In case you haven't read this whole thread this tek is currently not recommended. It can work, but the catch is that the acid boils would need to be evaporated and then based with a layer of sodium carbonate before the initial oil pulls. As people have inferred this is kind of a pointless step when the goods can be pulled right from the sodium carbonate bed without adding the additional labor of pulling with oil and then salting out. Most of this tek may be salvageable, however if a zinc reduction can be successfully added. The current issue with zinc reduction is that while it's not a revolution in extraction technology it usually works because it doesn't appear to be soluble in naphtha or xylene (right? I think....) It results in cock-ups when used with dry teks and the oil pulls I've seen done when it hasn't been separated from the final freebasing. It will desiccate the acetone almost instantly and make the sodium carbonate hard and unable to be crushed up. I'm not sure if zinc desiccates ethanol as well but the point is moot because the residual water present even in 190 proof alcohol would certainly carry over the zinc and you don't want none of that. It appears that zinc might be soluble enough is sunflower oil to separate it from the acid phase of an extraction though. If it is, we in biz I'll be sure to let you all know of any progress on this topic.

Fellow Nexians there is an appalling lack of Acid/Base teks on this site that use sunflower or olive oil as the solvent. Sure there's a bunch of anecdotal info pertaining to the topic that certain people have found incredibly useful for devising a more organic extraction process by digging through posts, however said info can only be integrated by already knowing one's way around an extraction. Some people just need to see things laid out for them in a step by step manner before they'll attempt it and I know for a fact that the lack of such a guide has prevented several people from attempting such an endeavor.

Sunflower oil is probably the better choice because olive oil sometimes has sediment in it. While olive oil does seem to separate from water easier than sunflower oil and may seem more desirable in that respect one would need to be sure they're using REAL olive oil if they plan on using it for this tek. I say this because most of the common big brands of olive oil that come out of Italy are mob-controlled and therefore either aren't olive oil or are a mixture of olive and cheaper oils. Cheers.

1) Freeze and thaw your bark three times.

2) Grind or shred the bark.

3) Do three to five 1.5 hour boils on the bark using distilled white vinegar as the acid in a stainless steel pot. A pH of 4 is optimal but if you don't have any way of testing that using 30 ml of vinegar in each boil is probably more than enough.

4) Combine the acid boils and filter them several times through butter muslin.

5) Reduce your combined acid boils so that the volume is 100 - 200 ml less than the capacity of the jar that you'll be pulling from and then transfer the boils to it. A mason jar works dandy. A jar ≥ 1000ml is desired.

6) Here an optional defat stage can be utilized by doing a handful of small pulls on the acidic liquid with your oil and discarding them. I've heard it's recommended to do this stage when using Acacia bark because it's really fatty. No alkaloids will be pulled obviously, because they are still attached to acids and won't be soluble in the oil. Three pulls of 50 ml is probably good but use your eyes. The fats will color the oil significantly so you'll be able to easily see when you've grabbed most of em. Pre-heating the oil (note: oil can ignite easily at too high of a temperature) will help it pull the fats more efficiently but if the acid water's still hot from the reduction stage you might not even need to bother.

I'm trying to be as efficient with words as possible here but the thought of someone using this guide for their first extraction process necessitates that I describe what a pull is. By pulling I simply mean adding the oil to the jar with your goods in it, capping the jar, shaking it for a few minutes, letting the oil separate from water and then sucking out the oil with a turkey baster.

7) Add lime to base

Do ten pulls on your freebased soup with your oil. One of the benefits of doing a thorough defat, besides a cleaner end product, is that you can pre-heat the oil to increase the solubility of the alkaloids. It's not necessary though, and if you didn't defat heating the oil will unnecessarily pull lots of fats. Be sure after you add the oil and shake the jar to wait several minutes so the oil (semi-)fully separates before you decant it. Even if you wait a bit these aren't hydrocarbon solvents so they won't form a distinct phase in the jar nearly as quickly as naphtha or xylene (hence the 'semi-fully'. It takes a while for the two layers to completely separate so having additional jars can speed the process up. This is done by putting your first "rough" pulls into their own jar and then once all of your pulls have been collected letting it sit. The oils in the "rough" collection jar will probably drop some residual lime water in some time. Once it appears that most of the water has dropped out decant the oil again into its final jar.

9) If you grabbed a tiny bit of lime water while transferring your oil to its final jar in the last step that's perfectly fine. All of it will be neutralized by the vinegar in this step. Do ten washes on your oil with your distilled white vinegar to salt out the alkaloids into the vinegar. Use < 50 ml each time. Obviously in this step you're sucking out the bottom layer of vinegar instead of the oil. Collect the vinegar into its own jar and let it sit for awhile because some residual oil will more than likely have been carried over. Even if you were super careful there will probably at least be a thin top layer of oil and you don't want to carry any of that over to the next step. Once you're confident that no more separation will take place suck out the vinegar (leaving a little behind if there's a chance of carrying along oil) and collect it into a stainless steel pot.

