Hello!

To start off I simply want to thank all the Nexus veterans who have compiled such a rich source of information. This place has inspired me to explore teks I would have been too chicken to try otherwise.

I plan on doing a Vovin style DMT extract soon, but right now I have just taken the first enthralling steps into 69Ron's beautiful tek.

All I have right now is a postal scale so all my measurements have been estimates (but hey at least if I'm off I should be consistently off).

I set aside ~100g dried cactus chips and powderized them in a coffee grinder. Coffee grinders have served me well in the past, but I must say cactus, even dried is TOUGH. I had to unjam the grinder a bunch of times which was quite frustrating! (Especially with safety goggles and a dust mask on!) Next time I will probably switch to a good blender, or at least a higher quality grinder, but at least I have a cheap disposable thing I can use till it burns out.

I then weighed out 25g CaOH and mixed thoroughly. Then I gradually added 300ml of distilled water. I was planning on being VERY stringent with the water, but the powder absorbed all 300ml without ever getting watery. The consistency became very spongy and rubbery. I was tempted to add more water, but I decided against it, don't want to mess everything up on the second step lol.

I mixed and mixed this mess until I could I could see no powder left behind. The mix had become very clumpy, so I did my best to break up all the clumps. At this point I tested the pH with a strip, it was ~12 (maybe even 12.5).

Then I added 300ml d-limo and mixed some more. At first I was worried that the d-limo was soaking into the mixture, but swishing the pyrex mixing bowl around showed that most of the d-limo was loosely flowing in the bowl. Huzzah!

The pyrex mixing bowl I bought is PERFECT for this. It's nice and big, and has a simple trench on one side for pouring.

I'm gonna let the d-limo sit for the next ten hours or so, mixing it up occasionally. Then I'll begin with the vinegar pulls (I have a sep funnel thankfully). I have cling wrap on the bowl to prevent evaporation / cat hair contamination.

I can't wait to see the result (even if it's failure). Anyone got any comments or advice?

My first vinegar pull is evaporating, but I'm a little worried.

The d-limonene was VERY yellow with a strong green tinge, but no matter how hard I "vortexed" or just plain shook my sep funnel, I couldn't seem to transfer any discoloration to the vinegar. So all 4 pulls were completely clear, but at least the first pull was near neutral pH (5-6), and the fourth pull was close to being the pH of vinegar (~3), so I know SOMETHING is being salted, it just doesn't look as 'gunky' as what I remember being reported in 69ron's thread. I'm keeping the limonene pull in case I just didn't mix thoroughly enough, but otherwise I'm at a loss as to what could be the issue.

At least the cactus is feeling a lot "looser" now that it has been 24hours since basifying. During the first pull there were still hard rubbery "rocks" of cactus matter, and now these rocks have loosened into cottage-cheese like chunks that can easily be separated with my spoon. Maybe the second pull will be where all the alkaloids are at?

If anyone could let me know how normal/abnormal this is I would HIGHLY appreciate it!

More updates:

The first pull has evapped to the point where I've taken it off heat and started to simply fan it. It looks like the yields will be low, but I can definitely see little circular patches of CLEAR cyrstals forming! Also there are patches of red here and there.

The second pull is being heat evapped. It also was crystal clear, but this time I used a heat bath on my sep funnel to help with emulsions that were forming from mixing. Although the vinegar still never took on any yellow, the limonene got much clearer which I will take as a good sign.

For the third limo pull, I used the 200ml I was able to recover from the first pull and added 100ml fresh limo. Also I recovered all 300ml from the second pull so that's another thing I'm taking as a good sign.

I've been splashed with so much mescy limo and licked a bit of my vinegar (nice n bitter!) and I'm actually feeling 'off' from baseline! I'm happy enough with just that!

69ron I want to kiss your feet!

This whole time I was biting my nails like a teen behind the wheel for the first time, only to discover that the car practically drives itself!

The three or four tiny crystal drops multiplied and multipled until I had a field of dreams! The whole plate was COVERED with these babies.

