I've been reading till my head explodes these last few days and something has nagged me a bit with the sunflower oil tek I will relate below. I'm am very keen on using COMPLETELY non-toxic ingredients for any preperation.

In LucidLemonade's Sunflower oil TEK, (As i understand it) the lye is serving two functions:
1) to chemicaly lyse the cactus powder to release the mesciline AND
2) to basify the "soup" ready for the sunflower oil (NPS?) to extract the freebase

The problem with this Tek is possible saponification (something i know a bit about as a home soap maker )

What i would propose is this:
1. Re hydrate and freeze/thaw cactus snot to lyse the cells
AND/OR
2. Boil with acidified water till foaming stops and then pressure cook
AND/OR
3. Utilize pectinase to break down the gunk - i have it in bulk for wine making
THEN
4. mix 1:3 gunk to water (possibly at step 3) and leave to settle out and decant.

Using one or more of these steps would avoid the use of Lye for the breakdown and extraction of the Mescaline and thus the Saponification of the oil.

Next alteration - Is sodium carbonate (oven cooked making soda) sufficiently basic to covert the M. to free base to be extracted by the oil? If so, this might also help to avoid the risk of saponification AND overcome the danger of using lye in the Tek.

Finally, a soap making observation:
In many if not all of my soap making books it is stressed that it is crucial to have both lye (solution) and assorted fats at the same temperature in order to ACHIEVE saponiciation, and that if you don't it is likely that the two mixtures - base and fat will separate out into layers again.

I would be curious to find out if anyone has tried a cold baseified cactus solution (made with lye or otherwise) and oil solution in order to oil wash the mescal base out?

Purely theoretical speculation on my part: my two p.torch cacti aren't nearly big enough yet, but i planted 60 pach x peruvians seed yesterday and just ordered some banksii seed today so would be curious if someone can chime and totaly de-bunk this idea or other wise.

Bright blessings

Would be nice to hear someone who knows his/her Chemistry to chime in on this! Would be nice to try this sunflower oil tek, without the fear of loosing the goodies to saponification!

Being a hobby soap maker I am also afraid of mixing lye solution with cooking oils. As you might have observed in your soap making, there is a rapid saponification part that happens within ~30min followed by the slow part that takes a month or so to firm the soap bars. The overall saponification process relies on using a small amount of water in proportion to oils (e.g. ~300ml of very concentrated lye water to 1 kg of oils) and also good mixing. Temperature is less relevant and you can make good soap in any temps. Saponification temperature last time I checked influences the final characteristics of the soap but not saponification per se.

The teks that utilise oils like sunflower oil use proportionally more water than oil (opposite from soap making) and a lye solution of a much lesser strength (still strong enough though) and it is often advised from people that tried said teks succesfully to not mix the oil with the basic soup too long - pulls have to be fairly quick. But I have difficulty believing that no saponification at all takes place, which is one of the reasons along with the fact that cactus is precious material and that I already have other solvents like limonene at my disposal) that I haven't tried this approach.

Your methods of breaking the cactus material with freezing/long boils/pectinase are all sound and do work at reducing snot viscosity, but you can achieve the very same with just mixing lye and cactus and leaving it for some days prior to a NP pull.

Sodium carbonate might work but one time I was unsuccessful at increasing the pH above 10 (which is not that spectacular for mescaline). You may want to try that though since you can always add lye to bring the pH high enough. Sodium carbonate only will most likely give you emulsion problems if you do not mix gently basic and NP solutions gently, a problem that excess lye often takes care of.

I don't like that LucidLemonade tek and think it should be removed from our site. It violates basic chem 101; always add lye to water, never add water to lye.

Let's make this extremely easy: Follow this tek and replace the word limonine with sunflower oil, 1:1.

Haapi extracting

I've seen an LL tek attempt go awry, I'd rather use a solvent that isn't readily hydrolyzed by alkaline solutions. Limonene fits the bill, but I use xylene. either will work, without complicating things.

the most rapid way to process (that I've tried, anyway), is to add dilute acid to the powder
(I had presoaked goop), and just pressure cook that for 30, 40 mins. no boiling needed.. that's enough to lyse the cells, the cell fragments fall to the bottom, you just decant off the syrupy solution, and proceed with basification. If you want to use cooking oil, that's on you. You may have a tough time cleaning the product though.

Thanks for the input folks, it is appreciated