Theredplum wrote:It looks to me that lye is used in the production of dmt because of its high alkaline content and I found it interesting that urine the longer it is fermented increases its ph starting fresh it is slightly acidic but as time goes on maybe a month or two it increases all the way up to 10 or so. here is where I find it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8jb1zbgmTw (check description)
I've seen that urine has been used for soap making in the past also and part of my reasoning to why it could be a replacement, also it is safe and food grade I myself know urine is sterile and to proof it for myself drink it semi-regularly.
Im not to into the science parts of it so that is why I post here, Thanks if anyone here can help
Lye is easy to obtain in my neck of the woods, but heres something you could try, if it works then you can make all the base you could ever possibly need. If you add a strong base to any ammonium salt, it generates ammonia gas. Bubbling ammonia gas into water, converts it into ammonium hydroxide so you can store it like that. One base thats readily available everywhere it baking soda. But its a weak base, definitely too weak to free ammonia. Heat baking soda to 50C and it gets converted into sodium carbonate, a slightly stronger base. Still not strong enough to free ammonia I don't think. But the thing about chemical reactions is its all about the energy activation barrier. Certain reactions that don't happen at room temperature, might happen when you add heat. You could adding baking soda to water, boiling it to 100C, then pouring it onto a small bit of ammonium sulphate (they sell big buckets of it as fertilizer), and see if you smell ammonia gas. If you do, then happy days for you. You can just make a gas bubbler and bubble the NH3 gas into water and then you've got a clean base (since gases don't carry solid impurities with them). I've tried this with lye as the base, but have no idea if hot Na2CO3 can free ammonia. I'd like to know if that works myself too cuz it would mean baking soda can be used for a lot more things than most people think. I see this is the collaborative project forum. I'll find out if this baking soda thing works and report back.
UPDATE: I smelled ammonia so it works. I boiled the kettle and dissolved the Na2CO3 in way too much water, if I had mixed the two salts together then added a drop of boiling water it would of worked way better, I just didn't feel like doing this outdoors so used a lot of water to avoid generating too much NH3 and killing myself. I got a decent whiff, so this definitely works. The water was only at about 60C too. There are loads of ways to enhance this reaction, but from what I saw there I think it'll work just fine. The only tricky part is trapping the ammonia. You need to put the salts in a sealed container with an outlet tube. The other end of the tube is submerged in water. The tricky part is adding the boiling water to the sealed tube. With a two neck flask its easy, but if your improvising then I'd say you'll need one of those rubber bungs with two holes in them. Put two rubber tubes through the holes. One tube gets submerged in water. The other tube you spray the water into, then clamp it shut when the reaction starts. This way the only way for the ammonia to escape is to go through the tube into the water. There you have it, an OTC way to make clean NH4OH. I'm sure there are ways to turn that into lye if you really need to.
About this thread though, this is pretty interesting, I'm a chemist and I like the idea of being able to do chemistry in a survival situation. Since urine is something thats always available, its interesting to look into what can be done with it. If you wanna extract a base from urine, I'd say the way to go would be to add colloidal silver particles to kill the bacteria, that way the urea won't get converted into ammonia gas. Let the water evaporate at under the decomposition temperature of urea (I can't remember the temp, its around 60C), without the bacteria there'll be no smell. Then collect the remaining solids. Lots of interesting compounds in there, but to extract the base what you wanna do is make a simple gas bubbler, then heat up the leftover solids, the urea will decompose into ammonia gas, then you can collect it by bubbling it into water and turning it into ammonium hydroxide. Then you've got a clean base.
Brilliant idea thinking of uses for urine since its something thats always readily available. One use for it is making potassium nitrate, I haven't looked into how that works but they call them nitre beds. Urine is loaded with urea, and the smell is caused by bacteria converting it into ammonia. Ammonia is a base, it reacts with the water in the urine forming ammonium hydroxide so thats one reason why urine would turn alkaline over ime. I bet if you added an acid to the urine, it wouldn't get smelly. The acid would convert all the urea into a salt. Lye is sodium hydroxide, so what makes you think urine will produce lye over time? It will definitely produce ammonium hydroxide though and if its just a base you're after, that will work just as well. NH4OH (ammonium hydroxide) is different to NaOH (lye) though, if you add a stronger base to NH4OH it will generate ammonia gas. In fact any ammonium salt will do that. Thats useful to know cuz in the same way gassing with HCl is a clean way to convert a freebase alkaloid to a salt, gassing with ammonia is a clean way to convert it back to its freebase form. Using dirty hardware store lye would contaminate your alkaloid with god knows what.
Urine contains a load of interesting compounds. One class of compound are known as urokinases, and they have medicinal properties so they started building special urinals to collect the urokinases. I think all this is a brilliant idea, turning an abundant waste product into something useful. Nice one for the idea, I'm gonna start experimenting. First I'll piss in a bottle, add some HCl and see how much ammonium chloride I can collect. NH4Cl isn't of much use though, we should think of something more useful we can do with urine. Nitrates aren't so readily available, but I don't know how nitrates get formed from urine. I'll look into that.
The caveman synthesis for lye most commonly known is making it from wood ash. There are much better ways to make lye if its not available in your area. Have you ever done that high school chemistry experiment where you put two electrodes in a bucket of salt water and turn on the voltage? It releases chlorine and that frees the sodium ion, but sodium instantly reacts with the water forming sodium hydroxide. I think you need to put in a membrane to separate it from the chlorine bubbles though, cuz chlorine reacts with the lye forming chlorates. Maybe theres something you can add that'll eat up the chlorine faster than the sodium does.