Apparently, to make sodium carbonate, all you have to do is line a cookie sheet with foil, fill with baking soda, and bake in the oven at 250 degrees for an hour. Can anyone verify this?

sorry if this has already been posted somewhere else.

awesome! thank you.
I'm hoping to use it on my final naphta pulls and then discarding the soda ash. It won't take any spice with it?

you mean wash the solvent with sodium carb dilute solution? no it wont carry spice with it

why do you want to do that on the final pulls only, though?

Oops... I meant washing all my solvent pulls in sodium carb dilute solution at the end of the whole process, after removing them from the lye/mimosa. That's when I should use it, correct?

Just a few questions about this part...

1. How much soda ash dilute solution should be used (maybe per ml of solvent)?
2. How long does it take the soda ash/solvent emulsion to separate?
3. Can just using soda ash and maybe a defat be enough to get pretty white crystals?
4. Is there any other information about soda ash or crystal washing that anyone would like to add?

Check the FAQ:

Separation should be immediate. I dont know what you mean with "defat", because your spice will be in freebase form there so you cant defat them.

sorry, I meant a defat in the beginning of a standard A/B extraction.

Personally I find defat process a waste, and completely unnecessary for mimosa. Normal pulls with naphtha and freeze precipitation (or limonene pulls, salting and water crystallization convertion) can yield pure white dmt without the need for defat. Even if final product isnt as clean, a recrystallization is a much more effective way to clean up with minimal amount of solvent.

Are there other ways to turn sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate if you don't have an oven? Could you also use a microwave perhaps? or maybe even a frying pan?

In your opinion, what is the thing that causes loss of yield in washing or recrystalization? It seems simple enough... put it in a little warm naphtha and pull the solvent up with a turkey baster/pipette and then freeze the solvent again. how long does warm solvent need to settle before pulling it up?

maybe I need to make a seperate post about this topic or is this considered all in the same category?

In the link I posted it says:



I've never tried it on a stove top, but I'm sure it works.

There should be no loss of yields when washing.

With recrystallization, you are cleaning up the dmt so of course at least the impurities weight will be gone. Follow FAQ instructions and you should be fine (doing 2 pulls on impure dmt, freezing separately), that will clean the dmt and not lose too much yield.

ok that clears things up. I forgot to take into account the weight of the impurities. Just to clarify, what are people talking about when they are mentioning "loss of yield"? During which step is this most common?

loss of yield its just that, loss the material you are working with. If you can give me an example we can talk about it, to see what happened in that case.

For example you could say "Oh I spilled my dmt-ladden naphtha all over the carpet, I lost all my yield", or "I didnt use a strong base so my naphtha pulls didnt pull much alkaloids, and I threw the whole mix away before realizing my mistake, big yield loss" or "In this recrystallization I lost 25% yield, but most of that is impurities" or whatever.

If you do everything right and your mimosa is good, your yield will be good too so you got nothing to worry about. If you do a recrystallization, what you can do (appart from the tips in the FAQ and as I mentioned), is to do it with half your product. That way you have both halves to compare, one cleaned up and other not, in terms of looks, taste and effects

cool. I guess the best thing to do is have faith in the teks and just follow directions carefully and I should be fine. I think the reason people are having problems is that they think when their impurities are gone, that they are losing some of their spice in the process. Or some people weren't basifying enough like you said or maybe they didn't do enough acid pulls or solvent pulls on the base. I think this pretty much wraps up with post for me. Thanks Endlessness - will let you know later this week how things go.

I'm making some sodium carbonate right now. For anyone that's curious, it is also used in tie dye. I think I might put together a cool tie dye post once I've made a few.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHy7lSm68cs <---- tie dye mandala

just finished making my sodium carbonate. Followed the FAQ tek. I compared it with some baking soda in my hand. The color was different and the texture was a little different. thanks Endlessness