So I'm basically ready to do an extraction, I'm perplexed by one common feature of the teks tho. People seem to leave each xylene/toluene layer in the extraction mixture for up to 24 hours. This is apparently because of emulsions and the current penchant for extracting cactus powder rather than concentrated tea.
My plan is to get ~850 grams of chips extracted and concentrated to half a liter or so of 'tea', base to pH 11+ with lye, add xylene, and stir on a stir plate set to medium to hopefully avoid emulsion. Planning on 4 pulls.
What I cant decide is how long to leave each pull stirring before I stop for a little while and draw off the xylene?
In the absence of emulsions and cactus powder would 2 hours of mixing suffice?
It would be great if I could get it done in one day.

Its been over a decade since I read up on mescaline extractions and these days I cant even find the simple scalable old school tea teks, everything is powder, microwaves, gallons of methanol, and VAST quantities of lye

This first extraction will be on Kimuras Giant X SS02

2 hours should be plenty. Just make sure you give it enough time to settle into layers, emulsions won't be as bad using the stir plate (rather than shaking) but with a thick concentrated tea, it will still take some time.

There's a good reason for that you know. The excess sodium ions help push things along and lots of base coupled with heat (like 80dg c) makes for very quick separations. I'd wager you'll be reaching for more base and more water before your day is done 😘

I've tried a stir plate and the xylene just stays ontop. It needs some more mechanical help to pick up the alkaloids. I find shaking the crap out of it then heating the crap out of it much much MUCH faster!

good luck man

Oh I understand using an excess of lye, but many teks [particularly no-filtration STB powder teks] utilize upwards of 1 gram of lye for every gram of cactus, and on the tea side I've seen people go so far as to advocate 100+ grams of lye per 100 ml of tea!
That kind of excess causes all sorts of problems.

I'm on my 4th 2 hour stir plate pull of an 885 gram cactus chip syrup now. I intended to reduce to 750 ml but hit 630 instead and after stirring in 6 heaping teaspoons of lye, yes I had to dilute to 800 ml for the stir bar to spin properly
Six heaping teaspoons was enough to give the mixture a powerful burning amine odor, like sniffing 10% ammonia.

Between a paraffin defat of the syrup to get rid of the wax, and the stir plate running just enough to produce a small vortex, there has been no emulsion issues whatsoever and in a 1000ml beaker I've been able to pull off all but ~5 ml of xylene with just a baster.
I've decided that I'll start a 5th pull after this and let pull 5 go Really long while I salt out the combined first 4 pulls. In this way I'll get a good indication if these no-shaking 2 hour stir plate pulls really were sufficient.

I have no shortage of cactus, this is just the first 1/3 of my current project, and my needs arent high so I would take a slight reduction in yield to avoid vigorously shaking a liter of 28M lye, fighting emulsions, and having to do lots of washes and recrystallizations of the product to get rid of gunk from 24 hour pulls

Please post your yield for that clone! I assume you have seen the cactus analysis thread?

I have always assumed that KSG would be inactive since it is so cuzco-y...

Yup, I already had my eye on that thread But its not a Kimuras Spiny Giant hybrid, its a Kimuras Giant one. KG is a different clone from the same vendor, less cuzcoy looking from pics I've seen.
This extraction is Kimuras Giant X SS02 and my next will be SS02 X Kimuras Giant, I'll report them together in that thread since it'll be a clue as to any significant influence of mitochondrial DNA on potency. As far as I've seen, thats an issue that hasnt been examined much. If at all.
An odd quirk is that both groups of cactus stems had been sitting on a shelf in dormancy for exactly 12 months before drying. That wasnt intentional, but it happened.

Antichode called it, I'm not sure if it was just because my syrup was too viscous or if the under-powered stir plate inherently didnt agitate enough but pull #5 had just as much mescaline as the previous pulls.
Into a 2L erlenmeyer in a hot water bath my goo goes, with vigorous mixing.

On the up side I, at least, am not going to be disappointed with the yield as I've already titrated out 5 grams from those initial pulls