Hi,

I am in the middle of my first MHRB extraction using cyb's A/B tek. I'm curious how I know when I am done doing pulls and have extracted everything. Will there be absolutely nothing to scrape from the dish after freezing, or do I look for things like darkness or consistency?

So the first pull resulted in very white, fluffy crystals, mixed with little light yellowish tint. Second pull resulted in mostly yellow crystals. Third pull resulted in dark brownish fine crystals.

Is it normal that it would get darker each pull? Should I be continuing to do pulls once it is a dark brown like that? I'm collecting each pull and putting them in the same jar, which I plan on recrystalizing when I'm done pulling. Could it be because I am doing each pull 24 hours apart from each other and the soup sitting that long is causing it? I noticed the powder is not dissolved in the liquid, it is more of a sludge at the bottom.

Should I be shaking the soup vigorously between pulls, before adding the naptha back in? I am just putting the naptha back in and softly rolling it in a figure 8 for 60 seconds.

Thanks!

Actually you will never extract everything, but in practice we just extract most of it in the first three or four pulls. It's not worth doing another pull as it would yield only few milligrams or so. It can go like this:

1st pull: 300 mg
2nd pull: 80 mg
3rd pull: 20 mg
...

The darkening is probably lye breaking down the plant material and substances, the colour of mother liquor also depends on temperature (I think tannates are responsible for this).

Ok, that makes sense. Thanks for the info. I guess the day between each pull was a bad choice. I only did it because I only have one glass dish to use. Next time, I think I will purchase two or three more and do all the pulls the same night. I have 400g more bark and I am doing it in 100g increments. I think I will purchase a few more glass dishes and try again. I will make this my last pull of what I have and then start the recrystalization.

Do you think it would be better to recrystalize the earlier, whiter stuff separate from the later, darker stuff or just put it all together? Also, do you think a mini A/B or a recrystalization better? Or both?

This has been discussed many times here.

There is no clear answer. Highly impure DMT is harder to purify by re-x. Mini A/B is better for highly impure DMT. Re-x works better for low to medium pure DMT in my experience.

Thanks man. Can you have a look here and let me know what you think. That was my end result. Does that look good or would you re-x further?

I'm actually doing my second batch right now. Powdered bark is sitting in the water / vinegar.

Your product looks heavily contaiminated with oil, so next time try to use less heating. The naphtha can be cold as it quickly heats up from the water anyway. 30-35 °C is more than enough.

Separating the oil by re-x is very hard is there is too much.

Activated carbon unfortunately eats away quite a lot of the product.

So to get pure crystals, either go for backsalting or mini A/B. It there is low contamination, then re-x from naphtha or heptane will do the trick.

Good luck

thanks for the advice. I did heat up the naptha before putting it into the mix, so perhaps I heated it too much. How can you tell it is heavily contaminated?

Also, are you referring to the original post (first extraction) on that thread or the update I added (second)? Is it the raw extracted material you are saying has too much oil or the final product? What do you suggest I do with it? Does that mean it is no good?