I thought my first extraction failed because of adding water lowering the PH. I had saved the used solvent in a jar in my big freezer where it has been for a few days. I pulled it out just now and saw dmt crystals all over the inside. I poured out the solvent and fished out all I could with a long tea spoon and put them on a glass plate to dry.
I heated up some 90ml Naptha to 110f in a hot water bath and poured it in put the lid and shook vigorously a few times until the glass looked clean and poured all the solvent into a large baking dish. I am assuming in a day or so to have some goop evaped out. I have it 90 percent covered with plastic wrap sitting on the back porch.

Question: The naphtha is yellow and very cloudy in its chilled state from the freezer. When it is all evaped down I am assuming I will have a bunch of other plant material present besides the dmt. Do I need to re/X it or can I just smoke the beige goop?

:/

Never hurts to recrystallize materials like this. if it evaporates down to yellow goo it will still contain actives just not as pure. What was starting plant material?

You want to avoid basic water ending up in final product as that is corrosive.
hope this information is useful.

Starting material was Acacia after my first experiment I have decided to use the FASA technique to take the guess work out. From my understanding the DMT-Fumarate salt store much better and can then be converted to a freebase in several different ways. No defat step is needed=Bonus

A quick question. I have been reading and studying can you use citric acid saturated acetone with a Soxhlet extractor? From my limited understanding, you should be able to extract the alkaloids into the CASA then add FASA to convert the salts to DMT fumarate which will precipitate out saving the basifying and pulling. Then after washing the precipitate with Acetone a couple of times vacuum desiccate it and store for safe keeping.

So I tried to convert some freebase to furmates. 50ml Acetone (dried with baked Epsom Salts) mixed with 1G, then poured into an evap dish. Added FASA dropwise until there was no longer a milky reaction. Placed it under a fan for a minute and the milky texture cleared up some and formed crystals in the bottom of the dish. I walked away for a couple minutes and when I came back the crystals were gone and I was left with a yellowish green, slightly syrupy residue.

EDIT: So, left in ambient air overnight it has turned into a thicker goo. If I'm speculating, I would say that there was still a presence of water in my acetone. Curious if this could also be caused by a presence of fats that were still present in my freebase material.

Will leave this goo out for another day or two to see if there is a further hardening off. If the results are unsatisfactory the resulting goo will be scrapped and dissolved into an A-B

I am a complete layman. For drying anything would a vacuum distiller run with a homemade water eductor or an epoxy off gassing pot work. That way I could vent the exhaust gas out a window and not smell the house up. It would also be much faster than fan drying. I look forward to hearing the answer.

Ananda, for a layman you sure are looking at some highfalutin sciencey crap for your setups. As far as a Soxhlet goes, its looks like a fancy contraption but its really pretty straight-forward.

Solvent is evaporated(boiled) from your flask and travels up to the condenser. The condenser cools the solvent back to a liquid form and drops into the Soxhlet chamber. This then fills up (slowly) and is fed back into your flask via gravity siphon.

In theory, acetone could be run through this setup, but you are going to have to keep that condenser and chamber pretty cold. I've seen it done with cannabis (Chock full of waxes and chlorophyll) but I'm not sure how citric acid saturated acetone would work. I think it would be of dubious value considering the time and setup required to run the experiment.

No. Citric acid is not volatile. Browse the forum a bit more, there is plenty of info here so you won't have to re-invent the wheel.

Doing xylene pulls. Added fasa dropwise. No idea if this is looking right. Pictured right is from last night, left I just did.

Edit: ok, so the right was decanted and the precipitate dried in front of a fan. It looked like broken fiberglass, very white. This was washed with acetone to remove excess furmaric acid and dried, yielding a pill like yellowish powder. Weight seems right. Is that it?

I used the search engine with no joy. Could someone go over the steps after you add FASA to get the precipitate washed?

Wash with Acetone they said. I did an A.B pulled with xylene and added FASA stirred it good and set aside all night. I had a bunch of precipitate in the bottom of the beaker I poured off the xylene without getting any of the stuff in the bottom. I then poured everything in the beaker into a large casserole dish under a fan in the garage.

Can I filter this in a coffee filter and pour acetone over it and let it dry? Then I could scrape the DMT off after it is completely dry. Sadly I do not have a Buchner filter yet it is on my wish list.

A quick, although somewhat esoteric, question.
Just how shelf stable are the dry freebase quinazoline alkaloids of P. harmala?
Would they show degradation/oxidation after some years storage in a dry dark place?

