SWIM just got 600 grams of Pedro and thought he would try an A/B. He unthinkingly dumped the sack of powder into an 11 quart stock pot and began acidification. When it came time to separate what was supposed to be the first of at least three aqueous layers from the powder, he tried everything and realized he couldn't. (He doesn't have a vacuum filter or anything cool like that ). He is wondering what he should do now. Should he split the 11 quarts in half and try getting an aqueous layer that way? (Before proceeding to defatting). Or should he just defat the acidified cactus sludge? Either way, the main thing he wanted me to ask was how long is it okay to leave the cactus sludge sitting in this acidified state? Thanks in advance guys...

How long is it okay to leave cactus powder in an acid bath?

Also, I wasn't sure where to ask this, and I didn't want to be an ass and start a new topic, but I was wondering, was the whole LSA to LSH thing ever settled by the gurus? The only thing I could find was that 69Ron was working on settling a fool proof way of assuring the conversion... Was that foolproof way ever arrived at?

Please forgive me for asking this if it is incredibly stupid, but SWIM took a wrong turn while doing an A/B on 500g of San Pedro powder. He still has all the gunk left from the failed attempt (black goop cacti powder which has been acidified, basified; mixed with toluene, xylene, limonene, etc.) The question he had was this, would it be possible to do some kind of straight to Hcl with Hcl? That is, hypothetically, could one just douse cacti powder in a bunch of Hcl and then decant that Hcl into some water and evap from Mesc Hcl?? Thanks...

the hcl will be in water already, what do you mean byy 'decant the hcl into water' ? if you make an acqueous solution with the cactus and a few drops of hcl and boil them, if you strain/decant that water and evap, it wont be pure mesc hcl, it will have some other stuff, similar to the cactus resin tek (check the extractions wiki). To get mesc hcl you have to base the solution, pull with non-polar and then mix the non-polar with a dilute hcl solution and evap that.

why was it a failed attempt, what did you do wrong?

Thank you so much for responding Endlessness, I really appreciate it. To show my gratitude I've been working tirelessly on a little project I hope to submit to you soon... Anyways, here is what SWIM did, at least, as best as he can remember each step:

1. Acidified 600g of powder in HCl aqueous solution to a pH of ~4.

2. Desperately tried to strain the aqueous solution, nothing worked, so just added more water, made sure that pH was still ~4, and somehow ended up with two 11 quart pots almost full with a rotten mix of aqueous solution and cactus powder. (Could NOT seem to separate!)

3. Tried defatting this junk with Toluene, but there was just too much of it, so skipped the defatting...

3. Basified the 11 quart pots using NaOH to a pH of ~12.

4. Used whatever solvents were available to extract freebases: Xyene Toulene, and Limonene...

5. Salted with HCl acidified (pH ~4) water, and ended up with at least two pots filled with acidified water...

*Unsure what happened next, I know something was spilled (allot of this water), I also know a separatory funnel was accidently broken :thumbdown: (his one an only piece of lab glass!) while washing it out in the sink.

6. Boiled both pots of acidified water down and accidentally burnt one to a crisp.
*This made him very impatient and upset.

7. Went and got the ALL (now salted) solvents used to extract the freebase, as well as cactus powder residue, threw them into a pot and began boiling, stupidly had a little fire... He knew boiling solvents was a bad idea, so thankfully he had his fire extinguisher ready at hand.

CONCLUSION

NOW, he has the brown powder left from the boiling down in step 5 (the other pot which would've been the same burned to a black crisp). He tried cleaning this brown powder with two Acetone washes and a wash in 99% ISP. He also has MEK, but hasn't tried that yet. See PIC:



The product of boiling down all that cactus gunk and solvent left a black thick tar which, for some reason, after trying to clean with Acetone, he put in a pot and covered in 35% Hcl. See PIC:


******
Because you're such a sweet dude I thought I might as well share this one with you as well. You see, SWIM hasn't been too lucky with the first couple of teks he's tried, and he is pretty bummed about it. Recently, SWIM tried an A/B on 300g of MHRB. Long story short, he boiled and evaporated, played with, and now he has ended up with nothing but this (SEE Pic). What looks like a mere gram or two of nothing but DMT N-Oxide.



Any suggestions on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated!

Ok here's the thing... With fresh cactus, doing an A/B will work if you dont blend the cactus but rather cut the whole cactus up in small slices/pieces, and simmer that 4x for a few hours. If you're doing with powdered cactus, its much more recommended, to avoid the problem you had of filtering and so on, to do a dry tek like 69ron's mescaline extraction . This will avoid you a lot of problems



How many pulls? Mescaline freebase being reasonably water soluble, a normal acqueous A/B with cactus will only get most alkaloids if you do many pulls.




why so much acidified water?

When I did an A/B mescaline extraction (with fresh cactus), just to give you an idea on volumes, I made first 3x 150ml limonene pulls. Then I put these 450ml limo pulls together, in a container with 50ml acidified water and mixed a lot and separated. I did 3x acidified pulls on the limo pulls, so this turns out as 150ml acidified water that is put together to evap. The Limo I reused to make another 3x150ml pulls on the cactus basified solution, put them together again, and 3x acid pulls on the limo. So I did this for a total of 9 limo pulls, and all the acidified water that I used to pull from the limo, when put together, was 450ml, not "two pots filled with acidified water"



Appart from needing much less water, as I explained above, also its better to, instead of boil, getting a food dehydrator, or simmering it down instead of hard boiling, or putting in a tray in the oven (under 100 celcius) with door open and fan turned towards it



jeez man, NEVER boil solvents with fire!!!!!!!!



This should be where your alkaloids are.. try to wash more times with cold acetone and IPA, to get it cleaner. How many grams/milligrams are there in that powder?



If you've done enough solvent pulls in the first place, there shouldnt be any alkaloids in this... By the way, you seem to think that steps in different extractions are equally interchangeable.. For example you say "after trying to clean with acetone".. But clean what from what? Do you even know if the alkaloids are there? Do you know if they would be there, what form they would be in and if this form is acetone soluble? Do you know what the impurities are and if they are acetone soluble?

Im affraid maybe you are just improvising things too much along the way without properly understanding some of the basics of extractions, and doing unsafe things such as boiling solvents with fire and so on.

I really hope you read some more the forum, the extractions in the WIKI and other resources before making more of a (potentially dangerous) mess in your future extractions






maybe you should post this in the extractions help thread not to mix MHRB questions in a cactus thread, but anyways:

First thing I notice is that you evapped it in a metal pot. That doesnt seem like a good idea.. When you scrape that you might have pieces of metal in your dmt, thats not good, is it? Always evap in flat-bottom glass dishes (like lasagna baking dishes) for easy safe scrapping.

The other thing is that you didnt say where your bark is from, what chemicals you used, what quantities, etc.. how can somebody help you troubleshoot something if you dont give propper information? Check out this thread about 'how to ask questions' in the forum. In any case what you could maybe try to do is redissolve this in minimal amount of warm naphtha/heptane and freeze precipitate.

good luck

if you already had it powdered, why go thru all the bs of the A part...??

go stb!!!

the base will fully digest any cacti matter rather quickly