Greetings, fellow travelers.

I recently carried out my first DMT extraction and I want to share the procedure and the results. Maybe you have some advice on how to improve my tek.


Procedure:

First water was acidified with citric acid to pH 3, then 20 grams of shredded MHRB was added to the water. The mixture was kept at slightly below 100 degrees and was agitated occasionally. After 90 minutes, the MHRB was strained off, and the solution was placed in a seperate container but kept heated. This procedure was repeated three times before the MHRB was discarded. The three solutions were combined, and were then evaporated down to a volume of 400 ml.

After the solution had cooled slightly, 6 grams of sodium hydroxide was added to neutralize the acid and bring the pH up to 13.

The solution was then transferred to a 500 ml bottle, and 20 ml heptane was added to the bottle. The bottle was agitated every couple of minutes, before being left in a warm water bath. The layers then seperated, the heptane was transferred to an evaporation dish. After it had evaporated to half its initial volume, it was placed in a freezer with a temperature of -32 degrees.

Crystals of DMT precipitated, and were put aside.

After doing several more pulls with partly reused solvent and partly fresh, all the DMT crystals were redissolved in 80 ml heptane, which was then evaporated down to 40 ml, before being placed in the freezer.


Results:

After the recrystallization, I got around 200 mg of nice yellowish DMT crystals This represents a yield of around 1%, which I'm pretty happy with for my first time

I'll attatch some photos of the crystals

Looks very nice. Any reason you are so strict on the measurements? There is quite some room to play if you feel like being a bit lazier with them. Also, perhaps trying other solvents can be easier for you or more enjoyable. Congratulations

Thank you

I didn't have any pH indicator, so to get my desired pH I calculated the amounts of acid/base I'd need. That's why I had to know the exact amount of acid I put in for example, to know the amount of base to add later.

I think heptane works great, it almost only dissolves the DMT without too many impurities, that's why I chose it. What other solvents would you recommend?

I just did a ACRB extraction with both Naptha and Heptane,,The Heptane gave me really pretty translucent/snow white gems,and the Naptha gave similar the first pull/scrape,,yet a Noticable yield increase..I posted some pics in the AB Extraction thread...I think after this pretty fun experiment,I'll be using Naptha in the future runs,,but I can see myself doing Heptane again and I've been really interested in D-Limonene ,mainly cause I have not tried it for myself yet ...
Happy you had a successful run and wish many more to come for u

Isn't naptha just a different word for heptane?

Nice work

Naphtha is a term for a wide range of liquid petroleum products, some of which may contain heptane.

n-Heptane is a single, pure, chemical substance - a (or rather, the) seven carbon, straight-chain, saturated hydrocarbon.

I know what heptane is, it's just that the solvent I bought had the name "kemiskt ren bensin", which means chemically pure fuel. And on the back it said: "heptane (naptha)". I looked it up and it's pure n-heptane. I guess the word naptha refers to different thing in different places.

Sounds like you were in luck, then!

The pedantic description of n-heptane was provided merely for contrast, although it seems likely your solvent is a mixture of heptane isomers.

"Bensin/benzin/benzine" also refers to a wide variety of petroleum products in different places; most people aren't chemists and just want to clean stuff, thin paint or burn fuel so it's unnecessary to be overly precise, I suppose. Hence, you can still call pure heptane "naphtha" or "benzine", or "panel wipe" for that matter. Labelling it as heptane out of context of a laboratory wwouldn't make commercial sense.


Aaaaanyhow nice crystal pics, well done