So I took a shot at running Kash's Tek on 200g of morning glory seeds - it was an absolute disaster. I definitely have some questions about what I got wrong...I read the entirety of the tek's thread and a good portion of the LSA/LSD/LSH subforum, but I'm not infallible and may have easily missed an obvious answer to my problems, so my apologies if that's the case.
I'm also hoping I can serve as a precautionary tale with one of my mistakes...so without further adieu, here's the breakdown of the extraction:
Quote:200g of MG seeds were ground to a fine consistency and placed in a glass container. Acetone was added to the powdered seeds until they were completely covered, and the container was then sealed. This mixture was agitated at regular intervals of the course of several hours. The mixture was then passed through a coffee filter, with the resultant acetone set aside and the seed powder returned to its original container. This process was repeated 3 times, and the filtered acetone combined. The filtered acetone was poured in a wide, shallow container and allowed to evaporate.
I went by the book here, only deviating from the prescriptions of Kash's Tek in the volume of acetone I added, as the prescribed 100mL would have been insufficient to cover the powdered MG seeds.
The result I obtained here was...unexpected. The acetone appeared to have completely evaporated, as there was no residual solvent smell. However, I was left with what I'm compelled to call "slime"; there was a slightly-viscous clear puddle (maybe 30mL) of, well, I don't know what. It had a decent amount of muddy, stringy debris suspended in it. And more importantly, it (as well as the muddy debris) fluoresced very brightly under blacklight, so I was pretty sure I had workable material that point. I didn't know what exactly to expect the residue from the evaporation to look like, so I assumed I could keep going.
Quote:A 100mL, pH 4 solution of distilled water and citric acid was prepared. This solution was added to the evaporation dish. Residue in the evaporation dish was scraped until it came loose. The contents of the evaporation dish were poured into a glass container. This container was agitated by hand for 10 minutes.
This is where things got problematic. The product, at this point, was a cleanly separated layer of slime+residue sitting on top of the citric acid solution! As far as I could tell, whatever the acetone pulled from the seeds was not miscible with acidified water. I know Kash's Tek says not everything will dissolve, but when I examined this separation under blacklight, the slime/residue layer fluoresced brightly while the citric acid solution didn't appear to fluoresce whatsoever.
I decided to proceed with the tek under the assumption/hope that perhaps fluorescence isn't really a gold standard for ergot alkaloid presence, and that maybe the citric acid solution was actually holding a substantial amount of the salts that I wanted. And that's when I made a huge mistake...
Quote:To the citric acid solution was added 50mL of acetone.
Yeah, I'm an idiot. This is what happens when you work in the dark and have identical containers for acetone and naphtha and don't double-check everything. Don't be me, people: if you're performing a process that requires low ambient light, make sure you have some substitute for labels! Anyway, I know it might have been recoverable at that point, but I was already so flustered by the apparent inability to dissolve the fluorescent material and totally lacking knowledge on how to appropriately recover from a mistake like this...that I eventually ended up discarding what I had. If anyone wants me to walk through my attempted recovery process so they can hound me about how I wasted 200g of perfectly good seeds, I'm willing to elaborate on that. I consider the knowledge of how to recover valuable even if I don't intend to make this mistake again.
At the moment, though, I'm more interested in the following questions:
Assuming I had continued the tek correctly, could I have been successful? Was the lack of fluorescence in the citric acid solution an actual problem, or do the desired alkaloids simply not fluoresce at that point? And what was fluorescing in the imiscible layer?What's the deal with the slime? Did it have something to do with using store bought acetone instead of anhydrous acetone? The acetone seemed to have evaporate completely after a few hours, but the slime didn't seem to evaporate at all from that point forward.Also, it's a bit of a minor gripe, but does anyone have any good alternatives to coffee filters that don't absorb a ton of whatever they're filtering and don't take forever to actually filter?