My friend was going to do a mescaline extraction soon and wanted to do a hot xylene pull in a crockpot in theory that more alkaloids will come out.I've seen cold xylene pulls done in HDPE but not hot.

Yes xylene will erode HDPE especially if it is hot. HDPE is rated as "partially resistant" to xylene at 20 C and "not resistant" at 50 C.

Oh ok.So I assume the proper procedure would be to mix the lye and water in the HDPE.Then mix the basified water with the cactus powder in a pickle jar,let sit for a while,add the xylene,shake vigorously,let sit in the hot water bath at ? degrees for ? hours.Thanks for the fast reply

I would use glass for Xylene - always.

Have you ever heard of a solvent called Varsol?

It is a mixture of xylene mostly and a few other NPs.

It comes in a 5 gallon pail, HDPE.

What I noticed is after a while (over a month) at room temperature the plastic doesn't erode away, it changes. It becomes much more pliable and soft. But I didn't notice any erosion like you see with PP (which erodes almost immediately).

Are you sure?

It's probably not HDPE but a hydrocarbon barrier bottle. Those are HDPE mixed with Nylon. They are resistant to xylene, I believe. Looks just like HDPE.

Yes, I'm sure because you can go to almost any garage and you will find a Varsol station. You will often find dirty Varsol being stored in 5 gallon buckets that used to have engine or transmission oil in them.

Since it is used as a cleaner it is common for people to cut a 5 gallon pail in half and fill it with solvent to clean very dirty engine parts. This is often left out for a long period of time, and if you keep using the same container for cleaning it "changes" and becomes softer and more pliable than before. But I've never seen it get eaten up, a container that had a hole eaten through it or something like that.

Another story, the machine I was using was a thread cleaner for large industrial pipes and it used Varsol. I would make a splash guard out of a used HDPE bucket with the top and bottom cut out. After a long time the splash guard really does change from being exposed to varsol all the time. It becomes very soft and curls... but again based just on visual inspection there was no plastic being eaten away.

This was all at room temperature by the way.

I remember the ingredients on the MSDS were xylene, toluene and mineral spirits. You could be right that the original container was a special blend of plastic.

Check this out though: http://www.forumsci.co.il/HPLC/SolBest.pdf

It says that xylene has moderate effect on HDPE, whereas toluene has minor effect. Since Varsol contains a mixture of different solvents I'm not sure now... I could be wrong.

Varsol is sold in a regular HDPE2 container.

Do you have any sources that cite Varsol contains any Xylene though? I've seen many MSDS's for the product, and see no mention of anything other than "Petroleum Distillate" which, as we all know, can be any combination of petroleume product - Xylene included.

No, but since I was using it at work there was a detailed MSDS with all the ingredients and their percentages. Xylene was the highest percentage, but there was also toluene and mineral spirits.