Helloooo fellow Nexians!!! Hope you all feel great and are doing well!

So my friend decided to finally go through with his extraction after he manages some tools. He has collected about ~30g of Ac. Acuminata phyllodes and an unknown amount of twigs/small branch bark+branch wood that hasn't been measured yet. He plans on drying both the phyllodes and bark up in sunlight and then putting them in a blender/coffee grinder to increase the surface area. He also had a question about removing branch bark from small stems and small branches that are less than 1cm in diameter. How should he go about this? Or should he just chop the whole thing up in to small pieces and then try to grind it? He knows that its usually the outer brown bark layer (1-2mm), not the inner white woody fibers in the twig/branch that is usually active.

He plans on using Cyb's Hybrid AB Salt tek, which does not involve acid boils. He was wondering if this would affect the yield/ability to extract majority of the DMT out of the material. I have read the many different phyllode teks on the Acacia Extraction workspace, but he feels as though he's not comfortable with using ethanol/methanol as most teks use water.

Since he's using phyllodes + branches (could contain branch wood), he expects that there will be quite a bit of fats/tannins/gum/chlorophyll that will be in the solution.
Therefore he's thinking of doing either a defat or a re-x. Cyb's method recommends a re-x at the end.

Also he was wondering whether it would be wise to say, cover the entire blended/grinded material in water and then freezing/thawing 3x?

That's about all I have to write up so far, my friend will hopefully go ahead with the extraction this weekend. I'll let you all know what he has to say

If anyone please has anything to say, whether its feedback or helpful advice, I'd love to hear what you've got to say! It could potentially save my butt and many others when it comes to future extractions

It's been really bugging me, almost sort of like an OCD problem if you like. But the branch bark off the small branches are killing me. It's so difficult to remove, its quite hared. I don't know how to separate it from the wood, maybe someone's had some experience at this?

I wouldnt worry about separating bark from branches-it would prolly be better to report yields from whole twigs/branches alone. Also, I would suggest you extract phyllodes separately from twigs in order to know any potential differences in alkaloid content.

With regard to the extracting technique, A cyb tek should be fine. I would suggest doing a run through without defatting (acid soak-basify-nps pullz) and posting pictures of initial product. If gooey goop results from no defat, this could easily be cleaned up by doing another mini A/B with defat on alkaloid. Chlorophyll and tannins and a buncha other non-nitrogen containing plant matter will not be absorbed by the NPS so no need to worry about that. You only need to worry about contaminants in NPS if they contain nitrogen/are basic in their freebase/unsalted form.

IMHO, re crystallization doesn't make much of a difference unless you want to change the shape/size of your crystals or bump your product up from 95% to 98+% purity. I have never really understood why one would recrystallize using the same solvent they used to extract the alkaloids with in the first place (If the species present had already dissolved in NPS then they would probably dissolve again in it). I would only recommend a re-x if a significant portion of aqueous phase was present in the product or If you wanted some drool-worthy crystalline goodness.

I think you have the right idea as to what to do and how to do it and I can't wait to hear about the results!

Thanks for the valuable feedback, Godsmacker
I'll do a separate extraction for the two types of material. That's actually a really good way of summarising all the different types of methods of purification.

Yeah i'll probably go bald trying to remove the bark from those tiny branches so i'll just weigh em up and chuck em in. That's what Endless suggested too.

I was wondering what type of NPS I should use for the defat? I've only got shellite atm but I could go for a grocery run.

Also when adding the NPS to pull, does it matter if I use a stirring rod or just swirl it around? I don't want to shake it up and down vigorously, as i'm worried emulsions might form. Do you know if the DMT could be vaporised if I put the twigs and phyllodes inside a preheated oven at 30oC?

So an update is due for this thread;

I ended up using 50g of acuminata stem bark with Cyb's tek. I got really yellow NPS pulls, which I had freeze precipitated initially. I actually ended up getting a few small x-tal formations at the bottom. However, since it was my first tek, I had thought that I missed the pre-evap step so I took the pulls out, evapped till it got to half the volume (at this point it had a few gooe-y darker syrupy like solution in the NPS. I then freeze-precipd that and then I left it to dry for a few hours. Ended up with small brown/yellow specks, which scrapped up to a brown wax. I smoalked the whole thing, probably around 0.1-0.2g of it. Felt a strong body high which slowly worked it's way up to the head. Quite pleasant actually

Just a quick note & not that important considering that we've already concluded that you need not separate the outer bark from the twigs themselves....

I've found a planer, especially an electric planer, to be a godsend for removing bark/shredding bark/roots/twigs/branches...

Yeah, after this extraction i've learned quite a bit. Mainly that re-x or mini-ab was in order but the full spec goo was still quite nice.

Thats a handy tool to have! May we know what type it is?