CYB- Nice work. Try with clear naphtha next time, or even heptane. Give it a fare chance, ya know?
You didn't mention when you added the salt. Did you smoalk some?

Yes clear nap will help, just a bit far to go to the shop in the rain.
Added salt solution at the start followed by the lye. Two hours of soaking and agitation, then add the nap.
3rd pull just out of the freezer and looking good.
I'm expecting a 2% yield...best before salt was 1.5%
Thats 1g out of 50g MHRB...not bad!

Not tried it yet.

What is this Yellow Goo??
Plant Fats? (smells active) When dry it hardens a bit like Earwax!
This is the 3rd Pull of Salt Tek just out of freezer and drying. No lye was present in the pull.

1kg of iodized salt contains 30mg of iodine, does that really affect the procedure? scaling down, it's a tiny percent...

I don't know what the yellow oil is for sure but adding salt will push more plant oils out of the mix too, so that may be what your seeing. I added the salt with the lye in the beginning of a STB tek and saw no differences except the massive increase in yield.

seems to work. i did acid boils then based a filtered solution.

1st pull - cloudy after 10 minutes of mixing/separating
2nd pull - solvent came of slightly colored, but clear. no clouds.

added about 50G salt

3rd pull - cloudy after 10 minutes mixing/separating
4th pull - cloudy after 15 minutes mixing/separating


these were heated pulls done with minimal solvent (650ml solution from 100G MHRB, 50ml naphtha). Solvent was freeze precipitated, seperated from crystals, then heated and used again for all pulls. Solvent is crystal clear after freeze precip even after multiple pulls, gotta love how clean a proper A/B is! Salt also made emulsions a non issue, i can shake like a british nanny and still have clean solvent separate in less than a minute.

Just completed another salt extraction.
Used a quick tek (STB) of my own recipe. (one day start to finish)
Nice fluffy white result > 1g from 50g MHRB.
Salt works...nuff said!
kudos to CTM...

Also extreme closeup pic of 1/2mm 'dots' of xtal...aren't they cute...

Those look beautiful cyb, glad you trusted my judgement enough to give the salt a try. I have a feeling the spice content in mhrb is actually signiicantly higher than everyone currently believes it to be. I would like to try this again using various levels of salt so a clear correlation can be made between ionic strength and %recovery. Are you still pulling your bark or was 2% your final yield. I am almost positive my bark would have given me over 3% had I done more than three pulls.. Nice work brother/sister/fellow alien. Look forward to seeing some new high yields around here.

Thanks for your input CTM.

Pulled 6 first time round...6th was just a small layer of clear oil...no xtals. Active but not really retrievable (maybe a wipe round with herbs)

This time on the quick tek am on 5th pull and still going...
Just using regular table salt...
Almost boil the right amount of de-ionised water in a pan and add the salt, stir, dissolve and add to the bark. Then dissolve the NaO2 in a little water and add on top.
Stays hot/warm for a while for the soak...seems to help.

After the Nap, It seems to make a difference if you shake like a MoFo rather than roll the mix. Seems to 'touch' more of the mix.
I only use 40ml or so of solvent. I figure that if you saturate a smaller amount of nap it will crash out all of it (thinner layer on the glass tray).
I then reuse the nap in later pulls.

Would like to leave in the freezer longer to let 'em grow more but am too impatient.

2% yield is the norm now...
Would be interested to see if someone varies the salt content and comes up with more.

Pease out...Bro Cyb

I mentioned earlier in the post that a friend of mine from back on the west coast was able to increase his yield to over 3%, an that i was well on my way there before having to abandon the jars after only thee pulls. Increasing the salt content increase the partition coefficient of the spice in the water:naphtha sytem. This is the ratio of molecules that exist in each layer of a two phase system. By raising the ionic strength of the water phase you push the partition coefficient to favor the naphtha. PC's are commonly given with the non-polar layer first so this would be raising he PC and hence retrieving more of the spice. It's not possible to get all of it because the PC cannot reach infinity, but we can do everything in our power to get it as high as possible.

Being able to agitate more vigorously also is a great benefit of adding salt to the mix. When the aqueous layer is extremely salty, the dmt molecules tend to aggregate in solution to minimize the level of interaction with the charged species in solution, this makes agitation more effective because now the NPS has "globs" of spice to grab onto instead of individual molecules.

I think patience is a most important virtue for every step of the extraction process. Slowing down and taking your time with it always pays off in the end. I only freeze precipitate for 18-24hours , nearly all of the spice is crashed out of solution by that point.

