Hi,

did my first extraction with noman STB tek yesterday and i have to say it was majorly a disaster

Somehow there were signs this wont be a nice extraction so lets go on:

a.) The water/lye/bark container leaked a little! The cap didnt close properly. So i just screwed it tighter and it somewhat worked. Luckily i put down old newspapers everywhere so the spills werent an issue. Nevertheless....i was starting to wonder what else will go wrong...

b.) Seperation part. I used 50ml naptha with 50g Bark. Things seemed perfect! The two layers were seperated well and i moved around the container for a few minutes making sure there wont be an emulsion. And now the really bad part started!
Time to pull off the naptha....getting my turkey baster...sucking in the nap...ohhhh wait theres black stuff try again....again....again....got it! Well but then my turkey baster showed that it cant hold anything in! What a bummer...
I got somewhat annoyed since thats already the 2nd thing that fails...
Luckily i had syringes with needles to give it a try.

But it was so hard! I can assure you i dont got shaky hands and im good at doing frickly tiny things but this was soooo hard to me. I pulled with my syringe (no needle attached) very carefully but the layer of naptha was like only 5mm perhaps and the black liquid always decided to visit the inside of my syringe too! Same thing with needle attached

I got frustrated and added more naptha so i could somewhat save the precious spice but i know its not good to just add more naptha.
End of the story: I got like some ridicoulus small amount of spice now from my freeze precip and evap jars.
I lost a lot of naptha with spice in it im totally sure of that
At least the spice is pure white

Conclusions i made:

a.) Get a proper container next time

b.) TEST your equipment before the real deal

Questions i got:

I used about 1500ml Water for 50g bark since it was pre-powered and said so in the noman tek. Next time i want to use a bottle as a container and so the water amount would be around 1 liter. Any problems with that? I got the impression too much water doesnt benefit but just makes it harder for the naptha to get loaded up with spice. True? Bs?

My naptha was pure clear in color but it didnt change yellowish after agitating it around in the jar. Is that normal?

How long do i have to do this agitation? I did it like ~5 minutes constantly moving the naptha around and then i immediatly started pulling. Good?Bad?

Thanks already

Well despite the setbacks, congrats on your first extract .

So with your extraction, 1500 ml water is wayyy more than necessary for 50g bark. Swim doesnt use STB but rather a/b extraction, yet that still seems like a huge amount of water for 50g. 500ml of water would surely be enough. Make sure to extract with naptha a good 3 times, 50 ml is a decent volume for each. Agitate for atleast 10-15 minutes.

That is good you got white spice though, that is what you want. Yellow spice imho is far inferior.

Well in the tek it says "add 1.5-2x the amount of water if pre-powered bark is used" so thats what i did.

My next try im wanna use a bottle like this (top left):


Is the cap gonna survive it? Its made of metal, material unknown to me. But the kinda narrow neck should make it easier to get out the naptha than in my leaky flat container

The cap will survive...I've had mine for ages with no problems.
The neck is soooo much easier to pull with.

See this:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=36239