First off a terrible macro of the crystals on the plate (with finger to illustrate how transparent they were):


And the next two are of the scraped results, the yields are out of this world!




Unfortunately I don't have a mg scale handy at the moment, anyone want to estimate the yield on pull #1? Could this be over 1g???

Hey man,

Great work with the tek...it is awesome...and great to see a pic of your end product...doesn't look like a bad yield at all...but would be worth getting a cheap mg scale off Ebay so you are able to measure out doses. May I enquire as to where you got your cactus from?

Thanks!

I have an mg scale which is in a different state. The friend who has it is unreliable. I asked her to ship it, but truthfully I know it won't arrive, so I ordered the same model from ebay last night (it should arrive by the time I have the spare time to dose anyhow).

I ordered from Icaros, a peruvian supplier. According to his site these cactii are grown and dried at altitude, and the yeilds speak for themselves. He also claims that they preserve the cactus roots so that the same strains they have selected my live on in perpetuity! Can't blame him, this cactus rocks.

He is a bit more expensive than the usual providers, but I suspect his product blows them out of the water.

As for updates, my second pull only yielded about half as much as the first (but that's still a ton in my book). The third pull is drying as we speak!

Ah that's good to know, as my cactus is from Icaros too... Although price wise I was under the impression his cactus was some of the best going, in bulk anyway...

Your end product looks really nice and crystally though, mine looks more waxy than that after I scrape it up.

Good work though man, I hope you have high time when come to eating some!

The first plate was filled with very nice crystals, but what I've noticed is that the manageability of the material depends on the thickness of the sludge as much as the purity of the mescaline. On the first pull everything crystalized, even the thicker pools. When I scraped this up it turned into wax, but very crumbly wax. When I hit the thicker pools, they came off in big waxy peels that I immediately chopped up with the razor blade (to help release moisture), these peels also turned much darker, which I assumed was also because of excess moisture. Those darker 'crystals' are actually visible in the pictures.

The second pull dried while I wasn't paying attention and so the thick fluid had not been fully spread over the plate with tilting as I like to do. Naturally, this took much longer to dry as there were more concentrated pools. The thin pools however did not crystalize as 'cleanly' as the first pull's. The formations look more like little circular fingerprints than pinned crystals. It still scraped up easily from tan to amber wax. There was more amber this time, probably both from impurity and more moisture.

The third pull was pretty bunk. I was very excited at first since as I was heading off to work I had just dried off the liquid and saw that my tilting skills had worked again and formed a promising dry layer over the whole plate. But by the time I had returned from work nothing had changed (maybe a few of those fingerprint-like swirls). I heated it up some more and blew air over it, to no avail. It seemed pretty dry though. When I scraped it it immediately turned into resiny goo. I scraped the whole plate but I barely have a ball. I've scraped it up and spread it out a couple times, and put it back on heat. Hopefully this pull turns into something nice and dry, otherwise I won't feel right adding it to my little jar of what I presume to be purer stuff.

Ugh I have a fourth pull I was going to vacuum filter but now I'm not so sure.... maybe I'll only use 40ml total vinegar over however many pulls it takes to reach a pH of 3-4...

The first extraction was fully completed and I got my mg scale yesterday.

The first two pulls combined yielded a very sexy 1.5% in good crumbly crystals.

The second two pulls yielded .1% in goop.

This tek is EFFICIENT.

I will be assaying 300mgs tonight (I know most people advise to start low, but with a looong list of recreational substances under my belt, I know my body/mind pretty well). Wish me luck!

I feel as if I'm talking to myself here, but perhaps someone will find all of this useful.

The bioassay went smashingly. 300mg was the perfect starter dose for me, though next time I want to have a full psychedelic experience from it I will definitely be upping it to maybe 500mgs (I wish I had lower thresholds like some people do, unfortunately I overdid it on LSD a few years ago and my brain has never been the same). Till then I will occasionally be trying the sub 100mg doses that 69ron recommends so highly, I definitely felt like I had some euphoria from the small amounts I ingested during the extraction, very MDMA-like (go phenethylamines!).