10) Reduce your combined vinegar washes to a very small amount. You don't want it so small that it starts to thicken up into a paste but you want it pretty damn small because you're going to let it evaporate into a paste in the next step. KEEP AN EYE ON THIS. If you aren't paying attention and all of the liquid evaporates it'll torch all your hard work (seriously that's never happened before) and you will be sad. Once it's reduced enough pour it into a pyrex dish and let it evaporate.

11) Once the liquid has evaporated you'll have a DMT-acetate paste. Place a thick bed of sodium carbonate (baking soda cooked in the oven at 425 degrees F for 1.5 hours in a GLASS baking dish) directly on top of the paste. Use a metric fuckton. You want to be sure everything freebases and if you ended up using 50 ml of vinegar to pull each time it's going to take a bit. Once you've covered your paste pour enough water over the mixture to moisten everything and let it sit. One would think that since the mixture is going to be wet anyways at the end of this step that the reduced vinegar wouldn't necessarily need to be evaporated into a paste first but one would be wrong.

12) Once all the water has evaporated from your mixture and it's bone dry do several pulls on it with 100% acetone. Filter the collected acetone and let it evaporate.

13) Tell your friends about this tek and how incredibly non-toxic acetone is compared to whatever they're using. Seriously the stuff evaporates extremely quickly and you could accidentally drink a fair amount of acetone and still survive. You can't say the same about paint thinner.

For additional points you weigh your resulting goo, add it along with a suitable amount of extracted harmalas into some more acetone, and let that mixture evaporate to form some leafless changa goo that can be dabbed.

Even this leaves a little to be desired. When any solvent is used on plant material it's inevitably going to wash off all the cool little signature sub molecular spins that a plant enzyme bestows upon it's goods and therefore alter the experience. My friend wonders if he could just do extensive filtering and defatting on the initial acid stages, reduce to a paste, and then add a saturated sodium carbonate solution dropwise to the paste until the precipitation appears to stop. The jar would be left for a few days to finish the precipitation before the holy grail of solventless extracted spice would be filtered and collected. The acid would have to be lime or something else besides vinegar since vinegar creates hydrophobic pockets that wouldn't really let the goods precipitate........... Someone please try this sometime and post results.......

There's a whole bunch of pictures of sunflower oil extraction in this pdf.

Don't you have a problem with your oil turning to soap when you use lye?

Would lime be a better base or would that still be too strong? Successful runs have been performed using lye. The times that didn't work were due to the attempted addition of a zinc reduction stage; it produced a chunky mess that had to be discarded.

I've been successful with lime in both wet and dry style teks with oil. Good to know that lye will work as well.

Updated

add some oregano, crushed red pepper, dried parsely, dried basil, and some balsamic vinegar.

^that's a beautiful start towards making a nice pharma-infused marinara sauce. The only remaining step would be to add it to a heavy lasagna with a buncha cheese n sausage

Do y'all think that the lye + oil -> soap is what could have potentially turned a few attempted extractions with a zinc reduction step into a chunky unusable mess as mentioned above? One such mixture had been filtered very thoroughly in the acid step (able to pass through a coffee filter) and during the pulls the chunkyness still ensued. My friend has been severely discouraged at attempting zinc reduction again given the many such extractions that had to be flushed

yes.

Very nice tek, can't wait to try it with Acacia Confusa.
Would citric or ascorbic acid work as well?

yes

Interesting.. I may try this next

Uhm, im assuming this used to read using lye. Why was it all of a sudden changed to lime? Im pretty sure the process would be different beings that lime cant be used in a wet tek. So that would make the op incorrect and someone following it would meet disaster at the base step.

Lime most assuredly can be used in a wet tek. See the above linked pdf for a very detailed example.

I must of read some bad info lol.

Dreamer, but that pdf's results were not DMT, since they did not react with ehrlich, correct? So it may be another indication that Calcium Hydroxide indeed it's not working so well with wet teks, or maybe I misunderstand something? Maybe you did other tests with mimosa/acacia with such method and it did work with DMT?

In any case this could easily be adapted to a dry tek.

I have used lime in a wet tek for mimosa as well, it works fine for DMT. It may not be as water soluble as other bases but it's water soluble enough to push the ph up to 12-13 and that's all you need.

It's hard to say what the results were from the phalaris, it possible the tryptamine content was just so low that the reagent didn't pick it up, or perhaps being so late in the season the profile was mostly beta-caroblines, or perhaps it was devoid of these compounds entirely. The rf's were in the right general range for tryptamines and beta-carbolines however. Any assistance you could lend on interepreting results on that would be helpful. Though that discussion should probably take place in that thread as it's off topic for this one.

Yeah and it is really simple to convert to a drytek as well.

Ugh now I feel silly . My friend was planning on seeing if the initial acid boils could be reduced down, evap'd into a paste, based with a bed of sodium carbonate, evap'd again and then pulled with the oil for a dry tek anyways since he doesn't have access to lime, however if that's the case then I wonder what the usefulness of the initial oil pulls would even be. If the acid boils were defatted properly and able to pass through a coffee filter before basing couldn't one just pull with acetone then and there, avoiding the need to pull with oil and salt out?

