Hello,

I just found myself with a gram of synthetic DMT fumarate. My plan is to convert 1/2 to freebase and keep the rest for pharmahuasca.

Sorry to ask such a newbie question, but which tek is recommended?

I see one which is only water and sodium carbonate https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...Freebase_Conversion_TEK sounds too easy to be true.

I also have some lab grade heptane on hand, if it's useful in this process.

Please advise, and thank you in advance.

It doesnt matter if DMT is synthetic or not, the conversion is the same. Ive tested type 1 and 3 of the methods in the link you posted and they both have worked perfectly.

Dont throw anything away if something doesnt go as expected, it can always be recovered..

Let us know how it goes

Thank you!

I'm going to go with #1. A question, though:
It mentions 100 ml of water for 40 gr of carbonate. Should I assume this is for one gram of DMT?

This is way more than you'll need, really. You'll add a fraction of that and it will all have precipitated. Just remember to add very slowly, drop by drop as slow as possible, for best crystal formation. You'll know when to stop adding when each drop doesnt create any further clouding.

Thanks, and how much hot water on the DMT for the initial dissolving?
I decided to convert the whole gram instead of half.

Dont have to worry much about that tbh... Just add slowly till it all dissolves and a little bit more. Only add the sodium carb solution when everything has cooled to room temperature

Again, thank you.

If you can buy a concentrated (~30%) solution of ammonia in water (a.k.a. ammonium hydroxide) and you can competently and safely handle smelly, toxic and corrosive liquids (~30% NH4OH is no joke), dissolving DMT fumarates in some ammonium hydroxide, refrigerating, filtering and thoroughly drying will result in extremely pure DMT freebase.

The reason is that ammonia is a gas, so it will evaporate off your DMT very cleanly upon drying, leaving no solid residue whatsoever. You can tell that by simply sniffing the crystals - if they smell like ammonia, they are not dry enough yet.

Metal salts, like sodium carbonate, will remain on your DMT freebase crystals in trace amounts once the water covering them evaporates (unless you wash them in the end with ice-cold distilled water, accepting some losses). You obviously cannot vaporize sodium carbonate with DMT (the boiling point is too high) but you may still inhale microscopic particles of sodium carbonate with the DMT vapor.

So the ammonium fumarate ends up in the filter? What happens with a more dilute ammonia solution, does ammonium fumarate stay in solution?

Ammonia cannot saturate the water to the point where ammonium fumarate would not dissolve. It will dissolve and pass through the filter. In theory some ammonia gas may get "salted out", but in reality most "concentrated ammonium hydroxide" solutions are no longer saturated anyway.

Lower concentrations of ammonium hydroxide will work too, but the higher the pH, the less soluble the DMT will be in the water, which helps minimize the losses. Ice-cold 5% ammonium hydroxide is as diluted as I would personally go: its pH is 12.2 (vs. pH = 13.5 for 30%). Higher concentrations have lower freezing points too: 30% freezes at -79°C, low enough for any household freezer.

Ok, so then after drying one would need to still separate the ammonium fumarate from the FB DMT, right?

No, you won't have to.

When you throw DMT fumarate into a water + ammonia gas solution, the following happens:

1) The DMT freebase precipitates out of the water, so you can filter and dry it. Nothing else will precipitate, assuming your DMT fumarate was pure.

2) Most, if not all, ammonium salts are water-soluble. If the amount of water is sufficient, ammonium fumarate will stay dissolved, and will pass through the filter. A bit of it will be trapped in the wet DMT crystals, but the concentration is going to be very low. You could wash the DMT in another shot of fresh cold ammonia after filtering, to get the purest DMT this side of the Chrysanthemum... )

3) The compound that made the water alkaline is a much more concentrated impurity. Ammonia will evaporate out while sodium carbonate will crystallize as microscopic powder.

...Whenever folks complain about their DMT vapor being "unusually harsh", and blame NaOH for that harshness, a common opinion is to dismiss their claims on these grounds:

1) Since lye is insoluble in Naphtha, it will all be left behind.
2) Even if it somehow contaminates the DMT, its boiling point is so high that you cannot vaporize it.

In reality, water has non-zero solubility in non-polar solvents (simply shaking heptane with water will make it cloudy). Carboxylic acids (such as acetic acid, commonly used for DMT extractions) are known to increase water solubility in non-polar solvents. Lye molecules bonded to water droplets will get extracted with DMT. Vaporizing lye is not necessary to inhale it - a good toke can "vacuum" lye particles into the lungs with the DMT vapor.

Drying the non-polar solvent in A/B extractions (to remove water-bound polar impurities) is one step that I would love to see added to future teks.

Ah, so you meant drying what the filter catches. I thought you meant drying the ammonia water after filtration (the filtrate).

The new info/claim for me is that FB DMT crashes from ammonia water. I had assumed it stayed in the water, hence my questions. If that is true, this proposed method should work with a lot of DMT salts (e.g. acetate). It would be very interesting if household 10% ammonia crashes DMT as freebase.

Interesting point. would love to here results of any experiments.

DMT freebase is insoluble in sufficiently alkaline water, and it is not important what makes the water alkaline: NaOH, KOH, Na2CO3, or NH4OH.

It indeed does not matter what the salt is - it will work the same with DMT acetate, citrate, fumarate, tartrate, phosphate, or benzoate.

Two things matter: the pH needs to be 12+ for most of the salt to become freebase, and the amount of water cannot be too large, otherwise the DMT particles will take forever to meet, clump up and precipitate out of the suspension. These two things make ammonium hydroxide a poor choice for primary DMT extractions.

10% ammonia should work OK for converting amine salts to freebase. The pKA of DMT is 8.68, the nominal pH of 10% ammonia is 12.4, so we are more than 3 units of pH above the pKA and 99.9% of the DMT will become deprotonated. In reality it will be less, since some ammonia escapes every time the bottle is opened.

Here is an easy experiment: dissolve DMT freebase in a small amount of vinegar. Start dropping concentrated ammonia into the solution with a pipette. Each splash will produce a small white cloud of DMT freebase, which will quickly disappear. Once the overall solution is no longer acidic, the clouds will no longer disappear but sink to the bottom. At that point you can dump more ammonia in to raise the pH to 12+ (freeze, filter, dry) or use a non-polar solvent to extract the DMT (reduce, freeze-precipitate, dry).

Hello again,

As I mentioned, I tried method 1. However, I don't think that I've been very successful, since the DMT feels weak. Is it possible to repeat the process and perhaps get a better result? I think the conversion was not complete.

Thank you for your help.