Hi folks.

SWIM's been growing a plant for a few months now and through lack of experience hasn't produced anything that looks very smokeable. Rather than just throwing it away SWIM was looking into a tek whereby he could squeeze any active substances out of the plant.

SWIM came across a tek where the plant material is soaked in a solvent under heat, then the extract was cleaned and then an isomerization was performed using sulfuric acid to convert all like cannabinoids to THC.

Only thing with this tek is it involves using a lot of nasty solvents under heat which sounds like a vile procedure to do indoors.

I was wondering how possible it would be to dry and grind plant matter, then run acetone through it using THP to initially extract the actives from the plant.


The tek SWIM's going to be basing his procedure on can be found here:

http://nepenthes.lycaeum...Drugs/THC/isomerize.html

Ok... just realised THP method is not the best. But a long cold acetone soak perhaps?

With acetone you are going to get a lot of extra crap you do not want. Acetone is highly polar and will dissolve a lot of additional components. Try using a non-polar solvent like naphtha, hexanes. Butane works well check out those honey oil extractors they sell online.

Also have you considered just using the material to make butter? Just chop it up and put it in a crock pot with some melted butter and let it simmer all day.

I've heard it works best with Naphtha.

SWIM tells me that soaking powdered marijuana leaves for a day in acetone at room temperature, then straining the leaves and evaporating the acetone gave a brown oil with slight hints of green and insane potency. Too much for SWIM.

Second soak of the leaf material repeatign the same procedure gave a green-brown sticky mass that was pretty intense when smoked but a bit harsh. More lipids and chlorophyls were present.v

The third and final soak gave mostly greenish sticky residue not really worth smoking.

Acetone in generally works amazing for a crude extraction of THC, SWIM certainly recommends it and prefers it to the butane extraction.

from past experience butane works best for me. It makes the smoothest product and is the fastest to work with. If your plant still looks like a plant and doesn't have any bud on it, you might want to try switching its light times to 12 hours of dark every night. Thats what tells it to start budding. But yeah butane is my personal favorite because it doesn't stink as bad and boils/evaps at room temp

Hi brother(from another mother)

Using acetone same as alcohol is a BAD IDEA unless you don`t wanna purify extract further with petrolether or diethylether
Damn right.Ethanol was the same,it took all chlorophyll away and left one with almost white plant leftovers and shitloads of weak extract
ILPT would commit to use such a solvent only if massive quantities would be processed cos ketones and alcohols are not as flammable and dangerous as ethers are.

So ILPT used to extract tons of weed about a decade ago. Mostly foliage and stalks also imature male plants Material was active, one could get high by smoking mature flowers from the same cultivar, however other parts of plant were too weak for smoking unprocessed.
He proceed simple extraction using DIETHYLETHER CH3-CH2-O-CH2-CH3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylether

Material was roughly cutted (esp. stalks)to 1cm pieces and then dried in oven at 200 degrees celsius for about 10`.One need to keep a keen eye on it, shake it and mixed it to dried material as soon as possible, to prevent oxidation and distilling actives away from plant material.In this process decarboxylation of THC acid take place and material is ready for cold extraction.

In plastic bottle were placed roughly powdered foliage(by hand) and stalk cuts. Diethylether was poured in the bottle in volume double to the volume of the powder.

Bottle was squeezed a bit to allow escape the air above liquid and cap was putted on.(and again, every time when damp pressure created by shaking blowed the bottle back).In course of 12 hours,bottle has been occasionally vigorously shaken otherwise macerating still in room temperature.
Diethtlether has been strained and fresh ammount added. Step was repeated 3-4 times.
Notes:
-any size cola or lemonade bottle does the job, however ILPT used rather more small 0.5-l liter ones then big 2- 2,5 l ones.
-one small bottle will stand about 10 runs, then tiny cracks around neck forming and is no longer safe for use

Collected diethylether extract has been distilled off to about 1/10 of initial volume.

!!! CAUTION !!! NEVER DISTILL OF ALL DIETHYLETHER IN ATMOSPHERIC DISTILATION APARATURE !!!

Dangerous peroxides will be created and aparature WILL EXPLODE

Anyway, concentrated ether extract was poured on shallow plate placed open air and let evaporated . Small fan could speed up evaporation, but is quite quick anyway.
After evaporation, bit of dark black-green goo has been spread all over the plate then scratched back to one piece an so on, whilst the plate has been warmed from the bottom on the water bath.This was performed until goo no more smelled of trapped ether what also made goo a bit thicker.
This was scratched and mixed with some finely powdered and sieved plant material until no more sticky.

High was great loads of euphoria and ILPT an his mates felt energised and like someone put some lubricant oil into their joints , all movement was smooth and efortless.
The smoke tasted just like one from vapourizer without any hint of chemical taste in it as far as ether used, was pharmaceuthical without stabilizer.

Yeah and that times he had dozen liters of Et2O from work. It`s very hard to get paws on good ether nowadays.
He is dreaming of cold sodium carbonate STB with ether which will he utilize for majority of interesting plants
It`s lovely solvent, elmusions are not an issue and evaporating rate is fantastic.
ILPT love him the most!

The minuses are: solvent is probably watched and availability is bad,very flammable , low stability and creation of explosive peroxides in damps, a bit pricey.
One need to be carefull!

Ether will work as will almost any non-polar organic solvent. Alcohol and acetone will extract a bunch of non-active plant components. Naptha will work fine as will any aliphatic chain hydrocarbons. Butane is nice for the reasons stated above. Hexane and heptane is what is used in much of the scientific literature to extract cannabinoids.

Why not just use butter and make some edibles?

d-Limonene will also likely work and this may be an interesting thing to try. Cannabinoids are extremely lipophilic and hydrophobic. No matter what you are going to end up with some fats in your extract unless you subject it to distillation or column chromatography. But there is no need for this unless you want analytical samples.

So guys,

Sorry if SWIM opens up an old thread, but this is really interesting.

A few questions:

If SWIM's got it straight, all one needs to do is dry and chop up plant material, chuck it in a container with non polar solvent, and shake it from time to time for 12 hours a pull?

Would it help to warm the naphta first?

is freeze precip possible like with spice?


SWIM's in for a lot of fun he guesses...

Warming may speed-up the process but cannabinoids are highly soluble in said solvents and this is unnecessary. Due to the high solubility of cannabinoids they will not precipitate out as other compounds do. Also they are oils and would not be a nice solids and thus even if they did precipitate it would be difficult to collect. One will have to evaporate the solvent all off and the result will be an oily golden-green residue. This is a mixture of a variety of cannabinoids, terpenes, ... It can be used as is or subjected to column chromatography to isolate individual components.
Honestly if one has plant material it is far more economical and useful to use it to make butter. One can make a lot of potent batch with just leaf and trim.... even males ... good luck.....

Its tough to remove all traces of naptha or even hexane from cannabis oil without reduced pressure and mild heat. SWIM would recommend redissolving the oil in some alcohol after and reevaporating to remove any traces of solvent that get trapped in the oil. It works.

This is one reason why butane is easier to work with because it does evaporate away completely.

But yea I don't see the point in wasting plant material to make oil, only use leaves and other waste material.



yes you can get almost pure THC this way.

thanks guys,

SWIM knows about the butter procedure, but this was the first time he actually saw how to make oil, and since he's digging up his old chemistry books since he started reading here on the site he thought he might just give it a try just for fun. (SWIM's a person of many interests )

As of the waste material thing, that's what SWIM meant.