SWIM recently performed an extraction which ended in him freeze precipitating the first pull and evaporating the next several pulls worth of naphtha with a fan... the evap pulls ended up much yellower with lots of yellow goo on them, which SWIM thinks is probably DMT N-Oxide...

Is this a normal result of evaporating one's solvent? Does DMT really oxidize that quickly? (To be fair, SWIM had a fan blowing at the stuff for over a day).

Also, when freeze precipitating, how does one dry off the spice collected without affecting the yield and/or potency?

Hi friend, I did about 10 extractions so far and first two were quite frustrating...

In my exp. proper type of solvent is important. I remember disappointment, yielding nothing because of solvent issue.I bought bottle says 'solvent naphtha' which turned to be 'heavy type of Naphtha'.

1. This stuff doesn't evaporate (I waited 1 month until I gave up)
2. It is potent and I wasn't able freeze precipitate and get crystals out. Even small amount solvent left in jar melt all crystals again in few minutes in room temperature.
FRUSTRATING...
Later on I found out heavy naphtha is similar to 'thinners' which I would'n recommend neither

So I studied NEXUS here (thanks for everything guys) and learned to use lighter fluids (light type naphtha petroleum...).For example 125ml zippo lighter fluid (3$) and so on. So far I worked with Swan, Zippo and many others brands only with great success. I always evaporate a small amount of new solvent before I used it in extraction to see if it is clean. Those are cheap and can be reused again and again through freeze precip. or used for storing spice melted in solvent ages and invisible to curious roommates (parents are the worse )

These extractions performed by basic high school chemistry in kitchen settings tend to be fun so maybe later on I'll try extractions of different alkaloids from different sacred plants.

Good Luck with your hobby...
Regards

and I forgot to mention that fan = goo (no crystals)

and best tek - pictorial I found on net and just followed picture by picture in learning process was called 'whatchas-easy-mhrb-stb extraction, step by step pictorial' (on mycotopia forum maybe...you see I can't remember I keep .pdf print of it)...HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Regards

Can´t agree with you on this one... Evaping will produce xtals if you did a decent extraction, but i´m also not a big fan of evaping, much rather first doing a small evap and then freeze precip, much nicer to recycle the solvent =)

In the worst case senario of evaporating and receiving goo, cant one take the goo, redissolve it in a minimum amount of naptha and freeze precipitate?

This method has propably been discussed i guess...

I dissolved some goo in warm naphtha and re-crystallized, resulting in nice clean crystals. If you need more info on it you can use the search option. Good luck!

AH so its done, and propably is common! Good to know, that would solve all the "goo" problems even if one goes with evaporation.

The thing is, if it is n-oxide, just dissolving it in warm naphtha i don't think would solve the problem. You have to use zinc dust to convert it back to nn. N-oxide is not soluble in naphtha and has do be dissolved in water containing an acid like HCL.

If it is gooey from the plant fats and oils, which is often the case in my experience, then its cool to just re-crystallize.

DMT does not oxidize that quickly, what you have is a lot of plant oils and other alcaloids mixed along with the DMT crystals. If you wanna go for a cleanner looking crystals my advice would be to do a clean up. Acidification, defat, basification, pull with your non polar solvent and freeze precip - the thing is your gonna loose yield.

For me the topic of spice color is ultimate BS! sorry to the purists in here - i know you guys love the white spice... but i gotta say from my little, insignificant experience the yellow waxy spice is stronger and it burns better.

So don´t be racists and love your spice no matter what color it turns out to be - white, yellow, jungle - it´s all spice anyway

hm, what have you heard exactly?

YEAAAAH This is what I got after my first extraction - recovered it from the bottom of my first freeze precipitation and it seems to be waxy - becoming oily when you rub it between your fingers...I did melt test some on the end of my knife though, and it smells the part...SO I'm going to try and smoke it tonight as I have about a gram of this stuff - like shiny lemon-tinted waxy crystals!

From a different jar I did get nice pure white snowglobes too though - muuuuch more beautiful, like driven snow, when in my container