Hi,

First post, after a lot of reading.

I am doing my first extraction and it's an approximation of Nomans tek. (500g bark, 500g! lye, 3L tap water, 6L glass jar, 200ml lab grade naphtha per pull)

Fairly happy with the results so far, despite one or two hiccups on along the way. I keep pulling off-white, fine waxy crystal/powder that smells right - I put this down to good starting materials, as I am learning good technique as I go.

This comes to my next question:

The first pull gave 300mg of tiny, pure white crystals BUT I spilled a trace amount of soup in the precip dish (< 10mg). I think the yield was so low because of insufficient mixing of the solvent - I just gave it a quick stir or three then siphoned off.

The following pulls are bringing much greater quantity (two 1g+ pulls) of off-white, and my refined separating technique means no lye spillage.

I missed the opportunity to do an immediate sodium carbonate wash pre freeze precipitation, to get rid of that first tiny lye spillage.

My questions are related to washing and re-crystallization:

Is it worth redissolving the first pull to do a soda crystal wash out of the lye contam? I am not even sure whether enough will be left to worth worrying about but I'd like to get it right, however apart from the spillage this is the cleanest looking crystals already and it's not a huge quantity.

Similarly should I bother re-dissolving the subsequent pulls and washing, despite any contamination being minimal?

Also is it worth recrystallizing either/both pulls ? I have held a bit of naphtha back so this is an option.

Or should I just stop being finicky, call it a job well done and move on to enriching some leaf?

In my opinion if there is ANY contam then you should do a re-x or repull it first before the precip. in the first place.

Any trace of basic soup or other chem. contaminants should necessarily be cleaned up. And that's a rule of thumb. Otherwise you can and will hurt yourself during ingestion. Take the extra mile and rather be comfortable during such experiences rather than be in doubt and potentially ruin them.

So should I do a wash and recrystallization ? or is just the recrystallization going to be enough?

Sodium carbonate wash would most likely be the best for water soluble contaminants, followed by a re-x and you'll be miles better.

I second that. Do a sodium carbonate wash.

I do the wash on every pull so that the combined precipitate is already clean enough for use (usually in changa). Re-x is not needed unless I want pure crystals.