In this day and age where all the rage is into lime and d-limonene (which is, by the way, at least as toxic as naphtha), a friend of mine has perfected his A/B with outstanding yields

No mysteries here, no tricks, no long time boiling, no extreme use of lye or vinegar and *pure* white crystals

So he boiled 160 g of plain powdered mhrb with 2 liter of water and 2 table spoons of vinegar (yes, only that is more than enough). The boiling took 30 minutes. Then he took it out of the stove and let it decant. Filtering is a waste of time and gives a false idea of cleanliness of the liquid. He let the decanting phase during the night (7-8 hours). Got the clear red liquid out of the mhrb and boiled it until about 600 ml remained (about 1:30 hours). He dumped there some water with two table spoons of lye and mixed thoroughly in an 1000 ml erlenmeyer. He then checked the pH which was above 14. While the liquid was hot he threw in 3x 30 ml of lighter fluid, shaking for 10 mins each. Absolutely no emulsion. From these 90 ml he freeze precipitate and in 24 hours he got 1.4 grams of *pure* and beautiful white crystals. He continued with the pulls as the naphtha was pretty saturated and got 0.6 grams of partly yellow spice, and from a third take he got about extra 0.4 grams, thus in total 2.4 grams or 1.5 %

But this is not over! He is certain that there are still hidden goodies in the strained mimosa, as the process was not very through. I will post the remaining part of this story as soon as my friend tells me. I would not be surprised he he gets very close to 2% of total yield

Important lessons learned:
1. Vinegar is more than enough for getting most everything from powdered bark
2. Extended boiling is definitely not necessary.
3. Lots of lye is not necessary, just enough to get the pH above 14
4. Naphtha is a perfectly good polar solvent for dissolving freebase if it's used while the substrate is hot

ahm.. no... limonene is used as a supplement, people ingest it orally.... naphtha not.. so how can you say its at least as toxic, you got anything to back up that claim?

but of course, do whatever you feel its right for you ...

glad you're having good yields and learning from your experiments

btw, you only did one boil with the mimosa?

http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/PE/petroleum_ether.html


http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9924496

At least on rats, napthas LD50 is about 12% higher...
A cursory glance on wikipedia showed that d-limonene might be chemopreventive, whereas naptha is carcinogenic.

Thanks for the post - likewise, a big fan of plain ol' vinegar/lye ... and SWIM had a nasty experience with d-lim when moving house - it leaked into a box of stuff, and got it on his hands. Burnt like hell; even broke the skin. Not pleasant. After a marathon attempt at evapping a d-lim pull, this experience was the end of the road for d-lim as far as this fella is concerned.

Amazing yields, btw. Were you not inclined to do further boils? Just in case a little bit of magic remained?

Decanting and leaving to stand, though, that is a very good idea. SWIM always leaves acid soup overnight, but also filters it multiple times throughout the process.

Reducing the liquid seems very sensible - lose some liquid, everything is easier to manage; less solvent, more saturated.

Can I ask how hot the base was when you added the NaOH? Are we talking straight off the stove hot? SWIM uses a hto water sink bath to bring temp of both Naphta and base soup ... instinct tells me heat is good here; but how much heat I don't know ... that may be the clincher for the big yield

Well, in the first place it burns my hands! Makes them very sensitive, and for playing the guitar afterward it's horrible. Naphtha does not have that effect. Secondly as it evaporates more slowly the risk of having as a contaminant is higher (although I know naphtha has a *slightly* higher LD50 in rats as has been mentioned here). Naphtha on the other hand is a pretty well studied product, better than d-limonene, and risks are very low.

Just because d-limonene is extracted from orange peel and oranges are good for eating, is not a valid argument on its safety: potato leafs and berries are highly toxic and you eat potatoes!

Finally, my friends house still smells of oranges from his last mesc extraction! if once it was nice, 2 weeks later its sickening!



Yes only one boil! 30 minutes with the bark and vinegar

oh yeah i dont think limonene is completely non-toxic, even water is toxic in some level.. but I'd personally rather use as a solvent something that is used as a food supplement (and I dont mean oranges, I mean, there are actually food supplements containing limonene that people take orally) than some petrochemical that of course people do not consume orally

also, nobody should be evapping their dmt-ladden limonene, you have to salt out with FASI/FASW/Vinegar and then freebase that... its a couple of extra steps, I understand some people might not like it, but personally I feel its worth.. once again I say, each one to their own


interesting with one boil, I would bet if you did another 2 boils in the bark you could get more alks there! you are still gonna extract it right? you could even do a STB on that strained bark and see what comes from it..

