me. If I remember correctly, I started off with approximately 1.4g spice (from 100g extraction) and ended up with approximately 1.2g spice after the wash. So I lost a bit under 20%. That seems like a lot when expressed as a percentage, but 1.2g should last a very long time for someone like me. I thought it was an interesting process, anyway, and the loss was a small price for me to pay to enjoy observing nature at work in various containers .

Also worth noting is that the .2 g loss is not pure dmt. Otherwise what would be the point of washing it in the first place.

Yeah that vovins tek will definetly loose you some product in the cleaning step.

50ml with a "pinch" is at best ph 8-9... when using Na2CO3 (Sodium Carbonate, Washing Soda)
and something like 7,1-7,5 when using NaHCO3 (Baking Soda, Sodium Bicarbonate)
I just tested that. And you could basically just use plain water instead.

So either you just do "extreme giant pinches" (Add till no more dissolves) with Na2CO3
to get a max ph of 11-12 or you just omit that step and be happy with the dmt you got which in most cases is pure enough if you done a defat for acacia or just followed a good tek for mhrb.

Or do a NaOH wash because that will not loose any DMT to the water layer.

For cleaning i recommend a reX and not a sodium carb wash.

I am not a chemist so I could be massively wrong, but I found this at pubchem:

Aqueous solutions are strongly alkaline. At 25 deg C, the pH of 1, 5 and 10 wt% sodium carbonate solutions are 11.37, 11.58 and 11.70, respectively.
Eggeman T; Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. (2001). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons; Sodium Carbonate. Online Posting Date: 17 Aug 2001

Does this not imply that a pinch of sodium carbonate should suffice to increase pH to the appropriate level?

Best regards

1% by WEIGHT. You know how much a pinch of Na2CO3 weighs? I just tried and i get roughly 0.05g
1% by weight for 50ml is 1g Na2CO3 and 49ml/g of water (water density is 1g/cm³ 1cm³=1ml).
So you are off by 1g-0,05=0,95g which is 95% off. So you have a 0,05% wt% solution roughly if you add a pinch to 50ml.
Na2CO3 is a really fluffy powder and also very light compared to many other powders. So you will need to add a lot more.
Measurements like "pinch" are hella innacurate for powders.

Ulim, that's fair enough except you've screwed up the arithmetic by the order of 50 % or 100% depending on how you look at it.

1% by weight in 50mL solution is 0.5g anhydrous Na2CO3 made up to 50mL with probably more than 49.5mL water, as the exothermic hydration of Na2CO3 will be associated with a diminution of volume.

Ulim's error: 1g-0.5g=0.5g which is 100% off (Using this perspective of error, the 0.05g would of course be 1900% off.)

If you're using store-purchased washing soda it will typically be (roughly - it's efflorescent or hygroscopic depending on ambient conditions) the decahydrate which would require adjustment of the calculations. Better to make your own anhydrous sodcarb by toasting the bicarbonate, although of course in certain countries such as Germany the washing soda is sold in the anhydrous form (hurray!)

I am somewhat confused here. A 10mmol/l solution should have a pH of 10.97. 10mmol of sodium carbonate is 1.06 grams. The suggested amount of distilled water was 50ml. This implies that you need 0.052 g of sodium carbonate.

I will admit that my country do not use feet, inches, pinches and pounds. So my calculations can definately be wrong, please correct me!

What is the source of this data? That pH seems rather on the high side for such a weak concentration.

Then again, this gives an even higher value:
(PubChem shows the same.)

In practice, dissolved CO2 will of course lower the pH somewhat.