apologies if this has been dealt with somewhere else on this forum ...

SWIM is doing an AB extract on 100g MHRB. Made aqueous NaOH solution (100g + 250ml cold water) by adding dry powder to water one tablespoon at a time, then leaving it to cool down a bit.

However, after adding the last of the dry mix and fully dissolving it, SWIM added it to the acid soup after just a couple of minutes ... it was not yet cold (momentary lapse ... )

When removing gloves to shake basified soup jug, it felt quite warm to the touch (acid soup was on the cold side of room temp before basifying) - how warm? Maybe nice bath warm.

Is this heat going to destroy the magic elf powder in the soup?

anxious and grateful

Breath deep, breath slow, let that anxiety go...

No, you didn't kill your spice although i do think its a funny phraseology. Lye + water = heat as a result of the chemical reaction, i believe (i'm a poor kemist, hoping to do continuing ed in a couple years and get a chem degree, but thats a side track). I actually would use the heat from the basified water to get my soup to what I found to be an ideal extraction temperature without having to subject my wine jug to a heathbath or otherwise jack up the temp.

Hope that helps alleviate your anxiety.

peace
SB

phew! Thanks SB ... yeah it looked normal and smelled awful like it should, so I've been hoping it's okay.

Nice one, guy.

SnozzleBerry: Yeah, its exothermic. Its cool isn't it? It can get really hot. Be careful when it all forms a plug at the bottom though

100g sounds like a hell of a lot of lye for a 100g extraction. Get some pH papers and measure out what you actually need to reach ph 12-13, it might be 1/3 of that

That's what I'll do - thanks mumble!

even if 1/3 of that would be sufficient, using so much lye will not create any problem at all (appart from the fact that your lye supply is going away faster)

ph 12-13 is enough but there might be still some emulsion problems.. and since we are talking to someone that already added the lye, he cannot take the lye off, and it would definitely be a bad move for him to try to lower the pH now

so just go ahead and extract and tell us how it went

Sure all is done and dusted now but its useful for future reference. Swim uses 60g NaOH made up to 200ml with H2O and always notices the flat black liquid, this is on a 500g scale so while people may use more using a lot more is a waste of money and increases the chance of lye granules going where they shouldn't and burning you later. Anyway papers and small additions will reveal to thee the magic amount =p

This would be the case only if you suddenly become careless with the excess amount of lye. Take for example your amount, you use 60grams of lye, so what your saying is that as he adds his first 60 grams he'll be fine, but then look out! His last 40grams have a greater risk of going all over the place and burning him? That seems kind of, well, wrong, to be perfectly frank. I definitely overbasify similarly to 88 (maybe not quite as excessively, but close) and if you are careful with your lye, you are careful with your lye, the amount shouldn't matter. There is no reason a larger volume of anything used in this extraction should inherently increase the risk of performing the extraction.

peace
SB

With twice the amount you have twice the chance of spilling some. There is absolutely no advantage to using a big excess so why do it? There are no emulsions either way and more to spill (more risk) and a higher cost one way, so why bother? Really? Its completely pointless you might as well just tip it down the drain and at least that way it will actually do something.

Risk is not proportional to amount. The risk involved in spilling 100g of lye is exactly the same as for 50g of lye. I put the value of 50g of lye at amount £0.5. Really, I don't think he's going to affect the market. STBs use MHRB and Lye in equal measure, there is no danger in over-basifying.

It's a bit of lye, let's not get so worked up about it, it ends up going down the drain anyway. The guy has his tek, it works for him so the result is all he needs.

peace

yep I gotta disagree too mumbles.. At least where SWIM lives, lye is very cheap, and the risk of spilling is the same no matter how much lye you have.. and you're wrong about emulsions, lower pH definitely increases chance of emulsions, so its not at all pointless.

and the idea that lye can contaminate your final product also doesnt make much sense.. Non polar solvent should pick up no lye at all, the only chance is if you get some of the acqueous layer together when separating your pull (which one shouldnt anyways), and in this case more or less lye wont make a different.. This can easily be solved with a simple sodium carbonate wash or later recrystalization, so.....

that being said, SWIM probably does use less lye than this common 1:1 mimosa:lye ratio.. actually he doesnt even measure anymore the amounts, he just throws some nice quantity in for the whole solution to be black and then some more, and if there is emulsion after mixing the solvent, he just throws some more in...

