I see a lot of you posting questions about how much materials to use in a tek, how much solvent to evaporate, and questions regarding yield loss. For the most part, it's entirely your own fault for not following simple directions, and being creative when you shouldn't. Some of you ask questions because a tek doesn't provide you with information you actually need. I'm writing this guide to help both groups. So that when creative genius fails you, or you get hung up on a tek and need an answer, you will be armed with the knowledge to overcome it.
This guide is about weights and measurements, how they are useful, why they are important, and some examples you may use. Your main tools are going to be a good digital scale, an accurate thermometer of any sort, and a glass graduated cylinder; 50 or 100ml will be perfect.
You should never ever throw chemicals into a beaker (or jar, bottle, what have you) without measuring them. If you measure your materials, you can simply reweigh it, and have a good idea of how much is inside.
common sodium hydroxide solutions are 5, or 10% NaOH by weight. This is something you can scale to suit your needs for any size extraction. 5g, 50g, or 500g. Even, 293g, it doesn't matter. First, you measure your water. 1ml water weighs 1gram. When you measure, you always measure WEIGHT. If you noticed I talked about volume for a second, that's awesome; we can use volume to determine the weight of a liquid because of its specific gravity. More on this later.
As an example, you can prepare a 10% BY WEIGHT NaOH solution by first weighing your water. 1ml of water weighs 1g, so measure 100ml distilled water, and pour it into a beaker or jar. Now you need 10% of that weight of NaOH. 10% of 100 is 10, so carefully measure out 10g NaOH and dissolve it in your water. You now have a 10% basic solution that weighs 110g.
So why does it matter what the basic solution weighs? Well let's say you measure 10ml solution and find it weighs 11.3g, so the all 100ml should weigh 113g right? You now know you have 3g material in you basic water that wasn't in there when you started. You know it wasn't in there because you measured your materials before adding them.
Now back to specific gravity, and volume. When measuring liquids, you will find that it's often measured as grams/cm^3. That's grams per cubic centimeter, 1 cc = 1ml. So water is again 1.0g/cm3. Let's check heptane. Simple google 'heptane density' and you'll get similar data.
My google search of heptane density says '684kg/m3' We don't want kg, we want grams. So divide by a thousand and we get: .684g/cm3. 1ml of heptane weighs .648g, 10ml weighs 6.84g and so on.
So let's say you re-x 1g of dmt in 25ml of heptane. You evap some, then freeze precip and remove your solvent. Low and behold, you find your results to be lacking. You look at your solvent, and you dump it in your cylinder. 13ml it says. We simply .684 times 13 equals 8.892 grams. But when you weigh your cylinder you find your solvent weighs 9.002 grams. What gives? That means your 13ml of solvent still has 110mg of material left in it. All you had to do to find this out is google the density of your solvent (or weigh it before hand) and weigh it again after. Pretty neat, huh?
One last thing, whenever you look up the specific density of solvent, that's the density of it at room temperature. (25C) So when you pull your re-x solvent out from the freezer, drop your thermometer in and wait for it to reach 25C before you weigh it.
Pro tips:
Solvents like naptha are made up of a conglomerate of crap. So you will need to weigh it before and after you use it to calculate the difference.
Don't throw anything away until you're done with the extraction. Let's say you freeze preciped your solvent, and got a crappy yield. You weighed your solvent, and it only weighs 25mg more than it should. So what now? If you measured your water and lye, then you can just remeasure it. ALAS! You calculate your water weighs 400mg more than it should! Maybe this is where your yield is hiding
Write things out. Record your measurements always! If you run into any problems you can figure it out and recover your yield instantly. If you tried something new, and got lost, no yield? You can google densities or vuew your notes while re-weighing solvents to find the one that has your spice.
Further protips:
You can use a device called a 'hydrometer' when using ethanol. a real good one will cost about 15-20$. There are 2 main types: a distiller's hydrometer and a winemaker's hydrometer. You want the former as the winemaker's hydrometer is designed to test low percentage ethanol in beers and wines.
You can weigh acetone prior to dissolving DMT freebase / fumaric acid to test for the presence of water.
Happy extracting,
1ce