Just finished first attempt at Kash's tek on 300g san pedro powder. All went well until the salting stage. I scaled up the amounts of hcl, so used 1.5ml in 100ml water instead of the 0.5 recommended. Did two saltings instead of one.

Combined saltings were pale yellow and clear. I started evaporating them over boiling water and all seemed ok until black needle shaped crystals started forming. When all the water evaporated, a decent amount of black crystals were scraped up.

Guessing I used too much hcl. Hopefully something is salvageable? Dont think a simple acetone wash will be enough though. Any tips?

Yes that happened to me too. Don't worry it's totally salvageable. Washing wont work well though, the only way to really clean I've found is to redissolve the HCl in water, re-base, re-extract and re-salt (in other words to re-A/B it).

Thanks Endlessness. Thats good to hear. Ill do a mini AB then but use less hcl to salt this time. Havent got a pH probe yet but I can use litmus and aim for just under 7 (post salting). Is that about right? Is evapping over a pan of boiling water ok heatwise?

Yes about the pH.

And to evap i leave the mescaline/acid water in a round pirex dish on top of a pan of boiled water with a fan blowing. I put towels around to insulate the pan of hot water to keep it hot. If needed because you have a big volume to evap, you can replace the hot water and keep going.

What endless said.

This is definietly a case where more is not better. Done it myself...

What is the black colour? I'm thinking traces of iron ions interacting with phenolic compounds, which would produce an intense black coloration. Or does the surplus HCl cause something to decompose? Endlessness' post seems to imply the latter but what grade was the hydrochloric acid? The drain/patio cleaner variety can have a fair proportion of metal ions by way of contamination.

No idea what the black could be but when it happened to me, it was lab HCl so it was not a contamination

Well, the black crystals were redissolved in 100ml water, giving a black solution. Addition of 100ml NaHO solution caused a separation, thin black flakes floating on top of a slightly cloudy yellow liquid. The black bits were skimmed off the top. 3x100ml xylene pulls were performed, combined and then salted once with 0.5ml hcl in 100ml water (as opposed to 1.5ml/l previously) The xylene went from cloudy yellow to clear and the hcl solution became kind of a salmon colour.

Anyway, it was evapped more slowly and with less heat this time. To my relief, I now have a dark tan powder, slightly waxy, more like the pics in kash's tek. Next step will be washing with acetone.

Yield is not so good. About a gram from 300g cactus. I got as much from 100g of the same cactus batch using 69rons lime/limo/vinegar tek. That was a year ago though so maybe there's been some deterioration? Obviously I dont know the purity of that extraction, but it was a light tan waxy powder and fairly potent.

Primo, are you sure you did enough xylene pull and not left anything behind ? If you still have the basic water, try one more pull.

Secondo, what degree of purity did you get with 69rons tek ? Did you get good effets with small dose of the result ?

Well I did 5 pulls of 200ml each originally and then went back and did another pull of the base soup whilst doing the mini AB on the black stuff. Heated it up in a water bath this time too.

69ron acetate seemed quite clean. Didnt do any cleaning stages on it. 200 mg kept me going all night, even though I was drinking beer too. It was about the same strength as when I ate 20 grams of the raw cactus powder.

Update. I went back and had one more try at the base soup. Added more sodium hydroxide (just in case). Heated the mixture up a bit more too. Did a 300ml pull with xylene. Lots of shaking and leaving to separate. Salted with about 0.4ml hcl in 100ml water. This gave me about another quarter gram of light tan crystals.

So maybe I shouldve heated the soup more for the previous pulls? I assumed this was done mainly to break up emulsions, but it must increase the amount of mesc that the xylene can dissolve too. Is toluene much better?

Ill go back to 69ron's for my next attempt, but salt with hcl instead of vinegar and see how it compares.

Good job so far. Don't forget to post your results

Have you measured pH of the final water layer? Mine was always way too acidic indicating not only all the alkaloids were salted out, but possibly more have been taken with it.

It seems one drawback of the method is to guess the amount of alkaloids and add just the right amount of HCl - too little and not enough will be pulled. Too much and maybe impurities will be pulled as well.