I've just dumped them in the past but on this kilo I want to save them in case I want to experiment with their chemical or pharmacological properties at some point, and collecting the freebase would be easiest.

Id collect the alkaloids now and store them as salts. Or you can prob vacuum seal and freeze them in a dark container. Two years is a long time for the plant matter to degrade.

What a mess!
I did four 4 liter boils on 850 grams of seed, concentrated it to 2.5 liters, added tons of 3M ammonia. Rue tea has an amazing buffer capacity, it stunk of ammonia and was still pH 9.5. So I dissolved in 40 grams of sodium carbonate (anh.) and let stand overnight. Still ~pH 9.5, basification of centrifuged filtrate showed it still needed MORE base, and I couldnt filter the decanted sludge because I dont have vacuum filtration and coffee filters were acting like coffee cups
VDS apparently didnt consider the lack of vacuum filtration in peoples homes when he advocated basification before salt precips. Or the tremendous buffer capacity of concentrated rue brew.
I stirred in ~250 ml of muriatic acid to get back to pH 6 and am now going straight into manskes just like I always did.

Someone else can have the joy of exploring the chemistry of quinazoline alkaloids

So I'm tooling up for a series of 5 or 6 mescaline extractions over the next few months, comparing yields from different source material, and I'm stuck on one point of procedure.
In titrating the mescaline down into the aqueous layer all the teks and experienced extractors say to shoot for a final, stable, pH of 6-7 by means of frequent monitoring of pH.
Just how is that monitoring conveniently accomplished?
Say I suspect a 10 kilo pile of fresh cactus could be anywhere from 0.25-1.0% on the dry weight basis. That would require 6-24 ml of 1M HCl. If I started with 6 ml and added acid in 3 ml increments, testing a drop of solution for pH at each step, I could still see the pH go from 8 to 2 from one 3 ml increment.
Are people using pH meters?
Most pH meters in the price range of members here seem to use a polycarbonate probe body, its generally advised not to use polycarbonate plastics with xylene or toluene.
This is the unit I have on order. I love that the probe matches my avatar but I'd be hesitant to leave it in xylene for an hour...

Also, I never see mention of back titrating when it does go too far. Does anyone add a few drops of ammonia to get it back up to pH 6? Ammonium chloride is used in gram quantities to acidify peoples urine so a few mg should be harmless, lol. An IPA wash may even remove it.

Just finished my first extract, a Max Ion tek on MHRB.

At what point do you dispose of the basified mix? My first extraction is (I believe) complete. Just put the product in the freezer to re-x. Prior to re-x, I measured approx 1.1g from 50g of shredded bark.

Being my first extract, and not knowing WTH I was doing (I understand much better now, on this side of it), I'm hesitant to dispose of the basified mix until I know all usable product has been extracted. I ran about 12 pulls. (4) pulls first day, combined in dish, put in freezer. Decanted used NPS (very yellow at this point), re-used for (4) more pulls the next day, put in freezer. These yielded .6g and .5g, respectively. First dish full was very white and crystalline, very little goo (though somewhat tacky while scraping). Second dish was definitively yellow, smaller crystals, more yellow goo in the mix. Still mostly crystalline, but definitely different from first dish.

I then added more salt to the basified mix (having read of success with this), and ran another 4 pulls (again using the same, now yellow, naptha). The results of this pull are inconclusive. The yield was very little, if anything. It may have just rearranged the leftovers in the pan from the previous 2 freezes.

Hello Nexus
SWIM was thinking about a funghi extraction from dried fly agaric. The Goal is smokeable extract. When you dry and shreed the funghi, put this powder in distilled water for 1 hour at 60 degrees Celsius and mix it once a while.
Now it should be like a funghi soup and hard to sieve the funghis from the water. Normal household screen methods for juices could not sieve this.
Is there any other way to get rid of the funghi matter und get something more pure?


Greets Sativa

paint strainer funnel?

Thanks moto
I think they have the right size.
Bubble Bags would be a substainable screen.
And another Idea, mixing it with a lot more water so it can separate and suck the water up, evap with fan at 60grad C.


Love

A set of theoretical questions (and apologies if these are somewhere in the FAQ);

Does the length of time that solvent sits on base tea (between rolls) increase crossover of the molecule into the solvent?

Does the solvent need to 'make contact' with as much base tea as possible - or is this mostly a chemical transference from polar to non-polar?

Is there an optimum method of agitation? Stirring seems to work and dos not run the risk of emulsification but I ma wondering if this is sufficient

thanks in advance,

Flux