Well, who cares about chunkier crystals while you're doing your extraction...
if you want them chunkier, then
1. purify them fairly well
2. convert to freebase
3. salt them with fumaric acid
4. see for yourself if you get "chunkier" crystals
I see your point with vinegar smell thought; in which case use less vinegar.
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I am no chemist, but I know a little.. What confuses me is that it seems like adding NaCL to the solution will form harmala HCl's?
I could see where the chlorine in HCl come from(NaCL), but does the hydrogen just come from atmospheric air?
Isn't it a "rule" that acetic acid forms acetate, fumaric acid forms fumarate and so on?
I don't understand if the harmalas prepicitate as HCl unregarding which acid you use.
the hydrogen is already in place, all alkaloids in acidic solution have this extra hydrogen (or are "protonated" in technical terms)
As for the precipitation, it has to do with dissociation equilibria. First of all, there is no such a thing as (say, for the sake of argument) harmine acetate in solution. Solid harmine acetate upon dissolution in water dissociates into the positively charged protonated harmine and the negatively charged acetate, both just float around in equal proportions, bumping onto each other occasionally and what not.
Adding NaCl in a harmine acetate solution means that the NaCl will also dissolve into the positively charged sodium and the negatively charged chloride. All molecules will be bumping onto each other occasionally and the positively charged harmine will have the chance of bumping onto the negatively charged chloride. When the latter happens, transiently harmine hydrochloride will form and because it is poorly soluble in the cold NaCl-saturated solution it will be stabilised and drop out (precipitate).
Harmine hydrochloride will have occasionally the tendency to dissociate back to harmine and chloride, but the presence of a already big excess of chlorides from the NaCl saturation will stop it from doing so. Generally (but not exactly accurately) the more you have of something in a solution (chlorides in our case) the more difficult is to add more of it in said solution (chlorides from the trying-to-dissolve back harmine hydrochloride.
That's all in a nutshell.
Of course, in theory, you could use any other acid apart from vinegar in the process but in practice if you have not seen someone doing it then you may as well not try to add extra variables in a process that you do not fully understand. I do not remember reading about fumaric acid used successfully but I do remember seeing that if you use citric acid then the manske precipitation might take many days to happen.
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