I'm doing a comparison on 2 extracts 150g MHRB fresh Q21Q21's Lime Tek, one with salt one without. I let both sit for 24 hours before doing the first pull, and used near boiling naphta for 15-20 minutes, both in same vat of water. I noticed the salt containing jar is a bit more liquidy, dispute using exactly the same amounts of MHRB/Water/Vinegar/Lime (+/- a 2 ml or 2 g here/there).

The first pull is about 18 hours in the freezer now, the one with salt is very cloudy and no visible crystals (they may be forming a film on the bottom of the dish), the other pull looks more what I'd expect. I've seen really filmy pulls yield far more then what it seems, so its hard to tell until I scrape it up.

I'll try to update with pictures once I leave it precip a bit more since its still cloudy.

Hopefully this works out for the best, thanks for the contributions Chemis

I'm not familiar with the Q21Q21 tek, so I'm not sure how salt will effect that tek. I'll familarize myself with i more today. Hope it works out for you.

edit: I don't think the salt addition will be quite as beneficial for dryteks. Normally this technique is used in the laboratory for biphasic aqueous seperations. Dry teks dont work in quite the same way. The salt should offer some helo in forcing the spice into the NPS, but with the limited diffusion in the paste it is unlikely to be as effective.

I'm in shock, the salt pull yielded less then 0.01 gram. The 2nd pull on the same jar I see a tiny bit of crystal formation but still not what should be. The salt was pure, no iodine or de-caking agents.

I can't check the PH on the jar at the moment but I will tomorrow, any ideas as to what could have happened? Hopefully its not ruined, maybe something else went wrong somewhere along the ways.

The first pic is the non-salted jar, the second two are the salted jar, I took a extreme closeup from the other-side and you can see minor formations.

SeekerOfTruths

How bizarre that you got no yield (or very little)

If all variables were the same (except for salt) for both xtracts, all you can really say, (with any certainty) is that salt won't work with a dry Q21 tek. CTM suspected as much in his post.

Perhaps you could just add water to your mix and basify and retrieve the goods as per a STB.

As with any science, don't look on this as a failure but an invaluable experiment for all of us.
Thanks for the comparison and the time spent. Well done!

No problem cyb, I'm not worried of failure just more a little confused as to what happened. Of course I'm no chemist.

I managed to find some pH strips, and doing a quick test the jar seems to be back towards 7'ish pH in certain parts, other parts 12'ish like expected. The other jar is 12-13'ish consistently, both of them using the exact same ratio's (150mhrb, 150ml water, 150ml vinegar, 125g lime). I'm not sure why salt would have changed the pH levels so drastically?

Anyway, i'll attempt to bring the pH back up throughout and see if I can pull something from it. If its too late, like you said information for the future Maybe it'll be closer to a STB situation for some reason and the jar wasn't ready to be pulled. Will update with results.

Seeker, adding the salt did not destroy or eliminate the spice from your mixture. It may have mad it more difficult to seperate. I have no experience with dryteks myself, but salt will not react in any way with the spice(I am a chemist). You ccan retrieve the spice that is still in the mix by performing an A/B on the paste you still have. Also, salt does not affect the pH, but it does play a role in how active the protons which determine the ph are. Higher ionic stregth will increase the activity of the protons, but ph is a measure of the concentration of protons, not their activity in soution. All ions show greater activity at higher ionic strengths(unless there is a common ion effect). I would work the past again with a wet tek and see what you can recover. Sorry when I said salt could be added to any tek I was referring to the wet teks. I'll be more careful to give specific information like that in the future. Good luck recovering what is still there and if you have any questions feel free to IM me.

I would like to interject and say that your results with Q21's tek are IDENTICAL to mine, except where you used sodium chloride intentionally, I used calcium chloride on accident (mixed up for Ca(OH)2). The yield was much, much lower than it "should" have been even after the second pull, working on the third. On the assumption that CaCl2 and NaCl would both have little effect on the solution (I know CaCl2 wouldn't raise or lower the pH ) and only act as ionizing agents, chalk me up in support that Q21's drytek doesn't incorporate salting well, or at least not in a way that's been presented.

I'm working on a second batch with everything identical and how it SHOULD have been (e.g. without CaCl2!) to compare.

I want to discourage people from trying to use my salt technique with any drytek. It has definitely been established now that it does not work with dryteks. I do not want this to discourage those using wet teks because it does work and it works very well. I should have thought of that to begin with and mentioned it in the original post, and I apologize for failing to do so. Hope those using wetteks are getting better results. With love...

Noted. Regardless, you've provided a simple and extremely useful addition to existing knowledge.

Do you or any of our other chemists know how a drytek could be salvaged after salt's been added?