Yesterday I performed my first extraction from 100 grams of ACRB with disappointing results. I have not drained off the naptha yet but i did have a little peak in the freezer and all i could see was 6 to 8 small white crystals on the bottom of the tray, a couple of hits at max. I followed Earthwalker tek (https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=58064) and I'm trying to work out where I went wrong?

In a 1.5 liter glass (wine) bottle I freeze/thawed 3 times.

Added 55-60mls white table viniger and left in a heat bath of 50 degrees C for 1.5 - 2 hours. Turning regularly. No PH scale was used.

Dissolved 80g of salt in 400mls or hot water and added it to acid soup. I did not add a further 600 mls as suggested because the size of my bottle would not allow for it.

-Added 50g 100% Lye to 300mls water and added it to the bottle containing the soup and was then topped of with water leaving enough room for naptha pulls.

-Base soup was left in heat bath for 2.5 hours. Turning occasionally.

-50mls of warm naptha was added to the soup and gently turned end over end for 1 min or so before being left to settle into two layer. Separation happened almost immediately. This was done 4 times per pull and 5 pull were performed in total. Pulls were done with a plastic pipette and collected in a glass jar. Soup was left in heat bath when separating and between pulls.

From here I went straight in to the clean up steps.

-Added 500mls of tap water and 60mls of white viniger to a 1 liter bottle then added the pulled naptha, the naptha went cloudy.

- The bottle was gently turned end over end and left to settle 10 times. Separation happened almost immediately and no brown fatty layer was not noticed as mention in the original tek. Used naptha was siphoned off with a pipette and stored in a glass jar.

- 50g of Lye was added to 200mls cold tap water then added to the acid solution in the 1 liter bottle. I was expecting the water to turn white and be able to see dmt floating round the top of the solution, this didn't happen the way I was i expected it to. The bottle turned slightly cloudy and something that looked like algae or bacteria could be seen suspended in the water.

-5 pulls were done with fresh hot naptha. Each pull was shaken and let to separate. Pulls were collected in a pyrex dish. No white fatty layer was noticed between water and naptha. Pulls were crystal clear.

-Pulls were pre evaped with a fan for about 1 hour before the dish was wrapped in plastic wrap and placed in the freezer over night. Naptha did not turn cloudy when under the fan.

Any Ideasa when I might have went wrong? Bad Bark?

Only difference from the origanl tek was i used a 1.5 liter instead of a 2 liter but was told that it would be ok in another post.

I used Ronsonal as Naptha.
Lye was 100%
Water was all tap water, some of it was boiled for dissolving the salt.
Viniger was normal cheap table white viniger.
Salt was iodized.....I couldn't find no-iodized.
I do not have a PH meter so PH was never mesured.
I do not have 0.01 scales as yet, i have ordered them, hope they arrive soon

I still Have the soup, the 1 liter Base water and the used naptha.

It doesn't get any easier than lazymans tek, put your basified water in and let it break down for a couple days, add naptha, mix it up several times while keeping it warm. Do a few solvent pulls and combine them, do a mini a/b if you prefer, then freeze precip. If the acrb was decent then there should be more than a few specks of xtals. Also get your self a hdpe jug (windshield wiper fluid bottle type). This should give plenty of room. Get some pH papers to make sure your ph is right as it'll drastically reduce yield if it's not.

Also how powdered was the bark?

I've used this tek twice with different bark each time. the first time, mine didn't go cloudy either. I didn't get much product at all. The second time, I used more heat in the initial extractions and did more mixing (and like I said it was different bark) and it very noticeably clouded up as soon as the lye mixture hit it. I got a better yield with that batch.

You might want to try doing a couple more pulls from your base soup and just evaporate the naphtha and see if there's anything left in there, or you could evaporate the "dirty" naptha and see if there's anything in there. You can always dissolve what is leftover in more solvent if you want to clean it up.

Also, in both my extractions I had a lot of material floating around in my cold freeze precip solution that I filtered out. Maybe you just have a lot still suspended in the solution.

Or it could be bad bark.

Anyway, I hope you get it worked out. I know I was a little disappointed when my first extraction didn't work very well.

Thank for your input guys. I have just cam home from work and took another look at my crystals and think i may have jumped the gun a little with my earlier post. I have now drained the naptha (ronsonol) and there are a lot more fluffy crystals then originally thought. To begin with i could only see about 8 larger clumps and now after 8 or so more hours in the freezer way more spice is visible. It is almost dry now and i will post pic soon.
Just 2 more questions if you don't mind?
On a closer inspection of my baking tray containing the spice, in the right light some tiny specs that look almost like water droplets can be seen...Just wondering is this small amounts of spice or is it a type of residue from the ronsonol?

Spaced Out 2 - I will defiantly be getting a PH tester, i ment to get one when i picked up my naptha but totally forgot an yes the bark was completely powdered.

OneStepBeyond - Next time I will try high heat and more mixing. If I was to try another Pull from my base soup would i have to reheat it? Also is there a chance there could be some spice left in the base water from the clean up step?

One last thing, When draining out the ronsonal (naptha) afrom the baking tray it had turned cloudy. Is this a sign of anything? I Did pour it through a coffee filter because some of the crystals were floating around and i didn't want to loose any.

I just scraped the tray and there was a kinda waxy layer on the bottom of the try, couldn't scrape it all with a c-card. Will scrape what's left tommorw with a razor blade. Is that waxy stuff normal?

All scraped up

Yep waxy stuff is normal. Some of it is spice that smeared across the glass and some is fats and oils that cross over. Now put your white stuff in an air tight vial, and scrape what you can from dish then recrystallize, other than that it looks good

I don't a a vile. I only have a little Baggie, hopefully that will be fine. How would I go about re crystallising the waxy stuff?

Try this.

