Hello everyone. SWIM is in the middle of doing my first extraction. SWIM is doing Noman's tech but is confused on when exactly to do the sodium carbonate wash. Does SWIM do it before or after the freeze precipitate and pour it in to the coffee filter. SWIM seems to be getting conflicting info from an extraction overview and Volvin's tech. Any help would be appreciated. Also, if it is after, SWIM just freeze precipitates it again and then pours it into a coffee filter again or just let it evaporate after SWIM freezes it the second time? I hope that makes sense. Thanks again!

Suppose there are traces of lye and you want a carbonate wash to take care of it. I think it's of no use to first make efforts to get contaminated crystals, then dissolve them again in naphta, do a carbonate wash, freeze then again a second time, get cleaned crystals back. This is indeed what Norman tek suggests.

You can do the carbonate wash before the very first freezing (Vovin). Keeps you from doing things twice. Even better: you could do it before the evaporation of naphta volume.

Hey mate.
The wash is tought to be made after you get the stuff out of the freezer. But you could also do it before freezing.
I prefer not to pour it through a coffee filter.
The best thing to do is to evap your solvent to about 1/2 before freezing. And the next day you put it out open it up and you can see the crystals. At this point you would pour it through the filter.
The problem is that it might happen that some of your yield gets "stuck" in the filter.
Because of that I prefer to let the solvent just evap till it's gone. Now i'm left with the crystals. And now it's the time for the wash if you didn't do it before freezing
Make sure you got sodium carbonate and NOT sodium BIcarbonate.
A friend of mine lost quite a bit of his yield because of BIcarbonate.

Hope that helps.
Cheers

Okay thanks guys! SWIM's jars in the freezer are getting snow globey! SWIM will probably experiment with both a filtration and a straight evaporation.

To your point of losing product in the filter, that makes sense.

I'm still a bit confused though. I'm trying to figure out how one would do exactly as Noman's tek but insert the sodium carbonate step in Vovin's.

If the SC wash is done before freezing one would do the initial extraction then make the SC wash then mix the wash with the naphtha that was just extracted, extract again and then freeze, yes?

If the wash is meant to be after the initial freeze, what is the point of freezing it if you're just going to filter it, add more naphtha, wash and then freeze again? That seems like a waste and possible loss of product. As Jees pointed out, I just don't see the point of going through all that just to do it again. If Noman intended to do it after the freeze is there some benefit to this? SWIM only did a 50g extract so he is not going to have a lot of product loss to work with. The jars are not done freezing. Should SWIM just take them out now and do the wash then put them back in? Should it be warmed first? Sorry for all the noob questions. SWIM is just trying to do this exactly right. Thanks in advance for any replies!!

If SWIM's freeze precipitate is already almost done could he just skip the sc wash and do a hexane wash ? Would that yield a clean enough product?

If SWIM gets a good final product I'll trying to post the procedure on here.