I know you can boil harmalas when dissolved in acid but once you salt it out, is it still stable enough to boil off excess water?

As I understand it the harmalas get the Chlorine ions from salt and precipitate in the salt harmala form.

I know the salt form of harmala is the brown needle like crystals and the Freebase is the white/tan powder. Same stuff, just different forms.

Shoot, I could be totally wrong here but I'm pretty sure the salt is just forcing the harmalas to precipitate out of solution. They are converted to their salt form in the presence of a low ph i.e. the vinegar.

There appears to be a little confusion about the term "salt".

Commonly, "salt" (as the white grainy substance that people put in their food for the purpose of flavoring) means sodium chloride.

Chemically, a "salt" means an ionic compound that results from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. Examples of this type of salt are sodium chloride, magnesium sulfate, potassium iodide etc.

Harmala alkaloids belong to the chemical class of amines. In freebase form these are organic bases and can react with an acid to form an organic ammonium ion and together with the remaining part of the acid (which is now confusingly called a conjugate base) it forms a salt.

So, you see, freebase harmalas and harmala salts are not the same thing.

The third meaning of "salt" is in "salting" the harmalas. This is actually not a very exact term, because "salting" can refer to several different chemical procedures. Here, it mean precipitating a specific harmala salt from a solution of a different harmala salt (notice that there is no freebase harmala involved here.) This procedure is sometimes also named "Manske" after the chemist who first systematically described the harmala alkaloids.

What happens is that to a hot solution of harmala aminium ions and acetate ions, there is added a hot solution of sodium ions and chloride ions (from the sodium chloride salt.) When there are enough sodium ions present in the solution, more than 5% by weight, most of the harmala aminium ions and an equal amount of the chloride ions click together and become insoluble when the solution cools. Thus are formed crystals of harmala hydrochloride (or "harmalinium" chloride - not a real term but you get the idea.)

What remains in solution is the sodium ions, the acetate ions and some of the the remaining chloride ions. When you boil down the solution, you get crystals of mostly sodium chloride, a fair bit of sodium acetate and a little harmala hydrochloride that had remained dissolved in the cooled solution.

Harmala salts are very heat stable so you can boil off the water without chemically damaging the harmalas.

Sleepermustawaken, it would help both you and others if you did a bit more research on the forum and on the web in general before opening so many threads here on the forum with IMHO often quite undifferentiated and underarticulated questions.

Sleepermustawaken searched using search function, neative results... Search using Site: dmt-nexus.me and yielded negative results... therefor preceded to FAQ... seems pretty reasonable to me.

SleeperMA, just please think for a second. You know that one can safely boil harmalas in acid, then you ask if it is okay to boil off excess water, what could be the temperature difference between boiling and boiling off excess water? There is no temperature difference. I've even wondered what inspired you to ask the question?

Another give away is ayahuasca: if you have read about it just a bit, you could have known that this brew is boiled-evaporated a very long time, to a small volume to drink, and the harmala actives are not destroyed.

Why do you want to boil off excess water? If you do a manske, your alkaloids precipitate already in salt from from the water so you only have to filter, no boiling off excess water. Most teks in our wiki explain this

Alright easy does it there Jees, I am no chemistry expert. I thought that perhaps because of the extra chlorine ions or whatever happened in the salt manske it might have made it unstable when boiling, I didn't realise though that salting the water just forces crystals to appear like a crowded room forces you out the door. I thought there was some chemical change as a result of the excess salt. There was no data so I asked the question.



I was trying to find a way to not use filtration but it is pretty hard without boiling down salt water then basifying with minimal water to dry and wash excess sodium carb off.

Why do you want to avoid filtration?

Filtration can be greatly improved with vacuum, which you could get a filtering set up even with a cheap pump, or even improvise using a vacuum cleaner... Also if you do a thorough pre-filtration before precipitating the alkaloids.

Try to stick with the procedures described in the wiki before trying to change and "optimize" anything until you have a thorough understanding of the underlying principles.

Knowing a bit more about the basics involved also helps to make more effective web and forum searches for further information. It also helps you to formulate questions in a way that doesn't require others who would want to help you to double guess what you are really asking.

The mansked material is more stable against higher temperature, and the data for it is present, it just takes time reading, reading.. the nexus site.

My tone was there to trigger you indeed and I did that for your own best, there was love behind, a motivator for change.
My best teachers in school weren't the loveliest dudes, they were effective.
I'm no teacher here but want to be efficient nonetheless, forgive me to encourage you to think

I followed the teks in the WIKI and just sat their with a bleak stare on my face watching for hours this solution not going through coffee filters or cotton balls. It didn't advise on any other methods apart from a vacuum filter and I just thought that was some high tek gadget I couldnt afford when I google searched it.

Still the mods look at a post like this and shrug their shoulders and think (the teks are perfect the way they are). Well I think they could be improved, at least put a link in the tek so that stupid people like me don't get confused then spend over 5 hours trying to make an extraction without a filter. you are probably laughing at me, I don't blame you it is pretty ridiculous but seriously, please for the love of god put a link in the harmala wiki showing how to put a water pump onto a funnel with cotton balls in there!

Instead of stupifying the teks, can we please unstupify the people? I think it works better that way in the long run.

A vacuum filtering setup isn't everything. Just wait until you've seen filter papers clogged absolutely shut tight with fat and crud within 3 seconds of filtering, leaving the buchner funnel filled with liquid that will not pass through. It's no fun..

Don't blame the moderators for aspects of the teks that are not to your liking. Why don't you write a tek yourself that does fit to your standards? Don't expect everyone to like it immediately, be open for constructive criticisms and improve it. After a while it might end up on the wiki. If you want to write a serious tek, plan to be working on it for at least a year before it gets to level "really good".

Stupify the teks? Huh? I don't like your attitude there mate, I am not attacking the mods! Stop trying to make me out to be some sort of villain, I am trying to help this place by proving feedback from my experience. Whether the mods want to listen and help potential new comers and upgrade with better info from feedback in the forums is their business.

The forum moderators do not write or maintain the teks, the forum members do. The moderators have enough work and responsibility already. I am not making you out for a villain, I am inviting you to write better info.

Oh great, that is good news then. So I can write and upload a tek to the wiki and insert a link into a previous tek?

This is what I wrote earlier, upthread (and you even quoted it yourself):


So what I am proposing is that you open a thread in the appropriate subforum and develop the tek in that thread. You can ask for and receive feedback in that thread and update the tek accordingly. When it has reached a certain level of maturity and has been checked for errors, it could be added to the wiki.

Please don't add stuff randomly to the wiki that has not been reviewed and fact checked on the forum. That only adds to the workload of the moderators when they have to remove it after complaints.

doubt it, that's like me could win lottery

Alright I'll make a thread of my new gadget.