EDIT: I forgot, my next experiment is to evaluate the purity of the acetate salts. My next 100g extraction I will be resalting the acetate as the HCl salt and then cleaning with acetone and ISO, and compare the weights by molecular weight. Also, having pure mesc hcl will make my dosing experiments more "accurate" whatever that means.

I'm excited to read about that!

Got a bunch of vinegar drying in pyrex pans from three vinegar pulls, after each of three Limonene soaks. Thats over 200 ml of vinegar to evaporate. While the vinegar evaporates seems to be a good time to contemplate, plan, and review for a newbie such as me. Considering the HCL followed by acetone wash, if I can find a clear description here, and considering a final treatment of the Limonene with carbonated water, as I've read some people have done and gotten results, though last I read it was unclear if the results were psychoactive.

1. Anybody know?

2. Is it a good idea to combine the final products from the 3 pyrexs, or keep pure-purer-purest batches?

3. If the HCL/acetone wash is done, can the alkaloids that are washed out be recovered and ....used? Are they active? What is the procedure for recovering them, if they are active?

4. can anyone point me to a good step by step post of how to do the HCL/acetone thing?


Thanks, and thanks for bearing with a beginner who is a little lost, but working to figure it out.

Here is 6oo ml of limonene, depleted by salting with vinegar three times, after adding carbonated water. I guess the thing that looks like egg whites floating in the limonene is an emulsion? Any ideas on what the white crap under the carbonated water is?

It's bad news as far as I'm concerned. Saw too much of that in my time.

How pure was your limonene?

I had similar results using 90%, but when I used 95% I got nothing like that.

Well hypotethetically the white stuff at the bottom of the jar could be mescaline carbonate that has lost its solubility. It could also be CaOH that was pulled into the limonene (though that should have shown in the vinegar as well).

I must say the the limonene itself looks VERY wrong. I have no idea what those "emulsion" strands are or why they would be floating at the TOP. Emulsions are a layer that forms when two substances mix and are SLOWLY unmixing, and that's why they always appear in between the layers.

Once you have the liquids poured off (assuming the white layer doesn't come with it), scrape some of the white layer off and add a small amount of water. If the solution is basic we know it's CaOH.

If it's not basic, have a LITTLE taste. If it's not bitter, it ain't mescaline/alkaloids, so it's either bleached cactus powder or Calcium OR some crazy impurity in your seltzer water (quinine?) or in you limonene. What's interesting is that you only noticed this during the carbonated water extraction, which leads me to believe you may have bought club soda instead of simple seltzer water, club soda has quinine, possibly even sugar.

Trust me, that aint mescaline. But you do want to filter it out so put it to the side if you really want to see for yourself, the chances are when it's dry it will mostly dissapear.

I trust that it isn't mescaline (I was literally running through everything I thought it could possibly be).

But then what is it? Is it Calcium?

Whatever it is, assuming it's NOT coming from the carbonated water, it should have also appeared in the vinegar solutions.

I think it's a heavy emulsion. But it could also be small particles of cactus tissue. I've had both when using inferior limonene

yes, I had pretty much concluded that I had junk. Hopefully, the vinegar salting got most of the good stuff. I was interested in trying the seltzer, since others had gotten results. I was careful to get just carbonated, no quinine or additives, so not sure what happened. I got greedy and strained the cactus matter pretty heavily through triple layer cheesecloth, and maybe squeezed a bunch of CAOH through?

Also, the limonine had been salted previously with vinegar, so who knows impurities I was dealing with.

Regardless, I think I just put the whole thing down the toilet for a nice lemon scented flush. I'm not sure I am up to trying to salvage anything from that mess.

Hi grrr31
Over in the cacti section you will find a thread on HCL / limonene extraction the cleaning steps are set out there.
Page 33/34 of the vineger tech there is some talk about the convesion to HCL.
The best bet is to read both threads start to finish.
If I could work out how to post a link I would but its hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

Cheers
Got