So the White spice it safe to smoke? Its is really fluffy, kinda like snow. The white spice is a little waxy/sticky, dmt i've had in the past was yellow and dry and powdery.
Would it really be worth trying to re-crystallize the waxy stuff smeared to the bottom of the tray? there is not that much there. Seems like it wouldn't be worth the effort.
Should I think about re-crystallizing the whole batch?

Yes, I'd reheat it. and yes, there could be. Did you keep the "dirty" naphtha from the initial extraction. If so, you could re-use it and if there's any product left in the naphtha, you should be able to get it out this way. You could go back through the process with the used naphtha and you might have more luck the second time around with the heated pulls. You don't have much to lose in trying. The fact that the cold naphtha was still cloudy after the freeze precip is a promising sign.




Freeze precip spice is fluffy like that, and isn't exactly what I'd call bone dry powder. It sounds pretty good to me. You could probably scrape up what's left on the tray and it will look like a small amount of yellow/brown goo. If it was me, I'd scrape it up and keep it separate, then later if you collect any more goo in future extractions you can put it all together and re-x at that time. There's probably not enough there right now to bother with a re-x.

Take one step beyonds advice, probably not enough there to re-xtal, but if you save it then it can be combined later with other xtraction goos for a better yield. Heat is important throughout xtraction process, spice is more soluble in warm naptha. Xtracting more per pull is the goal.
Spice is waxy, fluffy, and has a lighter odor than yellow and orange powder. Colored spice usually has dmt n-oxide mixed in and maybe nmt, and can still be very active, I think most just prefer clean white spice free of contaminates. Now you can go enjoy the end result from pic above.

Ok I will re-heat the base soup and re pull with the dirty naptha that was discard in the clean up stage. Then I guess I should do the clean up steps again? Should I use a 1 liter bottle again?
I still have the contents of the original 1 liter bottle used for clean up, can I dispose of this? if so what is the best method?

The naptha that was poured from my collection try after coming out of the freezer was put in a jar and I put it in the freezer, A few crystals can be seen on the bottom of the jar.

So please correct me if im wrong....
I will reheat base soup and attempet additional pulls with dirty naptha.
Do clean up steps the then do naptha pulls again.....im guessing I can use naptha that was poured off my collection tray?

Reuse your solvent, cuts down on overall cost. I myself make sure I have plenty of space in my container, any hdpe (high density poly ethylene)container will do, a regular windshield wiper fluid bottle is this type, hell a milk jug works but doesn't take heat very well. Just do all the steps you mentioned and you should be good. Just find you gallon sized jug so your not fighting space.

Use the dirty naphtha for the initial extractions and use the naphtha from the freezer for the clean-up. If you follow all the steps in the tek you will probably have to add some new naphtha at the end to be able to make all the pulls. As for the used 1L of base water, I doubt there's much of anything worthwhile in there. But you can hold onto it for a while just in case. When you're done with it, just dump it down the drain followed by a bunch of water. It's basically drain cleaner anyway.

or... If you just want to see if there's anything left that you missed and you don't want to go to the trouble of the mini a/b, you could just use all the used naphtha you have to take pulls from your heated base soup, evaporate it all in a dish and see what it leaves behind. It won't be clean and fluffy but you'll have your answer and it can be cleaned up after the fact. It will be a fair bit of solvent to evaporate and it's kind of a waste though.

I hope you have some success with this. Please let us know how it turns out. If you still don't get much of a result, it could be due to other factors (ie. bad bark). Like I said, I got almost the same exact result from my first extraction. At the very least it looks like you've got a little bit to experiment with. Have fun!

Well, as advised I just completed some more pulls on the same soup and again the results were disappointing. I re-used the naptha from my original pulls.This time round the spice i was left a little off white, not yellow but no where near as white as the spice from the first round of pulls.

My scales arrive today and when i weighed my goods it came to about 0.2 from 100g ACRB...(dont have an exact weight because i sampled some of my goods the other night)

I guess I just have bard bark, maybe its trunk no root bark?

I think I will try one more 100g gram extraction. This time round I will have a ph meter so i will make sure the all ph's are in check. If i dont see any better results i might just do one large extraction with what will be left, about 600g using the acid boil method https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=44251

It could be low yielding bark, which is always a possibility. The acid cook is very time consuming, but worth a try. Just remember to keep your combined basified tea warm as well as your solvent. Good that you have a pH meter now, so that you can be more precise. You didn't mention anything about how your spice was that you sampled

Look When I started out I made that many mistakes it wasn't funny , it also cost me a fortune and untold amount of frustrating hours thinking ohh it must've been my water bath was to hot - cold !!!!! ,, my scale musta been wrong and I put 48g salt instead of 55 g !!!!!!! , all this stuff went around my head I couldn't handle it any longer ,, but there was one person that said EW you're technic is sound it has to be you're bark , but I said no I tried two different batches !! But still cyb kept saying its you're bark .... so I tried another batch doing the same old routine and when I checked in the morning I had a huge big crusty bunches on spice , I couldn't believe it woooo I was so happy , so fast forward 12+ months and over 25-35 extractions later doing extractions just by eye and get the same results they vary in yields but there successful , these extractions ppl are so simple they truly are hard to mess up ...... as long as you keep the order of the chemical reactions and procedures it will work , don't stress the small stuff

I agree with you, fortunately I have not had any screw ups from day 1 due to everything I had read on here, and I find it amazing that others still struggle with extractions. I'm like you after doing so many I just eyeball my measurements, maybe check pH periodically, and proceed as usual. I can smell when it's there and when it's not. Your yield will vary greatly that's why I tried a few different sources before settling with one. Now I keep a stock pile from that source because I know it's generally decent. Extract when necessary. Practice will make perfect, you'll get a feel for it after doing several.