Yes. The bark is still there, and I'm positive there is some spice still to get. I do not know yet if more boiling is going to be necessary, or will just heat the liquid with more water and pour watery lye



My friend was very careful with getting the liquid out, and it was dark yet very clear, so no filtering was necessary. My guess is that the small particles are an important source of contamination when the solution is basified and are the sure source of emulsions




Not boiling hot but hotter than a hand could handle. It was not measured, but my guess would be about 60-70 degrees centigrade. On the last pulls the liquid was heated again before adding the naphtha as they were done many hours later. However if on the first pulls the naphtha turned milky white when it cooled just a bit, on the last pulls the naphtha was definitely yellow tainted. It's an interesting phenomenon worth some investigation

Excellent - thanks for answering those questions for me - much appreciated. Next time my great grandmother dyes her knickers purple, I'll tell her to decant, reduce and do hot pulls.

OK, here's the end of the story.

First a clarification, which my friend just remembered. It was just one 30 min boil, yes. However, the decanting process used a sort of a semi boil. After those 30 mins, the liquid was left to rest for 5 minutes and roughly decanted, getting mosl of the liquid, but not all. Then some more water without vinegar was added (about 300 ml) to the mimosa mush. This was just heated to boiling point and then retrieved and mixed with the original liquid. This step was made basically for cleaning any valuable extraction liquid still in the middle of the bark.

He just remembered this detail for he finally found the time for processing the remaining mush. He added 600 ml of water + 2 table spoons of vinegar and let it boil for 20 minutes. He decanted and washed as previously, ending up with 400 ml of tea. Added lye until pH of about 14 and made 2 final pulls with naphtha. He retrieved more 0.2 grams, making the total extraction of about 2.6 grams, or 1.6%. Not bad by any means

This further means that using this method he was able to retrieve about 92 % of all spice in one single boil (with a subsequent wash)

thanks for the update - nice one

Great tek, A/B is quicker and better than STB, that is just a fact (in SWIM's mind)

also to help you your valid point that d-limonene isn't "non-toxic"

"The oral administration of 20 g d-limonene to volunteers resulted in diarrhea, painful constrictions, and proteinuria"
quote from here

Worse than naptha? Dunno

Safe to ingest, I wouldn't


Just a piece of advice, post yields and pictures, If you don't have a measured yields or a camera gets some, SWIM would have love the tek more if it had yields and pictures

Thanks for the thumbs up, and for the quote on d-limo! When I read the MSDS for the substance I got quite apprehensive. For a "food grade" solvent it did not look much safer than naphtha. At least naphtha is more studied and its effects fully documented




You are right. When I was writing the initial report I felt it could benefit if some pictures were taken. One thing that is quite striking and would appear in the pictures is how clear the boiled MHRB tea is after decanting. It's dark, sure, but you can see through it! Almost like a reddish coca-cola. and the first extraction gets the most beautiful crystals I've ever seen, pearly white, really. I have to notify my friend for taking some pictures in his next extraction!

Why do people bother with ab extractions. I mean, the only reason I'd do one is if I didn't want to use lye or naphtha.... but if you're going to use those two things anyway, why bother? I just threw in a bunch of lye in with mimosa in a jar, let it sit for a half hour, then added naphtha, shook it, let it sit for a few hours, took out the naphtha, and frooze it and got 1% on the first pull. A tek easily started in the evening, and done in the morning. The boiling and decanting was completely skipped and still 1% is pulled.

Most of the time my friend has been experimenting with various STB teks. Recently she tried Continuous Solid Liquid Extractor and became immediately converted to A/B. CSLE in essence is just a more efficiend A/B tek. Here is why she likes it.

1. A/B requires less chemicals, because you can reduce acidified aqueous solution a lot. E.g. extracting 50 g of mhrb last time she used 50 ml of white vinegar, 1 g of lye and 60 ml of heptane, part of which has been recovered. These savings will be more significant in bulk extractions.
2. A/B produces much cleaner spice without additional cleaning.
3. A/B takes about as much time as an STB if you include time spent on cleaning the spice.

