SWIM has started his third extraction today. His two previous ones did not yeild anything worth talking about. But, he has learned from his mistakes and should be in DMT world by Friday. 50g was powdered in a blender and has been sitting in the lye water for about 2 1/2 hours. SWIM will let it sit for a few hours more and then begin doing his pulls. We'll see how this goes

SWIM just checked the container and it's quite dented on the side, sort of like the air has been sucked out. Is this a problem?

Nope, your water probably got pretty hot from adding the lye and cooled off, that's all.

Keep going, you should be fine.

You can throw in the naphtha while you are waiting. In fact the naphtha can go in the same time the lye does. The longer the naphtha is in there the more spice you will get out of it...and probably a bit more oil as well, but that's the trade off for a STB.

SWIM just now put the naphtha in and will agitate for a few minutes at a time. He will do this every so often (when he thinks about it) until about tonight, then he'll separate. Just a thought. The container seems to be quite chilly. How bad will this affect SWIM's yield?

The temperature of the naptha effects the amount of alkaloid that is soluble in it. Optimum is to have the naptha very warm when it is absorbing the spice then when you put it into the freezer it gets cold and can't hold as much so it precipitates out. You can eventually get the same yield out of the MHRB/Lye but it may take more pulls if the naptha isn't warm.

Well SWIM tried to do his first pull this morning but he could not get a hold of using the damn turkey baster. Once SWIM got enough liquid into it, when he lifted it, everything fell out. So he agitated the container and will go to walmart and get one of those syringes with the tube extension.

SWIM did his first pull. He got out maybe 45/50 ml which isn't bad. Although the solvent is quite clear(don't know if that's a bad sign, any reasurance would be appreciated)

How much water lye and naphtha did you put in?

50g bark/50g lye/750ml water/50ml naphtha

⠀

This is a very good amount. That way if you f up like SWIM did earlier, it's not a big deal. Plus small volumes are easier to work with

SWIM has a question. To heat the naphtha, can he just add some hot water to a jar with the solvent instead of putting the jar in hot water?

You could place the whole extraction vessel into a sink full of warm water and gently roll it around.

SWIM understands that rolling is a more ideal form of agitation. However his container has a flimsy flip top instead of a screw on, therefore he doesn't want any accidents on his floor.

Ummm, you could, but wouldn't it just be easier to put the naphtha in a mason jar and put it in a pot of near boiling water?

If you add water to the solvent you will have to seperate out the naphtha later...sounds like more work than you need to do.

As an update, since SWIM's container is not all that warm, he will let the second pull sit till tom morning
One more thing Would it be ok if SWIM evaporated his first two pulls first instead of all five at once?

yes

SWIM pulled off his second batch of solvent yesterday and has been working with the third since yesterday. He also cleaned up the little bit of lye that found it's way to the naphtha jar. Now SWIM realizes alcon_5's advice about taking your time. Not only will the powdered bark break down more and give you a better yield, but it makes things less rushed.

My Blue Bear has finished his extraction. He did four pulls and will let them evap in a dish. The naphtha is very yellow (good or bad?)

Good in that the naptha caught a lot of alkaloids, but bad in that you'll probably end up with very yellow results. Also, I highly recommend you not evaporate your yield entirely, and do a freeze precipitation instead. SWIM evaporated his first pull and found that the results were not only very yellow, but it was exceedingly difficult to remove from the evaporation dish. It was not a powder like SWIM had assumed it would be. He ended up with a lot of oily puddles that wouldn't evaporate, and they stuck to all the other residues, making the entire yield useless. (This was rectified by dissolving the mass in warm naptha and freeze precipitating it.)

Here's SWIM's freeze precipitation method: Let the naptha evaporate until you have less than 15% of the original volume; if you're using 50ml, evaporate enough so that you can fill a shot glass less than a fifth of the way full. Keep a close eye on your evaporation dish, and keep it just slightly angled so that all the liquid is pooled together. Move the liquid around after it has mostly evaporated and look on the glass; if you see pinholes in the residue (these are the beginnings of crystals), then the spice is getting too concentrated to stay in solution, and you should move the remaining liquid into the fridge/freezer as soon as possible. On SWIM's last pull (it was the 5th in the series), which was over 300mL of naptha, he reduced it to slightly less than a shot glass, and got 300mg of spice. (He used 5x as much of everything as you did).