Hello nexus, been a while. Sorry I can't post this in a more appropriate forum, seems my membership's expired.
I've been following the thicke-light tech for ACRB and been getting varied results. The first two pulls of this most recent batch were indeed crystal but still very sticky / waxy and orangeish-brown in color. I let this dry over a couple days and it still had a waxy consistency so I decided to try a sodium carb wash. Please let me know if anything below sounds incorrect, because the results were very disappointing and I'm confused as to why.
I heated a glass with 50ml h2o and 3grams of sodium carbonate. There was excess undissolved, even after extended heating and swirling.
I did my original pulls with naphtha, but decided to try recrystallizing with heptane. I poured 50ml bestine into another glass and added 1.4g of the gooey crystals. Very little dissolved on contact, and so I let it warm and swirled until the majority was dissolved. There was a thin layer of tan-brown goop on the bottom of the glass that wouldn't dissolve into the heptane and seemed to re-coagulate back with itself when I tried to disturb it, so I assumed those were impurities being separated by polarity.
While both solutions were still very warm, I decanted the heptane away from the goop and into a fresh glass with 20ml sodium carb solution. As I went to rinse the goop from the jar, I noticed the goop immediately changed and solidified when it came in contact with the cool water. Didn't think much of it at the time and finished washing it out.
Meanwhile, I gently shook the jar containing the saturated sodium carb soln. and heptane. It clouded and immediately separated. I shook it two more times and then let it settle. There was no emulsion so I immediately pipette'd the aqueous layer into a separate glass. I then let the heptane sit for ~6 hours and noticed it became very cloudy white as it cooled. All seemed to be going great, and I moved it to the freezer with a lot of excitement. ~12 hours later I realized that not much was actually precipiating, so I decided to decant into a fresh dish and fan-evap to see what there was.
Well it just finished drying and I'm pretty shocked because there is nothing in the glass except a sticky residue. Even the freeze-preciptation jar's tiny crystals seem to have remelted into a clear residue. It doesn't even look worth scraping up, maybe .1g of residue from 1.4g sticky crystals.
Does anyone know where I may have gone wrong? My only guess is that the goop that wouldn't dissolve in the heptane must have contained some of the crystals and not just impurities. I still have the sodium carb solution that I washed with, but it doesn't look like it contains anything other than a few oils; will try evapping that too though. Or maybe, is it possible to overheat the solutions and destroy the dmt? I'm just very confused and disappointed at this point... my babies just disappeared.
Thanks so much for your help and I apologize for the long read. Wanted to be as detailed as possible but lemme know if something isn't clear.