Hi, I'm looking for some more advice on extracting from confusa bark tea, since I can't seem to get any alkaloid migration into the non-polar solvent layer. I attempted the same method with veggie oil, but then there was also very little alkaloid migration out of the tea.

This round I'm using d-limonene as the NPS:

First I make a tea of around 100g Acacia confusa stem bark with distilled water and some vinegar.
Concentrate the tea down to a workable amount 450-500ml
While hot basify with sodium carbonate, which appears to crash out the alkaloids in solution
Add limonene and swirl 'doorknob-handle' style in jar

From here I've gotten a little bit of yellow color in the limo, so I remove from the tea jar and add to a jar acidified w/ vinegar.
Let sit for a couple hours, remove the limonene, the vinegar seems pretty much clear and only the faintest bitter taste.

I have since added maybe 10-15 more grams of sodium carb, but it still isn't pulling into the limonene easily at all.

Sodium carbonate isn't very efficient on the first pulls from the soup its just not strong enough. You can use sod.carb if you do a mini-acid base after when the solution has much less plant matter but to start with you should use lye.

Ohhh, ok thank you DreaMTripper

I was adding tons of carbonate, but it wasn't doing much... I'll try it and report back

I added a lot of lye to my limo/base tea jars... but there still doesn't seem to be any darkening of the limonene
Does the limonene change color or give any indication of picking up alks?

It hasn't been sitting very long, so I'll continue to shake it lightly

Hi , no it should stay clear as the alkaloids will dissolve in it. You only need 20g / litre (5-10g should do for 500ml)check some teks for rough ammount. If there's anything in there it should have gone over to the limo.

Thanks so much for the help dreamtripper, that gets me through the unknown parts of the wet-style limonene path...

This new limonene pull based w/ lye sat overnight and appeared to change color
Also took first lye-based pull and added to vinegar salting jar, which sat overnight, and the color migrated from the limo into the vinegar.

I can see a little bit of precipitate when the limonene hits either the base soup to absorb freebase, and when it unloads salts into vinegar.

From here I think I'm going to evap the vinegar to get the salts, base with sodium carb, and pull with iso to get some vapable product.

One question, In the base soup, do the alkaloid precipitates naturally float to the top or bottom?

I'll report back with the results once this is complete

Sounds like it's going well, really depends on the soup and how saturated it is as to where precipitate goes, some some people notice it float in top others have noticed it sink, usually it's in a liquid form dissolved so you cant see it. Id irs Super saturated it may suspend or float.
Ultra clean concentrates solutions it will precipitate eg the sod cab crystallization tek.
Let us know how you get on.

I got a workable yield with the first and second limonene pulls.

The pic below is what I was left with after evaporating the salted-spice vinegar from first limo pull, basing with sodium carb, and pulling with isopropanol. There was still a fair amount of iso left when the pic was taken. I didn't weigh the end product or bark, but this definitely isn't a very good yield, might have been .2% or so. Only a few piddling doses out of a double handful of bark... so I may have fudged somewhere, but I'm willing to bet the source wasn't too strong too.

I based some harmala extract with sodium carb and pulled with iso, which was mixed with the spice extract, and evaporated onto mullein. I shared this with a friend who reported intense visions, as did I, but didn't seem to break through easily. The harmalas stretched and changed the effect certainly, but the extract did seem really heavy on NMT.

The latest limonene pulls have been salted and evaporated after sitting several days, but yielded very little spice.

The source plant is supposedly Acacia confusa stem bark, possibly from fallen/aged trees, so I'm not too surprised at the low yield. I may try a dry tek next time.

Yeah no guarantees I'm afraid I expect low yeilding bark as the methodology was ok, how many ISO pulls did you do? You should get some fumaric acid to FASW or FASI.

I did one larger and one smaller pull of isopropanol on tryptamine-goo/sodium carb mix. I didn't want to pull very much carbonate, being 91% alcohol, and the first wash seemed to get most out.

Since then I've heard of "salting out" iso alcohol...
Salt traces in the spice should be ok for smoking or eating, aye?

I'll look into getting some fumaric acid

I consider it very difficult to get anything other than citrus-scented goo when using limonene. Fans of fluffy white crystals will likely resort to a final freeze precip from high purity alkanes if they're willing to swallow their "food safe" pride. Pharmaceutical grade petroleum ether should do the trick

At a pinch, you can dry your 91% Iso with anhydrous sodium carbonate (this is if you can't be bothered to obtain/produce anhydrous magnesium sulphate).