SWIM recentely dried some p. torch cuttings he had recieved from an online vendor, and had some scraps he could'nt fit in his dehydrator. He decided to just make a quick resin from them instead of firing up the dehydrator for another 12hrs. He put 1/2 isopropyl %90, and one half distilled water with ~8 drops %30 hcl in with 1/2" chunks of cacti.

After letting this sit for a few days, stirring often, he decanted off the liquid and evaporated it on the lowest heat setting on an electric stove under a hood. He was left with a brownish oily resin that definitely had some excess crap in it. He tried to dry it the best he could, heating and using a fan, to ensure all the water was evapped off.

Once he was sufficiently happy it was as dry as possible he scraped it up, noticing its still wettish oily consistency. He put the resin in a small mason jar and poured in ~30ml of dry acetone. Stirred and worked the resin, and found it would get whitish around the edges, and the water was getting more and more green.

He let this decant overnight and noticed a dark green acetone with tan/whitish precipitates on the bottom. He strained off the acetone, and dissolved the precipitate in distilled water, evaporated it again, dried, and washed once more with acetone then back to distilled water again and evapped. What he was left with was a yellowish oil at first, that when worked with a razor blade would harden up and crystallize. Swim put it over a low heat source (room heater) and got the Pyrex plate warm/hot.

When he scraped it up, it was shattering all over his hands and razor blades, little shards of crystalline something! He knew if he tried to scrape it up as-is, he would lose a bunch all over his hands, he added a small amount of distilled water, and evaporated again, being careful to get the resin scraped up in a pile before hardening it. He then heated up the Pyrex dish again and the resin began to turn white and lighten up as it dried crystallized. He decided to leave it overnight to dry out more, but to his surprise in the morning it was back to an yellow/orange hardish resin. IT seemed to suck up some moisture from the air.

SWIM wonders how he can dry this resin, he's fairly sure it pretty potent (plenty bitter), and would really like powder instead of resin. Has anyone ever had really pure torch resin that's this hygroscopic before? Would he be able to dry it better if he did an a/b on it and salted out of limo with hcl? It would be cool to be able to get it dry without that extra work, and would prob save more of the full spectrum alkaloids by not basifiying.

Any ideas? Is this just the nature of Torch alkaloids, or how he extracted it in anyone's opinion?

Heres the pic he took last night, then in the morning when it was wet again-

why add hcl acid? all the alks are very water soluble, and in acidic form already

if it wont dry out, mix with flour to rollinto balls

he added hcl so it could be washed with acetone and be sure very little alkaloids dissolved. Theres no sources as to exactly what salt they are internally in the cactus, and for that matter how soluble natural cactus alkaloids are in acetone. If swim added hcl, he knew the mesc would be mostly insoluble in acetone.

SWIM's trying to avoid adding binders of flour, etc to it, want it to dry out more than anything. He's thinking of tossing a few silica packs in the pyrex dish and covering it with saran wrap for a few days and see what happens.

Maybe another wash with anhydrous acetone is in order? Any news on it?

Cleaning the resin with acetone quickly to recover some product is a rather promising method that Phlux here and other at Nook have experimented with. The jury is still out -some found it hard to dissolve the resin in acetone, others found precipitation of a "plastic like" material that seemed not to be alkaloids.

Yea, from what he remembers, cellulose would not be soluble in acetone, and would end up in your end product. he doubts any more tone washes would help, he thinks its just the nature of the alkaloids and maybe some other acetone insoluble impurities.

Putting it in a shot glass with a desiccant, covered with some saran wrap, and leaving it on top of a heater did little to harden it up. Maybe dried it out a little, but not much.

Anyway, he just dissolved the resin ball he had in some koh water and mixed in some sunflower oil. Gonna try an a/b cleanup and see what he gets. Should know by wed or so if its active when he have time to evap the hcl pulls he'll have, and test some if he gets anything from it.

That is the acetone cleaned resin ball? Interesting, the sunflower oil method seems to make NP acquisition and use easy. Propably it can be used also in uncleaned resin.

Yes the tone cleaned ball, i might just go ahead and not wash my next batch of resin, being that i'm running low on tone. If the sunflower tek works good to get clean product without extra washes, then all the better.

the natural salts are going to be your basic CAM krebs acid salts, citric, malic, iso-versions etc