sooo

1000ml distilled water
350ish g lye
320g bark
100-200ml heptane(all but the lye was just exactly what i had left over hence the odd amounts)

so using the tek i outlined in the oz post, i added the lye to half the water and put in my 1.6L sherry bottle. then added the rest of the water(at this point hot enough to cause steam)

i added the bark and shook for 10min until combined. next i added the heptane and it turned freaking black! i used the woofer tek to break any bubbles or emulsion that was visable but still it is black.

using a pipette i decanted 2ml of heptane. i poured cold water into a jar and turned the plastic pipette upsidedown in it so that the solvent was in the bulb and th ebulb in the water.this cooled it down enough to cause ti to get semi cloudy, yet still uniformly black. i put this liquid into a 10ml beaker and within 5min it had seperated to a clear heptane with a black layer. i decanted the heptane onto a glass sheet and evapped it in about 2min. the result is a oily residue which wreaks of dmt. i remember using heat to evap heptane and getting a similar oil that over night turned into crystals. we will see about this.

i have gotten yellow and ALMOST orange heptane(still only half as orange as my naphtha pulls) but wtf is this black about? normally i put the jar of heptane in the fzr for 10-30min and most of the orange falls out before the white. ive never had it fall out at room temp tho, and never black not orange.

could this have to do with using such little solvent for a first pull on 300g of bark? its like almost the same color as the base solution but at and angle you can see its a bit more... cloudy where as the base is just light eating black. the heptane does nto cling to the walls liek the base either.

High amounts of base tend to cause a lot of stuff to get pushed into the nonpolar layer. The same thing happens with naphtha. You could dilute the solution with water, and that would probably help.

You could also take the DMT-smelling gunk, dissolve it in vinegar, and reduce any DMT N-oxide to DMT acetate with zinc dust/powder. Then filter out the insolubles and the zinc, such as with a coffee filter. You could defat at this step, by adding some heptane, mixing thoroughly, and discarding that heptane, but I don't know if such a step is necessary. Whether or not you defatted, you can now add clean heptane, basify the solution up to about pH 13, and pull out your spice.

If you don't do the procedure in the above paragraph, you can still clean your gunk up by redissolving in heptane, washing with sodium carbonate solution, and freeze-precipping the heptane. Hopefully, it will give you snow white.

Have you considered a sodium carbonate wash?