You don't need crazy amounts to reach ph13, thats all swim is saying. Waste what ever you like but its unneeded.

Guess what? That's exactly what I do with the soup, so I guess I'm killing two birds with one stone and as they're A/B extractions, its of real low viscosity, so it may as well be a purple drain cleaner. I was just saying that it seemed like another post where you just wanted to tell someone they're doing something wrong (well, I gues "dangerous" in this case) when they weren't really, or because you disagreed. Either way, it's all good, I'm sure his extraction is going fine and I'm sure yours go well too. So as long as we're all getting spice, everyone wins .

peace
SB

I've gotta agree with that.

I don't like using massive amounts of lye for so many reasons. Safety being my #01 reason. Spill a solution with 50g in it vs 100g in it will only depend on how long it takes to cause nasty chem burns and ruin your carpet or any clothing it touches.

#02 using large amounts of lye means have to BUY large amounts of lye. I do not want any agency thinking that I am home brewing methamphetamines, and NaOH is high on their watched list for meth production. Sure, if you can still find it on the shelf, and pay for it in cash, and don't by massive amounts, you'll probably be just fine, but I'd rather avoid the risk. A few months after I really started to respect the spice as a sacred medicine and really started extracting I bought 5 bottles of lye from lowes. I told the lady that we had a VERY serious clogging issue. Paid for in cash. I still have 1 1/2 of those bottles left, years later, and that's even with giving 2 bottles to a friend. So 3 bottles of lye lasted me 4 years now, at the least.

#03 it's just a bit wasteful (notice this is #03 on my list not #01) and moreso than that it's just not needed.
there are better ways to reduce emuslsions without fear (albeit probably unneeded) of contamination. SALT! Heat and salt....and tap the sides.

Oh and 1 more.

I've tried both A/B and STB teks a few times over (quite a few). To me, regardless of which method you choose, dmt extracted at extreme pH's (13-14pH) DOES produce a harsher xtal to smoke. This is most likely NOT lye contamination, but whatever it is, it needs to be cleaned up before anyone I know would want to smoke it.

I prefer a lower ph for extraction. 12.0 has always worked for me very well (A/B). Too much lower and yields will decrease (but purity of spice increases for some reason), too high and there is only a minor increase in yields, but the smoke feels like I'm smoking glass shards. After clean up the high ph extracted spice is usually about the same or gives a slightly LESS yield as the 12pH extracted spice.

These are only my observations and opinions. Please feel free to disagree or discard any and all suggestions/observations.

Next time, I'll try reducing the amount of lye. I've got ph papers, so will try to get it around 12 ... if it only takes 30 or 40g of the stuff, then great. I can add until it's right. Thanks for the info - this has been really educational!!

Agreed! I've always heard "there's no reason not to base the fuck out of it, because it can increase yields." But seeing as how you have a different experience, and lye isn't too easy to come by, perhaps there should be an experiment. Start with a more conservative amount of lye, and when that solution won't yield anymore, bump the pH up to about 13.5 to 14 and see if that will push more alkaloids into the NPS. Perhaps different solvents require different minimum pH values in order to pull all the alkaloids? Naphtha isn't the greatest solvent for desirable tryptamines, or so I hear. I imagine someone using xylene could get away with noticeably less lye than someone using naphtha.

Sure does clean the drains

Swim hates misinformation, especially dangerous misinformation so he tries to correct it when possible. But with the hostility he nearly gave up here. Anyway swim has said his peace and wishes everyone success with the spice.

Thanks for the information, mumbles - I'll be taking it on board. I'm currently trying hard to walk the Path of Precision in all my dealings with magical elf powder, all the way through the process. So I am going to take your advice and get a precise ph to refine my tek.

thanks again

Please don't give up trying to correct misinformation. Sure, sometimes it may feel like casting pearls before swine, but think of how many unregistered people may read what you say and find it valuable. Or think of how many members see it but don't make posts that say "thanks, that's cool" because they don't think they have anything to contribute to the discussion.

Besides, this is the internet. Everyone has a mean streak, and anonymity tends to bring it to the surface. But if people are hostile to someone trying to give them useful information, it's THEIR loss.

As for the subject of NaOH, it turns out that my friend will in fact be doing the experiment I came up with. The report will probably come in about a week or so.