So I made first gordotek extraction yesterday I done everything like him apart from doing small pull instead of 1 big I did 20ml x 5 after all process I left with alot 10ml of concerned Naphtha I stick it to the freezer overnight in the morning I took it out and was literally almost nothing maybe 0.5 mg
What I did wrong ? I didn't heated enough Naphtha/bark ? I leave calcium hydroxide to short (1.5h) ? Bad bark ?
I will try again tonight I added in the morning another 20g on calcium hydroxide (bark was kinda waterly) and we will see
For how long I should heat up the bark like 10min with the stim is ok ? Also for how long it's taking heat up 20ml (maybe anybody know ... I was pouring boiling water from kettle to pot and later I been putting there jar with Naphtha for like 1min)
Hope anybody Will help me
Best regards sorry for my English ^^

so first of all, don't worry...it's a process. very few of us have had success the first time. we make mistakes, we spill things...we make errors on measurements.....and then we learn...

you didn't say how much bark you used. and, depending on how much bark you used, in my opinion, 20ml pulls are pretty small. you used a "dry tek" and when you employ that type of tek something called "solvent loss" is common...meaning depending on how thick or runny your mixture is after adding the base, some of the solvent remains trapped in the mixture and doesn't separate. if you're only pulling with 20ml, that doesn't leave a lot if you have any trapped solvent.

i'd rather use a larger volume of solvent - depending on how much bark - perhaps 40-50ml per pull . if you combine your pulls you'll have plenty of spice-rich solvent which you can then evaporate down to a more saturated volume.

did you check PH? PH levels are far more important in the final analysis than temperature. in fact, a lot of people do their entire process at room temp to avoid pulling any unwanted fats/oils. not necessarily relevant if you used Mimosa but in the case of Acacia it does matter.

solvent can only hold so much spice per ml. if you really only put 10ml in the freezer, i'm not surprised at the tiny yield. bigger pulls, evap down, then freeze. chances are there's a lot more goodies in the mud than you pulled.

or - you could have bunk bark; you won't know until you pull everything you can.

good luck - hope it helped!

It's likely a combination of things, but I tend to think that dry teks might not be the best for someone's first few extractions. I'd say that following a solid wet tek will allow you to get a feel of the general process and reasons for doing each step. Once you understand the reasoning, then you can apply it to a variety of different teks.

As ducdevil mentions, there are a lot of variables and most likely salvageable. The only real issue that could not be resolved would be bad/bunk bark.

Also, was it mimosa or acacia bark?

ACY

Hi Virandell
I have some experience with gordotek and i think that it works really well.
I may be able to answer some of your questions,if i get more information about what you did exactly.
How much bark did you use?
What do you mean with 20ml x 5?
Does that mean that you intend to do 5 naphta pulls instead of one 100ml pull?


By the way, ducdevil could you please answer the questions i asked about the mighty vaporizer, would be very nice.

3 minutes of heating should be enough for 20ml pull. However, after this failure I would advise doing 100ml pull.

You say one was left with 10ml naphta out of 100ml. Was this achieved through heat evaporation? In which case I believe one might have over done it. I believe one should be left with something like 50ml naphta (half of the solution.) This is also a mistake I made on my first time, which also yielded like 50mg. A mistake I also made the first time was not to decrease the freezer's tempature enough. When the feezer is very cold it seems to pull more.

When a good pull is done you might be able to see the shape of the crystals beggining to appear in the naphta. if you blow on it you will see. It should also look cloudy once inside the freezer for some hours.

I hope I have been of service to you!