Success. This was my first extraction; now I have beautiful, fine white fluff. I thought the "fluff" I kept reading about was just the appearance, but having touched them, I realize that the crystals are delicate and yielding.
I used the Max Ion tek with these variations and notes:
* All my freezes and soaks were extra long. I have a busy work schedule to contend with, so sometimes the mix just had to mellow while I found time to get to the next step. It took me 11 days to go from powdered MHRB to fluffy white.
* I acid cooked with phosphoric acid instead of the recommended vinegar, ascorbic, or citric acid.
* I verified acid pH via wide range pH strips ( and poorly because all those oranges looked alike to me) . I was unable to verify the basified pH. The soup was so inky black that it coated the strip making it hard for me to see what color it was.
* I did not defat, as I was using MHRB.
* I did not evap down to 40% naphtha (step 11). There is surely still spice in my solvent, but I'm ok with that. The goal was never to get as much as I can, and I have a little more MHRB if it turns out that hyperspace is so enticing that I need to keep visiting.
* For the warm water baths, I used a sous vide immersion circulator. It worked great for keeping a stock of naphtha at the ready.
* I did not recrystallize. My crystals look so clean, it didn't seem necessary.
I produced 1.46g of DMT (~1.46% yield) with 6 pulls of 40ml solvent per pull. An extra ~40ml was always left behind in the soup because my siphon method was not accurate enough to extract it without carry-over. I am convinced that there is more spice in the soup, but what I have seems like an ample supply for me, so I'm not really motivated to extract more.
For the duration of the tek, I focused on quality over yield. There is likely still spice in the lye soup and naphtha. I have saved both for possible future experimentation, but for now, I'm just thrilled to have the spice. It's like magic. I've been prepping and studying for months, slowly acquiring the inputs and equipment from different vendors. Then I followed this magic spell, not really believing it would really work. One morning, I pulled my naphtha out of the freezer to find this snow sitting on the bottom. I felt like a boy on Christmas; I was so excited. I kept saying, "Oh my god! I did it!"
I finally got around to scraping and weighing days later. After scraping it together, I can see that there is a subtle orange/yellow color, so not the pure white fluff I bragged about earlier. Still, I'm riding a wave of good feels on having done it. I'm planning on a material test (probably 10mg) over Thanksgiving weekend.
And way down here at the bottom: Thank you all so much for everything you've given here. Without the clarity, attention, and thoroughness of this Nexus, I would have been neither brave enough nor knowledgeable enough to try this.