Been working on this writeup for a few days, and thought i would toss it out there in case anyone wants a outlined tek as to how to do a stb using alcohol & lime. FYI, i've never tried this with alcohol, but it worked good using limo and salting out the mesc. Alcohol should work better here, rather than large amounts of limo, and getting dark green limo after only one extraction.
Anyway, if anyone tries this share your results. Next time i do cactus i'll be using this tek, and will report back on how it goes when the time comes.
Materials-
Dry alcohol (etoh, iso, meoh, any dry alcohol that has a good solubility for mescaline freebase)
Dry acetone
Lime
Cactus powder
Sep funnel/butchner funnel vac aparrattus/coffe filters/cotton (pick one lol)
HCL or Acetic acid (Muratic drain cleaner for hcl (assuming you know its clean, always read msds, or distilled vinegar for acetic acid)
Distilled water
d-limonene, heptane, naptha, xylene, etc. (Any NP that will not dissolve mescaline salts)
1- Mix lime with dried cactus powder at a 1 part lime to 2 parts powder by weight in a pyrex pie dish. Add enough water to make a thick paste. Mix well and let it sit overnight, mixing a few times. Take the pyrex dish and put it in an oven at 150-175F until its bone dry.
2- Once its all the way dry, scrape up the chunks of dried powder, crush them up a bit, but don't go too fine or it will be hard to decant/filter. I usually don't go any finer than sand.
3- If your using a sep funnel, pack cotton at the bottom above the valve. Add powder to funnel, then add dry alcohol at 1.5 the volume of powder (pour enough alcohol in that its 1/2 higher than the powder. Swirl it around, but make sure you pack the cotton so it stays at the bottom. Let it sit for 12-24 hrs, swirling a few times.
4- If your using a glass vessel, and pouring off your alcohol, add the powder to the (preferably) narrow glass container, then add 1/2 more iso than there is enough to cover the powder. Let it sit for 12-24 hrs swirling a few times.
5- If your using a sep funnel, drain it, keeping the liquid. Apply light positive pressure at the top if you want, to help push the last bit of alcohol out. IF your using a glass container, let it fully decant, and pour off as much iso as you can get without much sediment. You could filter it, but usually if you get enough alcohol out, you can tilt it and drain almost all the alcohol out while leaving most of the sediment. Save this alcohol in a container you can add 3x more that volume in alcohol.
6- Repeat step 3 or 4 depending on if your using a sep funnel, then step 5 two more times.
Filter well your combined alcohol pulls, cotton, sep funnel, etc. Something very fine though, you don't want any sediment to make it through. Filter again with tighter packed cotton/double papered butchner if necessary.
7- Evaporate alcohol, and dissolve the resin in warm vinegar or dilute hcl distilled water, until the ph is at 5. heat the solution up to a simmer for 10 min, let it cool/fridge decant, warm to room temp then filter the water, rinsing the insolubles with slightly acidic warm water, then discard insolubles. Keep the filtered water and what you washed the insolubles with.
8- Evaporate water, and scrape up the resin. You can stop here for a fairly clean crude extract. If not wash your resin with a warm NP solvent, it should dissolve any oils, black goo/tar etc. Do this 2-3x.
9- Dry what does not dissolve in the NP, using the the oven at 250f for 30min.
Wash your resin with cold dry acetone, redissolve in minimal warm distilled water, evap w/o heat and you should get xtyals. They may still be impure, but powder then and wash again with cold dry acetone to fully clean them up. Once again dissolve and evap again with warm distilled water.
10- Alternatively, take your salts you dried in the oven, dissolve them in hot/boiling (no microwaves/gas/exposed burners, be safe) iso, adding more hot iso until it all dissolves.
Cool slowly, then add as much dry acetone to the container as theres iso. There should already be crystals before you do this, but after it should start snowing, big time.
Toss it in the freezer for an hour or so after cooling in the fridge first.
11- Pour off the iso, or decant using a glass eyedropper if the crystals are not stuck to the glass. Dry and scrape out crystals, put the iso back in the jar, evap it to 1/2 its volume and freeze it again. Repeat, saving crystals each time until theres almost no iso left. Each time you reduce the iso, the next batch of crystals will be dirtier/have more impurities. But they can be washed out later.
12- After evaping the last small volume of iso separately, scrape it up and wash it with cold dry acetone. Keep any xtyals that do not dissolve. Add them to your jar that you've been putting the crystals in each time you scrape out the container after freezing, and drying.
13- Crush up these crystals, and wash with dry cold acetone 2-3x. Should pull out a lot of color/smell.
14- Recrystallize again using boiling iso/acetone if you want super pure, or xtyal shards, but its clean enough for me not to bother.
Other thoughts-
If you have access to a soxhelt extractor, it would be an excellent way to use much less alcohol, and not have to filter, assuming you can make it work with a powder. Definitely an interesting idea though.
If you can, vacuum distill your solvents instead of evaporating, but don't attempt this process unless you understand the risks involved. Should recover 80%+ of your alcohol, rather than lose it all to atmospheric evaporation. Might be dirtier than before though, depending on if theres stuff pulled out of the cactus/lime powder that boils off at a lower temp than your alcohol.
Always evaporate alcohols with adequate ventilation, never near burners/heaters, even electric ones. Always evaporate acetic/hcl acid containing distilled water, with adequate ventilation (fumes are very caustic). You can use heat here, just keep it low. With alcohol heat is not advised, but if you do use ceramic/glass heat elements below the alcohols boiling point. No steel spiral electric element thingys or gas. And have damn good ventilation.
When evaporating alcohols used to wash crystals, always save the washes first off, but evap/dry them out all the way, and wash with minimal cold dry acetone. If theres any mesc it should not dissolve. If theres crystals save them.
Acetates may be more soluble in alcohols when washing compared to hcls, and you should always save your washes in case some gets dissolved and carried over.
Always use dry alcohol. Sodium sulfate works very well for drying alcohols, more so than mgso4 from what I've heard, it just takes a little longer to suck the water out.
Cheers-
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