SWIM is going to do lots of extractions soon, most of them probably would not yield any results, so SWIM will need a large volume of non-polar solvents. Naphta and Ether are very expensive here... so:

1- Are kerosene and gasoline non-polar solvents, and can SWIM use them instead of ether or naphta in the teks?? if not then what are some common easy to find and cheap non-polar solvents?
2- Can SWIM distill common cheap kerosene or gasoline to get pure lab grade solvents that evaporate cleanly without any residues? (of course the safe way, electric double boiler and Pyrex jars and pipes)

But methanol is a polar solvent not a non-polar one. Doesn't that cause problems?

Here's what I would personally consider instead: Use essential or vegetable oils and salt them out and later freebase. Orange oil (limonene) is the obvious first choice with so many teks around here, known to work very well and you might get in a good price. There were talks of using vegetable oils for extractions. I would try to salt them out (maybe some kind of fumarate precipitation) and further purify later, or just make simple vinegar salt, make paste with sodium carbonate, pull with clean dry IPA/ethanol/acetone and infuse some herbs with the results for a possibly good active product

Can you get any essential oil for cheap?

Its very possible that many essential (and vegetable) oils will pull dmt, some will pull much more than just dmt and be a very impure product, and some may not pull much dmt. If one can find the XlogP of the non polar one wants to use, it can give an estimation if dmt or other alkaloids will be soluble in it (though there are exceptions, so only actual tests will say for sure).


And yes, methanol is a polar solvent so forget that recommendation

I don't know about essential oils, but I'm pretty sure they are expensive here. Can't SWIM just use distilled gasoline?

what about vegetable oils, are they expensive too?

maybe distilled gasoline would work, I dont know. Did you ever distill any flammable solvents before? I see a potential risk both for you and for others that might read this thread and get ideas of distilling gasoline and hurt themselves. Then I also would be worried for your health. Im personally unaware of what kind of possibly toxic volatile fractions there are in gasoline that would be distilled together.

Then another thing I would consider, is that using gasoline seems to me a weird idea if one can otherwise explore in food-safe areas (and potentially create a massive breakthrough in food-safe extraction teks by bringing some new information for the whole community regarding vegetable oil extractions )

this might help ???

http://www.greenterpene....ade_p/upc-9970100114.htm

You mean simple Vegetable oils like sunflower/canola/olive? really? they can be used instead of naphta/ether? how effective are they?

SWIM distilled dyed methanol countless times to get clean pure methanol for extracting THC. since clean lab grade methanol costs about $12 per liter here but common dyed type is cheap ($2 per liter).

Tell me if I'm wrong:
Any volatile fractions in distilled gasoline will evaporate together with gasoline itself in the final stage to get clean dry DMT, nothing will be left and contaminate DMT. Am I wrong?

Man that's lovely but no fancy products here to buy like those. and the few lucky available ones are very expensive and thus non-practical for my purpose.

Yeah I do mean vegetable oils. I dont know for sure that they work, because I havent done it myself but I do remember some experiment, if im not mistaken it was spiceman, and I think he had gotten an active product with canola oil. Try running a search and see if you can find his thread, or otherwise just follow something like the limonene extraction teks but just changing the world limonene for vegetable oil. If I had no access to limonene/essential oils, I would try using that, salting out (make FASA/FASI/FASW experiments or just vinegar salting), freebase and bioassay. Start with small extractions to see if it works.




Good to know SWIY has distilled before...

As for the volatile fractions in distilled gasoline, yeah they should evaporate together with the rest of the distilled products but it is very possible (same with naphtha and etc) that as the dmt crystalizes, it traps the solvent inside the crystal formations, and even thorough drying might still leave considerable traces. Thats why redissolving in a less toxic clean-evaporating solvent (ethanol or acetone for example, if they are pure) and then evaporating that again would be recommended.

Still, if I was in your position, I would experiment with vegetable oils. Dont expect crystals (though who knows, maybe with fumarate precipitation you just might get them), more likely a goo that could be be infused in herbs and be very active. Do as you wish though, be safe and report back!

I may get shot down for this one ,but pure turpentine , thats non polar ,and evaps quite well doesnt it?
And its pretty damn cheap where i live

SWIM will go for distilled gasoline and then redissolve the yields in pure ethanol and let evaporate (maybe twice). that sounds safe enough for me.

When life gives you lemons... make lemonade, or even limonene? Im not sure what yield you will get from orange peel, but it might be worth looking at if your in a restrictive zone.

Plus you would get plenty of mcgyver points.

http://www.uwlax.edu/faculty/koster/limonene.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVZRnVKqkgw


Once you have salted out alkaloids from the limonene you can use it again and again. I think you can also wash the limonene with water to clean it up further. But of coarse if you down with the still.. you can simply re-distill it.

All in all it might be laborious initially, but once you have your solvent it should last a while what with recycling.

Poor man non polar... i guess that depends on the price of citrus fruits.

Though you need 200kg of orange peels for making around 1l orange oil, so its not very practical for the common person

200KG??!! Still very interesting, as a kid used to squeeze orange peels into the eyes of other kids also at burning match sticks and wonder what's that flammable substance squirting out of the peels, so it's called limonene...

polarity of a solvent is directly related to the dielectric constant it has, which is easy as pie to measure... here is a list of many many dielectrics at different temps including veggy oil (this says its around 4 at 100 degrees F, a bit more polar than xylene at 2.4 and naptha at around 2.5)

http://orioninstruments....ml/tools/dielectric.aspx

Thanks that was really helpful and contributed to my knowledge of solvents ALOT! Gasoline has a Dielectric Constant of 2, that's pretty good.

oh yeah, im not a soap maker, but beware mixing some oils with strong bases as you may accidentally make soap. I cant remember who pointed this out before, but its an excellent point.

EDIT you may want to check separately for miscibility info. I'm not a chemist so I'm not sure which low polarity solvents will mix with what... and I dont really know how xlogp is different from dielectric constant but they seem to be the same. any chemists want to chime in?

more EDITS! I did some research and finally figured out what xlogp means... and its really very surprising that it is typically so close to the dielectric constant. Anyways, xlogp implies polarity and DC is a direct measure of polarity so its not too suprising they are related. It seems like a lucky coincidence that they are scaled almost exactly the same, at least at the low end of the scale. At least you can use the DC to compare the polarities of two solvents effectively.

anyone tried using methanol during the A stage?
it is a very common extraction solovent, just need to know how to use it

Thats one thing you cant forget,if using vegetable oils,you cannot use strong bases simply because strong bases will hydrolyze your oil and transform it into soap.
Thats why only weak bases like sodium carbonate,calcium carbonate,etc, can be used.