Don't know if this has been asked before (search is not working at the mo)but what is the best solvents to use for extractions?

E.g Heptane or naptha for freeze preciping spice?
Is heptane like naptha in that it only extracts spice and not jungles?

DCM, Chloroform, Diethyl Ether, Xylene, Toluene, Acetone etc etc - whats the best one to use? I know acetone and diethyl ether mix with water (diethyl not as much but maybe enough to skew an extraction).

Any suggestions????

SWIM prefers heptane over naphtha. It's more selective for DMT than naphtha and dissolves it very well. You can freeze precipitate DMT in heptane, and it seems to work better. Heptane evaporates faster and boils at a lower temperature than naphtha. It takes less time and energy to distill it. The only reason for ever using naphtha is because it is cheaper.

What's the "best solvent" is a very complex question. It depends on what you want your solvent to do. Different solvents have different qualities that make them best for a particular use.

If you wanted all the alkaloids from a plant, chloroform or DCM would be best. If you just wanted DMT, heptane would be best because it doesn't pull out a lot of other alkaloids.

If you wanted a solvent that was safe, non-toxic, smells like citrus fruit, and is food grade then d-limonene would be best. That would extract jungle spice, DMT, and many other alkaloids. It's one of the few solvents that humans eat quite a bit of on a daily basis. It's found abundantly in fruit.

SWIM would use d-limonene whenever possible because its the safest of all the commonly used non-polar solvents. It's been in the human diet forever. If your DMT had some d-limonene residue in it, it would still be safe to consume. If it had naphtha or heptane in it, it would not be something you should consume.

what product names are heptane and is it available at an ace hardware? swim is looking for a solvent more selective and easier to freeze precipitate. what is the toxicity compared to naptha?
can this be used on hdpe plastic?

Heptane is available as bestine, which is a ruber cement remover. It is found at some art supply stores.

But now I got a question. I did a STD using a HDPE2 container. To get my jungle spice, am I gonna have to pull with DCM because xylene will eat the container?

perhaps d-limonene? xylene is so gross...but i think some d-limonene comes in plastic containers..probably HDPE

Do you know of a common store a person can buy d-limonene. I don't want to order it off of the interent. I want to finish my extractions by the weekend.

Yeah, I would recommend d-limonene to replace all use of xylene. It has very similar solvent properties and works better than xylene for a lot of chemicals. It smells like fruit and food grade d-limonene is used as a food flavoring in small quantities. It would illegal and very stupid to put toxic xylene in your food. Alkaloids like DMT and mescaline, just like food, are ingested, so its always best to use food grade chemicals when extracting alkaloids that you'll be putting into your body.

The d-limonene SWIM has is food grade and came in a metal container, but now the same brand comes in something that looks like HDPE to me. It might be flourinated HDPE which is a special type of HDPE that has extra protection against strong solvents.

By the way, there is no such thing as “HDPE 2”. The number 2 is a recycling code that just means HDPE. Saying “HDPE 2” is like saying “HDPE HDPE”, it’s redundant.

DCM will slowly eat away HDPE containers. SWIM would only use DCM in metal, glass or PTFE containers.

What is a good source for DCM? hard ware store? is so which product?

Is there not a prob here with getting the D out of the d-limonene? D-limo does not evaporate well, nor does it freeze-precip the D. The only way I know is to mix in fumaric acid and precip D-fumarate out of the d-limo. This does work very well, and D fumarate is more stable than nnD, but it is for oral use only, too acid to smoke.

Another solvent option is hexane.

Pretty much any acid (being sensible - 'obviously' boric acid won't work!) will get the DMT back out of the limo and into aqueous solution in its protonated form. Recovering freebase from such a solution is an established procedure with many options, some of which will have been developed in the 11 years since this thread was started

Hi - I couldn't find a topic about solvents I have read here earlier using search but this one came up so I will use it instead if thats ok.

Came across 5l of "C7-C8 n-Paraffins" and exerpt from the MSDS clipped below.

Would this be suitable as a 'vm&p naphtha' substitute in a spice mhrb extraction? Passed the evap test.

Hello, I'm struggling to find naphta in my location and I would like to try d-limonene instead.

One question: if I'm following a cookbook that requires e.g. 500mL of naphta, what amount of d-limonene shall I use instead?

Thanks.

I would assume the same amount of solvent. But 500mL seems like a bit much. You should really only need 250mL as most teks call for five separate pulls of 50mL each.

Side question. D-Limonene seems to have many advantages over Naphtha, Heptane, and other solvents. Most notably the smell and the toxicity. However, what are the disadvantages of using D-Limonene?

Of course total amount of solvent is still depending on water phase volume. I guess a good ratio would be:

water phase = Volume X ml

Then use same X for organic solvent

But spread into more small pulls llike 3x or even 5x, which would mean

X/5 -> X/5 -> X/5 -> X/5 -> X/5

So when your soup is 500 ml, then you could extract 5x with 100 ml Limonen.

Limonen is probably a stronger solvent than naphtha, so maybe less is required. But only at room temperature I'm sure it is a better solvent. Maybe naphtha is better at 60 °C.

With limonene I only see 2 disadvantages:

#1 No freeze precipitation possible (big drawback)

#2 No evaporation possible, you need to get your stuff out another way than just waiting (medium drawback, because an additional step to get towards your product will mean more chance of yield loss)




Actually about pulling:

Extractions from plant-materials tend to always be not so efficient due to the wild mix and also potential microscopic particles within the mixture, so 5x extracting seems reasonable.

If you just extract something pure chemically normally 1 pull is enough, as you can already tell by the colour it migrated into the organic phase. Even a pull 2 is then rather cosmetic.
That would obviously apply for example when just converting a DMT salt into freebase again.







I fear it might be not good. Too long hydrocarbons will not do freeze precipitation. While heptan still pretty much does it (and here you have only heptan + octan) it might also not work already here because you have a mixture, and mixtures of hydrocarbons have a higher solubility of DMT than the pure compounds mostly. That will also add and maybe prevent a good freeze precipitation.

If you could get a sample then you could try just dissolving 100 mg DMT in 50 ml and put it to the freezer, then check if you see crystals after 5 h. If not then you would probably need to evaporate always most of your solvent at the end ... still possible to use, but then better search a little more to get some Hexane/Heptane mix.

I once tried with C8-C10 n-Paraffins (octan to decan) and there was definetly no precipitation at all in the freezer. Not sure about the concentration I had, but at least I tossed it back then.

where i live. they sell crap and then more crappier... want ta be solvents.. i found one that works and very clean..and so stinky by bigger rEWards then Naps imo. end results should be refined (cleaned) if goo .use johnsons starter fluid Only. do your homework. there was a study done with this. i will find and post.