SWIM can't filter off the limonene in his san pedro/water/lime concoction. He's tried using a french press, a coffee filter, a sieve, an even via a buchner funnel under vacuum. He nearly broke his french press; he managed to plunge in about a centimeter, before getting painfully stuck, not being able to go up or down. Using a coffee filter, only a bit went through, and it was very green, not like limonene at all. The sieve just clogged up, as did the buchner funnel. He's followed the nontoxic tek to the letter (using the exact ratios). When SWIM use limonene with mimosa, the mimosa would conglomerate into more or less solid masses and the limonene could be decanted with ease. This doesn't seem to be the case here. SWIM is losing a bit of yield each time he tries and is getting frustrated; does anyone have any suggestions for SWIM on how to get his limonene out of there and why it's being so stubborn?

Hold on the limonene from cacti IS actually very GREEN !! So the green oil is the fully alcaloidal terpenic oil you want.
Fellowing 69ron tek is normally easy to get at least 70% of the d-limonene, and with a french press it is normally easy.
Have you discard anything already ?

SWIM did not discard anything, other than maybe 5g and ~15ml he lost in all those filtering procedures. SWIM got it to separate finally with a french press with (his own) different filter. The resulting mixture was deep green and opaque, smelled of limonene and cactus. However, after adding the vinegar (5% white distilled), his concoction did not separate. There were no emulsions; just one homogenous mass that smelled of vinegar/cactus. He mixed it thoroughly and he let it settle for 4 hours and no separation is seen. Is SWIM beyond rescue at this point? Does evaporating the vinegar/lime mixture make any sense?

SWIM must mention that he shook the lime/water/cactus very vigorously in a milk jug; could this have caused his initial struggles with separation?

Thanks for your help thus far.

What did you add the vinegar too? The limonene that's poured off should be more of less transparent.

If your limonene/cactus mix has turned to a jelly, try adding more lime to dry it out so that the limonene becomes free of the water. Limonene seems to have a bit of an affinity to water, especially when said water contains a lot of broken down matter.

Oh and also for future reference with the limo/cactus mix... stirred, not shaken. Though I doubt that's the problem.

SWIM added the vinegar to the limonene (that he separated from the original concoction). At this point, SWIM has a mixture of vinegar and limonene. Adding lime will cause the formation of calcium acetate and water and not do a very good job at dehydrating the limonene. SWIM's limonene was not a jelly; it was an opaque rich green liquid. SWIM knows 69ron's tek is as simple as teks go; he feels like an idiot for messing up somehow. He's stumped at why nothing's separating... At this point, SWIM understands his mistakes and what he will do next time to prevent them, but even though he witnessed no separation, the addition of vinegar must have created mescaline acetate, so it should be separable by evaporation of the liquid contents, right?

EDIT: This is what it looks like in a glass cup with normal lighting (absolutely no separation):

soulfood is suggesting adding lime to the the cactus pulp in your milk jug, not the d-limo/vinegar. If it's runny enough that shaking mixes better than stirring, it has too much liquid in it. Adding lime to that will thicken the "jelly."

The d-limo should be liquid as you described.

I believe that soulfood's thinks that water has been drawn from the bulk of the cactus powder into the d-limo, along with some of the powder. This might prevent the vinegar and d-limo from separating. If this is what happened, the only way to separate them I can think of would be to stick it in the freezer. D-limo has a much lower freezing temperature than vinegar, so it should just pour out after the vinegar freezes.

There is definitely something wrong with that picture.

When your Limonene is "mixing" with the cactus/lime/water concoction, it should really just be sitting on it. The two don't mix well.

When you dump off the limo you really don't have to strain much, it just kinda runs off the sludge.

Your Limo should be yellow/greenish after 4 hours or so. Once adding the vinegar they should fully separate quickly.

I'm not sure if you can save that or not but this is why I stick to small batches.

By the way, your Limo was clear to begin with right?

Hi all this is my first post here. Hey!


Gravy separator seems to pour little bit of limonene with the vinegar when swim tries to separate them.
Does the limonene evap? If it evaporates, does it potentially leave some unhealthy stuff on plate?

Thanks yall

This stuff smells like happy jet fuel.

If I dilute 10% vinegar with half water , can I use tap water? or is distilled water that much better for this?

understood, SWIM did this for his second pull and
and the limonene sat on the jelly this time

SWIM did this. Now he has two jars, one supposedly vinegar (what was frozen), and one supposedly limonene (that which he poured off). The only problem is they both smell the same. SWIM is thinking about re-freazing each for further separation or just fucking it and using a fresh batch of cactus.

However, SWIM wonders: what contains the actives: the vinegar? the limonene? or both? Keep in mind, SWIM freeze separated them. Could he just evaporate both and consume what's left? He knows it's not a very elegant way to do it, especially due to the difficulty in weighing doses, but it's a nontoxic tek; shouldn't be taxing on the body, right?

Luckily, SWIM did use a moderately small batch and if he has to discard his project, it's no big loss.

yeah, it was.

So in conclusion,

(1) right now SWIM is doing his second pull (correctly this time), but he only used 50g (dividing all quantities by 2), and his first pull was sitting for a couple of days, and probably got most of the actives, so yield is predicted to be on the low end.

(2) SWIM has 2 jars with supposedly separate vinegar and limonene. He doesn't know what to do with them. After he froze what is shown in the picture above, he managed to get rid of lots of unfiltered powderized cactus. Mixing the limonene and vinegar produces the same homogenous greenish-orange mass with no evident separation. Addition of clean vinegar simply dilutes the product. SWIM thinks evaporating both and ingesting the remains of both could work, but he needs confirmation.

limonene evaps clean, but slow. if you have food grade limonene, the chance of "unhealthy" side-effects like you'd get from dirty petrochemicals is low. There's no part in the tek where you need to evaporate limonene though. The only reason SWIM is thinking about doing it is because he messed up.

Tap water is just fine, it says so in the tek.