You can use all the tricks known by human being and beyong, but at the end the cactus material won't give more than what it has.
IME, 0.25% is not bad at all with regular (no named clone) cactus.

Really just comes down to how much your cuttings have to offer, how much you pull into your NP solvent, and how much you pull from your NP solvent. Simple really. Following the tek works well, but it can't account for every situation. If you are doing a larger extraction, you need to do more pulls to get everything. This is a very efficient and cost effective tek, and one has not found one better. Most importantly though, it depends on the plant material you are working with. Just because you are using 2 ft of cuttings does not mean you will get a good yield, as the market is flooded with very weak pachanoi now days.

My first 4 extractions yielded around 400-500mg using one type of Tricho.

Did an extraction same method same weight (kash obviously) got over a gram. So the material is extremely important.

Totally agree, I was simply thinking that there might have been a method I'm not aware of to push more mescaline out into the solvent.
I took another pass at it to be sure. Got another ~43mg out of it (after MEK Clean) but didn't pursue it any further. It's enough to finally get to try it - that part I'm looking forward to.

Hello,

Well, I had started this tek roughly one year ago, did 2-200ml xylene pulls then a third which I ended up leaving in my basic solution when I sort of lost interest and left it sitting for a year

So anyway I came back to check on the project and found the xylene that was left in the basic solution to be a cloudy yellow, whereas the previous pulls are clear yellow. No big deal, mixed them together for a total of 600ml.

Now this is where I added 100ml of H20 and 0.5ml of muriatic acid, measured ph5.6.

My concern is that the H20 layer looks clear. Is this normal or is it supposed to look milky?

Clear is normal.

Ok that good news for me then! thanks for the reply. I was anticipating having some precipitation and was quite concerned when there was none lol. Maybe some pics are in order if I get decent resulst

Keep shaking that sucker. Maybe the ph will rise and you need to add some more acid. Which also means more goodies

Benzoic acid could be a very convenient way to salt the extract. Tested here.

Simply add benzoic acid powder to the toluene. It dissolves and crashes what appears to be mescaline benzoate. Add benzoic acid to the combined pulls until pH strips are acidic. Alternatively, simply add excess benzoic acid (e.g. ~3x the expected yield) since oversalting should not be an issue: solubility of the acid in toluene is pretty high (80mg/g).

You choose your own adventure, but benzoate salt is considered pretty safe. Sodium benzoate (used as a preservative I believe) had no issues when consumed at ~800mg/Kg.

Mescaline benzoate would be ~74% as potent by mass as mescaline HCl (assuming no hydrate formation).

Cheers 🙂

7/31 edit: Unfortunately,
mescaline benzoate is somewhat soluble in toluene/xylene so this approach doesn't really work. Relevant link here.

Is there a downside to a defatting step with several xylene pulls on the acidic extract before bassifying?

I did my first three Xylene pulls last night as normal, then I re-acidified with citric acid, did a toluene pull which was an interesting kinda clear wax at that point.

Gibson, generally a defatting step should not cause any problems. One has done defatting steps for cacti in the past but it has not produced different end results. It may create more emulsion doing a defatting step if anything. Generally emulsions mostly come down to the cacti used and the acid used. Citric acid tends to form more emulsions and acetic acid (vinegar) should be considered a better option. One could use hcl or any inorganic acid as well keeping the PH in the right area.

There are multiple things to consider to prevent emulsions. Mixing too hard or low temperature will cause problems also aside from the mixture composition.

If you have a waxy aqueous/nonpolar layer, that can be tough to separate. The only thing that can separate it is a hot water bath, time, or a centrifuge.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Kash! Appreciate it.

I got 845 mg from 437gm fresh TBM a couple weeks ago. I didn't wash the crystals that precipitated out of the xylene yet. They are tan just like in the tek.

I just ran out of clean solvent to wash with. Do I need to adjust the dose very much?

Sounds like a good yield, gratz!

A good solvent wash is nice to ensure purity. Xylene can tend to stick around for awhile which is obviously not good to ingest. But unless the extract is goopy or has salt contamination the dosage is basically the same. Increased purification mainly increases the long term storability, ease of handling, and appearance mainly.