Hey guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. Firstly a big thanks to everyone who contributes to this forum. The wealth of information available here has been extremely helpful over the years. This is actually the first time I haven't been able to find an answer I was looking for.

I use bits and pieces from various teks, how I got to this point is not important but this is my situation: I have my salted (NaCl), basified, filtered acacia acuminata extract sitting in my extraction vessel. I have allowed it to cool to room temp. At this point I usually add hot naphtha (shelite) and shake. In this instance, however, I have foolishly heated up vinegar thinking it was shelite and added that instead.

I can see lots of tiny long crystals have formed in the solution which look a whole lot like dmt salt. I think this makes sense, as on contacting the basified solution the hot acid would have converted a lot of the freebase dmt to the salt form.

I've tried adding more NaOH to re-basify the solution but the little crystals are refusing to dissolve.

Any ideas? should I be heating the solution back up again? should I filter the crystals out with coffee filters then redissolve in something? Could they be something other than DMT salt?

Thanks in advance.

Sorry I should have mentioned... The pH of the solution is 13.5

If your solution is that high a pH level...your fine. (it's already freebased)

The needle xtals are more than likely dmt dropping out already (it's been seen before).
Just add your solvent and carry on...the needles should dissolve into the solvent.

However...you are using acacia acuminata...so it may be some other compound crashing out...(not familiar with acacia acuminata)
If they don't dissolve into solvent...just leave 'em.

Did you observe the crystals form before adding vinegar of after? How much acuminata did you use, how much salt did you use and what is the volume of water you used? Vinegar is a very weak acid and lye is a superstrong base. If you didn't add an entire litre to the solution and added a little more NaOH afterward, you should be fine. I think your fine and should go on with the extraction. However, I would like to see some pictures of the xtals-they seem interesting. My best bet would be that some alkaloids crashed out or that some sodium acetate crystals crashed out of solution.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I tried to ignore the xtals and carry on with the extraction, but only got a minimal amount of spice out of my pulls. The crystals (which I'm now convinced were a dmt salt) stayed floating in between the naphtha and base layer... kind of like how an emulsion would. I got the feeling they were interfering with the mixing of the two layers.

In the end I filtered the solution through coffee filters to remove the xtals. I then dissolved them in hot water (it took a bit of stirring and heating), basified the water and did a naphtha pull. This pull was much more successful, I didnt use enough naphtha so it was really saturated and I got about 2.5 grams of nice white spice. I'll do a couple more pulls today on the redisolved xtal solution as well as the now crystal free original basified mixture and see what I get.

I started with a little under 1kg of bark so ideally I'd like to pull another 5-10 grams.
The xtals definitely appeared after adding the vinegar

I took some photos, will try and attach them

Nice, I bet that salt chunk would have made some good pharma.

vinegar and lye, sodium acetate
mostly worthless salt i'm afraid

Not worthless ! You can make heating pads

I forgot he already based! The purge would have been quite strong, I think? With a rock of lye in the tummy?

well I did pull 2.5g of spice out of it, so not entirely worthless