Im gonna start an extraction tonight and try out this tek, upon completeion ill post some pics of the process and the yield.

Gotta wiegh in on this whole Naptha/Limonene debate. Ive used both in my extractions and both work extremely well. Only thing i can see as a drawback to the limonene is that you have to first salt the DMT out to store your extract as a tincture or to get to the white you have to salt it out rebasify and use Naptha anyway. Not a big deal if you dont mind, but for ease pulling with naptha to get White crystals and yellow crusty goop is much easier to extract, store and use IMO. As for toxcicity i much prefer the use of naptha. But with solvents in general it seems anything you use is not safe to ingest less your asking for problems. So in reality the whole "food safe" being put in there is more of a mentality block. The only two chemicles used that are at all safe to ingest are vinegar and lime and even those in large quantity will make you feel like shit. So in reality if your that worried about ingesting or smoking trace ammounts of a chemicle just dont bother with extracting.

nope, you can get pure white dmt crystals without having to resort to naphtha. Salt fumarates out of limonene, and then redissolve the fumarates in water and crystalze the freebase out of water, as described here. There will be no solvent traces because your dmt freebase will be crystalized out of water.

as for the whole 'toxic' discussion, of course anything in high enough doses is toxic, even water.. but fact is, limonene is even sold to be ingested as a supplement, and you definitely cant say the same about naphtha. Not to mention naphtha is a petrochemical (think of oil drilling and the dangers and environmental costs), while limonene comes from distilled orange peels. Quite a difference IMO..

Each one to his own, though.... Naphtha will work fine and considering you dry your crystals well enough, I dont think that small exposure and possible traces of it pose a significant health danger. Still, personally since I've found limonene I have no intentions of ever going back to naphtha for dmt extractions, not only because of health but also for the industry aspect mentioned before.

Well, to be fair, orange trees are cultivated at significant environmental cost too and unless they're organic, they're almost certainly using petrochemicals too. If they ARE organic, then that's a greater environmental cost because they have to cultivate more trees to get a given yield of oranges than they would with petrochemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Not that this answers the limonene vs. naphtha question, which every individual needs to answer for him/herself.

Anything these days being grown poses a threat to the environment with all the diffrent chemicles. There is a developement in a town im from called Copper Creek. The land was used for orange groves for YEARS. Test studies of the soil show incredibly high ammounts of copper, copper is used in a spray form to fight back and help control canker. I used to work in a grove and the ammount of chems we sprayed for various things is unreal. As for farmers growing trees without the use of chemicles how this hurts the environment is beyond me... i meen its my understanding that trees give off Oxygen so how is it something grown without chems is an environment cost. Also, people please educate your selves and stop calling something grown without chems organic, EVERY living thing is organic. Because its grown without chems dosent make it organic, its organic cause its alive. Its just grown naturally, funny how by adding a word noone understand to our food we all of a sudden think its better. Even if its grown hydroponicly its natural, The chems you add to the water are nothing more than concentrated NATURAL nutrients. SO PLEASE STOP WITH ALL THE ORGANIC THIS AND ORGANIC THAT CRAP!



You got me. lol shows my knowledge here Thanx though, always love learning new things. Oh and by the way thanx for the link, cant wait to test it out!

Ok so the results are in. This will be the tek i continue to use. Though i love the Q21Q21 tek i wont abandon it cause i love the smell after you basify the stew. No pics my camera sux but heres the yield First pull - 1.1g second - 0.9 third - 0.4 No kidding no joke and i am still waiting for my jungle to evap. will post the final yield when its complete!

For sure everything we do has some environmental cost, some things more, some less, and in all sorts of different ways.

But would you care to back up what you say with some data? Like, what kind of petrochemicals do you say are used in orange tree plantations, and how much of it ? BTW, saying that being organic has more environmental cost doesnt sound very logical to me, but maybe Im missing something in your reasoning... Petrochemical herbicides or pesticides shoudlnt change the yield, maybe fertilizers yes but which fertilizer commonly used for orange plantation is petrochemical based? Also, even if there is a bigger area needed, what real environmental cost would that be? Its still trees, which sequester C02 and help the whole life cycle, not giant machines (with all the costs of their production) pumping out this black oil from earth. Lastly, dont forget that the limonene is being extracted from orange peels, not from oranges, and that the oranges can still be used for food and the peels would be discarded anyways..