The oil steps could still be potentially useful if the zinc reduction was employed in the tek, but I was hesitant to include anything about that, because like I said the last few times I saw it used it contributed to extractions that had to be discarded. In those cases the final dried sodium carbonate bed visibly had zinc on it and zinc seems to instantly desiccate acetone. Some zinc was put onto a glass dish by itself and a few drops of acetone were rolled over it to confirm this effect. I also know nothing about zinc's solubility in either of the above mentioned oils. If it's soluble the defat stages should be able to remove it provided the zinc reduction was done before the defats and filtering, but if it's only weakly soluble idk how much I'd want anyone to mess with that step because after seeing acetone get dessicated by zinc a few times I don't in any way believe that filtering removes all of the zinc. I'm trying not to obsess over this zinc reduction stuffs too much but I really like the idea of squeezing every last bit of potency from some bark and it seems like a shame that it might not be employable with these food-safe extraction teks. The one time I've seen the zinc reduction work with this type of tek lye was used and the only reason the extraction worked was because a few oil pulls were done quickly enough before the inevitable sludgyness ensued. From what I understand the resulting goo had a somewhat weird taste to it so maybe zinc is weakly soluble in oil...

I've spent the past year doing veg oil extractions with great success and a few cock ups. My thoughts on the above are:

Lye plus oil will most definitely cause problems. I've created lye by mixing sodium carb and lime and it resulted in a big mess almost every time. Sometimes i still managed to get something out by adding a lot of salt, but it turns the whole thing into a big mission. For future extractions I will just stick to sodium carb as my base. It works just fine.

IME If you have powdered material there's no need for boiling. I just put my powder in a jar and add boiling water. Let it sit for an hour or two and then pour it off and repeat. I start with a cup of boiling vinegar. Let the powdered bark sit in that for an hour. Then add the boiling water. With each subsequent addition of boiling water i add a bit more vinegar, without measuring. I keep adding boiling water until the water becomes relatively clear (usually after 3-4 litres). All the poured off water is then simmered down to a syrup.

The defatting sounds like a great idea, so i will be trying that on my next extraction. Usually i just wait for the syrup to cool and then add sodium carb slowly. If it was simmered down enough it should start to form a thick paste, which when left to cool produces a firm crust on top. This is ideal for oil pulling, because you can mix hot oil in vigorously till it is thoroughly combined, wait for it to cool and then the oil can be simply poured off without the need for a baster. Using very hot oil is also a good idea when pulling.

After pouring the oil off I recommend doing a sodium carb wash. This will clean things up and remove a lot of dirty color from the oil, but it slows down the process a bit.

After the sodium carb wash, i wash 3 times with acidic water using either a 2:1 or 3:1 (water to vinegar) ratio. It increases the volume that needs to be reduced in the end but i find it helps the separation and reduces the potential for soapy emulsions. I use about half a cup to a cup of acidic water per salting depending on how much oil i have.

When sucking out the vinegar I recommend using a piece of four folded tissue paper as a filter. Put this in a funnel and pour the vinegar through this. It will catch most of the excess oil that comes over when sucking.

Doing 5-9 oil pulls and salting each 3 times does the trick for me. I get most of it out in the first 3 pulls, so sometimes i just stop there.

I reduce the collected saltings down till it starts to become goo and then I add just enough water to make it all fluid again. This is then put into a dropper bottle. I find keeping it in a dropper makes dosing much easier.

I've been wanting to do a pictorial extraction log for a while now, but just haven't managed to. But i agree that there is a lack of successful veg oil logs on the nexus. So I'd be keen to see others veg extraction pics as well.

In my experience defatting with veg oil wasn't all that helpful, though I never tried it hot, always at room temp. Doing a basic (carb) wash on the oil after making the pulls is however immensely helpful for cleaning up the oil and very highly recommended if one chooses to work with the oil. However...



Bingo! This is why I've personally given up on the oil teks, they do the job, but they are much more trouble than they are worth when a polar extraction is so simple and effective.

The only reason I did the oil extraction at all for the phalaris pdf was because we know that a standard a/b with a non-polar is effective for removing undesirable compounds when working with the grasses. Going forward I will be testing if this can be accomplished with the ethanol tek as well.

but won't the acetone pull all sorts of other things from the simple basic mix (or acid tea) as well (colour,plant fats etc..) ? Considering how dirty the oil can get when pulling, i would expect a straight acetone pull to get just as messy. How do you get rid of the unwanted elements after pulling with acetone? Or am i missing a step here?

The ethanol extraction endlessness suggests looks great, only that i don't have access to good quality alcohol of any sort. Even from the chem companies i've looked at it's not that easy to find. whereas oil is readily available and cheap.

My feeling is that once you've got your oil tek rolling and you've worked out some quick fixes for problems (like dealing with emulsions when salting or filtering out excess oil). The process goes pretty smoothly. Using a sep funnel makes the whole job so much easier as well.