I know you don't do water washes with STB like you normally do with fresh water cooks with A/B but my A/B on shredded bark is not yielding much while the STB is.

So, if I let the first STB sit for a few days and then filter/separate the bark. Will there still be more DMT left in the bark? Or is sodium hydroxide so powerful that it just eat through all the cell walls like nothing, thereby extracting all the dmt and making it only necessary to have one wash? IMO, I thought that freebase dmt would be less reluctant to separate from the bark as it can't go in to the water because it is in freebase form whereas on A/B the dmt-acetate is super soluble in water.


Also, what is the maximum size chunks of bark that lye would eat through? It wouldn't dissolve anything more than 1cm thick would it? Not even over say a week or two?

-Consistency is looking something like this but I am wondering about the large chunks we see here as it is an extra effort/time to run it through the blender

Never mind, I just realized the naphtha pulled way too much oils/fats and hardly any DMT so I will not be doing STB on shredded bark anymore.

One thing I've noticed is that if you let your mixture sit for a few days and you try to do a pull you will get a BUNCH of plant fats. Best to just pull what you can while the the mixture is fresh. Also, it's so much better to blend up the bark before extracting. Imagine trying to break a stone down with water and how long it would take compared to a tiny grain of sand.

I read this interesting paper on this very thing just the other day. The paper said in regards to STB and naptha that you need to get as much as you can in the first pull. That's where it is white and reflects light etc. It said later pulls get progressively yellower. Say you did 1 pull a day. The first is going to be cleaner than the second.

What I took from this is that if you aren't going to clean up, or say you want those fats etc. you have a timeframe. First 1 day pull is where you get product that twinkles. Last pull day is where you get yellow goo "earwax". So spread out over 4 days you see that progression.

The moral of the story on that paper was to use measurments that really take advantage of that first pull, using your requirements, and that will most likely get the most from the stage 1 side of the 4 days you're given as opposed to the stage 4 side of what you can recover. The paper said after that 4 days your naptha costs cut you off from further funding.

Ironically they used the same ratios that can be found in the faq.