My friend just did a test on about 2g of spice slightly contaminated due to (wrongly) using Coleman's camp fuel to pull and then evapping the pulls...the Coleman's evaps clean by itself, despite the fact it clearly gets tangled up in the product during evapping of pulls. He understands it is common knowledge that Coleman's is bad for this reason as everyone reports this.

The spice began as very dry and workable, just unclean and very slightly white-green (from rust inhibitor). He added some ph3 water to the spice, dissolving some of it, then added a bit of xylene. Agitated until everything had either dissolved in the water or the Xylene. The water was clear, and the Xylene had turned green, the color of what is supposedly the rust inhibitor (heard people say it can look blue sometimes also). He pitched the xylene as it had clearly picked up the rust-inhibiting, or at least the discoloring contaminants from Coleman's. People seem to suggest they are one and the same.

Basifying the water with NaOH then caused immediate clouding , this can only mean that actives remain in the water surely...unless friend and I are really misunderstanding something. You would think that these actives are now ready to be saved with another pull using clean n-Heptane or something to achieve success now right?

This is throwing me through a loop because my friend has read loads about how there's 'nothing you can do' once you screw up with Coleman's...'it's a failure start again, no way to fix it', this n that...though it seems pretty clear that the green guck from the Coleman's is nowhere in sight now. My friend has not actually pulled from the water with anything to prove this theory exactly as he is waiting for better, clean solvent to arrive to do that.

Big question is -- What is the reason that this supposedly doesn't work, and if this works, why are so many people crying all that much about finding 'clean naptha' when you can basically do a mini-defat (mini-de-rust-inhib) with Xylene this easily? Is the pitched Xylene being green not sufficient proof that the rust-inhibitor has been separated from the spice for some reason?

Thx for any words about this

What you have written broadly corresponds to an a/b cleanup except you would rather need to dissolve all the contaminated DMT in the acidic water before adding the xylene. The process as described will have a poor yield because some of the DMT freebase will remain dissolved in the xylene. If the xylene has been kept the dissolved DMT can be recovered simply by adding a bit more of the acidic water.

Whether this proves to be effective as a clean up depends on what the rust inhibitors actually are. You would have to find this out, then choose a suitable solvent that selectively dissolves the rust inhibitors better than water while being immiscible with water. The wash with this solvent should be carried out on the acidic phase. Then add base and pull with clean, warm naphtha and freeze precipitate. Recrystallise from heptane.

It's still far better not to introduce the contaminants in the first place. Some component of the rust inhibitor might be colourless too. Overall, this illustrates a good reason why freeze precipitation is superior to simple evaporation for DMT recovery.