I've been playing around with Salvia extraction. For my first extraction I wanted to produce a vacuum purged Salvia shatter/wax however I was afraid of overdose. So I made a raw extract leaving in all the impurities. The process was simple 20g Salvia with 300ml acetone in a soxhlet apparatus. Evaporate acetone, vac purge oil until wax. The final product was so dark green it was almost black and I unfortunately allowed the oil to overheat resulting in a taffy like consistency. Upon testing my product I came to find the error of my ways. I didn't have the fore site to realize that impure oil would make for a very harsh smoke. The flavor was amazing though. During the test a vision of the spirit of Salvia came to me and said she didn't appreciate being "stripped" into oil form and to put her back in her cloths. I decided at this point to make a more refined "standardized" oil imbued leaf extract.

My next tek is inspired from this LSA tek.
LSA TEK
I plan on running the soxhlet with naphtha until it runs clear then proceeding with the above process minus the waxing procedure. If my theory is sound the salvinorin will remain in the plant material while waxes, tars and resins will pass into the naphtha to be discarded. Does anyone have an idea if this will work? Maybe I missed something you could inform me of. And some eye candy of course.

Via a much simpler process using only household equipment ( a French coffee press, a baster, a drinking glass, an eyedropper, etc.) you can end up with a very pure product:

I think you may have missed the memo about cold solvents and short extraction times.

From a post by Entropymancer a few months ago:

Thanks for the replies.
That's some beautiful extract gilbran.
Thanks for the info Morris. I'll definitely be reading those a couple of times.
I personally feel that soxhlet extraction is most simple extraction method out there. Fill it up, let run a couple hours, then remove your filtered solvent baring extract. For that reason I've been looking for soxhlet teks but have come up short. I have plenty of salvia to spare so I think I'll still go ahead with the refined Salvia soxhlet tek experiment. Thanks again for the replies.

You really should take some time and read through gibran2's write up. That soxhlet is going to pull a lot of unwanted plant matter.

A lot of people seem really intent on using soxhlets for a variety of extractions where they are significantly outperformed by less "cool" apparatus. Congrats on the soxhlet (and it is a cool piece of equipment), but both people that have chimed in on this thread seriously know what they are talking about.

I would listen to them

The soxhlet is indeed an unnecessary overkill for salvinorin A extractions...Sphere's tek works beautifully and with a very good yield because salvinorin is (purportedly) on the outside of the leaves and because chilled acetone can effectively pull salvinorins. The short contact of leaf material with chilled acetone also ensures that minimal amount of other crap are pulled, thus making the next cleaning steps much easier.

The soxhlet will pull all sorts of crap, thus making purification a royal pain in teh ass...But maybe the worst thing with soxhlet are the continuously hot (acetone's boiling point) temperatures salvinorin is subjected to; salvinorin is a heat-sensitive molecule and I don't see soxhlet doing any good for it.

I figured that running naphtha first before the acetone pull would remove most of the unwanted impurities. Thus creating a very pure extract in a matter of hours rather than days. Secondly I thought salvinorin wouldn't be heat sensitive at all due to its high vaporization point. I guess I was mistaking.