Hello,

It seems that fumaric acid is quite popular these days...

The reasons I found for this: food-safe, forms nice crystals, molecule is auite stable, ???

It seems that vinegar isn't quite as popular...

The reasons I found for this: doesn't crystallize, forms goo that's hard to work with, ???

But vinegar is food-safe as well and for the cost of obtaining 500 gr. of fumaric acid I can also buy at least 25 liters of vinegar...

So, why isn't vinegar more popular?

Especially when taking into account that many people convert their "salty" spice into freebase anyway?

Why are there tons of conversion teks for fumarate to freebase and none for acetic?

There must be at least one reason, and I can't imagine availability of vinegar being it

Any theoretical or experience-based info is very welcome (it's a tough decision, including shipping costs, 500 gr of fumaric would be worth 50 liters of vinegar or more)

PLUR

Edit - I just thought of a possible explanation for the discrepancy in popularity of both acids... Some compounds might form fumarates and not acetates or vice-versa? (if so, could new separation/purification methods be derived from this difference?)

My first reaction: 500g of Fumaric acid is a lot! With 500g of Fumaric acid you can convert about 1.5kg of DMT to DMT-Fumarate. If you look on ebay you can find food grade Fumaric acid for about 10-12 dollars per 250g and with that you can still convert about 750g of DMT.

If you look at vinegar then you can get about 20 liters of vinegar for the same price. Vinegar however contains about 5% Acetic acid. So with that 20 liters you have about liter of Acetic acid.

I'm not sure how much Acetic acid you need to convert one gram of DMT but remember that Fumaric acid bonds to two DMT molecules due to the Fumaric acid having a specially formed molecule that Acetic acid doesn't have.

This all means that cost wise the Vinegar might still be better, but it will only be with a factor of about 2-3.


If we then continue to calculate the cost of salting one gram of DMT to Fumaric acid:

* 12 dollars for the Fumaric acid;
* 9 dollars for the shipping costs;
* TOTAL: 21 dollar

21 dollar for 750g of DMT, makes for about 28 cents to salt one gram of DMT. If you consider the other ingredients needed for an extraction like bark and lye then this should not be the make or break cost factor.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Thank you Trav for resolving the cost issue...

Which still leaves plenty of room for argumentation regarding possible chemistry-related benefits of fumaric over acetic or vice versa...

But I'm almost convinced

PLUR

PS I mentioned 500 gr as this is the minimum order quantity at the place where I found pharmaceurical grade fumaric acid...

To feed the battle, acetic is smelly but also evaporates cleanly whereas fumaric is odorless but excess of it will be left in your product (that is, if you salt with water that has been acidified with fumaric acid). However vinegar bought from a store, regardless of how transparent it looks, it contains impurities - if you evaporate just vinegar you will be left with a yellowish goo anyway. You need to use glacial acetic acid dissolved appropriately in water if you want to have cleaner dmt acetate.

If the aim is to convert back to freebase, the choice of acid is irrelevant; any acid (well, apart from long chain fatty acids....) will do. The use of fumaric acid is solely because:

1. dmt fumarate is a solid, meaning that for pharmahuasca you can dose it accurately (but then again you can use dmt freebase which you can salt just before consumption). Makes nice crystals that have aesthetic value for some

2. dmt fumarate is insoluble in acetone meaning that dmt fumarate can be cleaned using acetone off potential impurities

3. dmt fumarate is purportedly more stable (but this is untested and questionable)

4. Fumaric acid works beautifully with FASA-xylene and FASI-limonene

None of the above of course make a very strong case for fumaric acid.

heck, why not citric?

...gets to take on the victor of this here battle...

Vinegar is perfectly okay to use but is messy and smelly and does not solidify. Fumarate creates stable solids. Most people that convert their freebase into salt form do so for 2 main reasons. First being storage/preservation of spice. Its is much easier to store a solid(fumaric) than a liquid(acetic). Second reason is because they plan to use the salted dmt for pharmahuasca. Its very hard to consume dmt-laden vinegar accurately, whereas fumarates can be weighed on a scale and dosed accurately. Also, if one wanted to IV dmt, they would not want to inject vinegar into their veins. I assume it would burn pretty badly. DMT fumarate was also FDA approved for medical studies(someone please reference this, I don' t know the details), whereas dmt acetate was not.

I used to salt with HCl. Lol. Not fun when it splashes on you. I just prefered it cuz a giant gallon of it was only a few bucks and I only needed a couple drops every time.

I was just wondering, is fumaric strong enough an acid to break up dmt-tannate and form dmt-fumarate?

If so, what would be the reason for there not being any STF (straight to fumarate) teks?

How would you remove dmt fumarate from a acidic soup?

Filter, evap, wash crystals?

Perhaps filtering would present a challenge or two

You filter and its still gonna get extremely messy, and still extremely dirty. Lol. Asking why there isn't a straight to fumarrate tek is like asking why there isn't a straight to acetate tek. Its just not gonna work out. Lol.

Citric seems to be a strong contender... A quarter of the cost of fumaric, a 5% aqeous solutin has a pH of 1.8, food-safe, OTC...

Don't know about impurities though or any other reasons why more people aren't doing A/B's or back-salting with citric... Anyone? I'm looking for indications why or why not to use citric, either for the initial acid soak or for back-salting of nps...

why must there be a victor?

choose whichever acid you feel most suited to your needs, or is most accessible.