a story in exchange for answering a chemistry question?

here is the story. chemistry is not really a science imho. hundreds of attempts, hundreds of different outcomes. zero repetability. i decided i had enough of unpredictibility and randomness in harmala tech, time to try a different approach. no acids, no bases, just grinding the seeds very coarse, adding water and freezing. after a week time to filter the brown murky sludge with a cotton ball. being extremely frugal, decided to suck the ball afterwards, no good stuff wasted. i would never ever ever ever get accustomed to that awful taste. somebody else heard me suffering and offered a tictac orange flavor. and that worked surprisingly well. i wouldn't like to sound like a tictac ad, but now that stuff is a must have for me.

now the question. will manske work without vinegar? would adding salt to the filtered rue water going to work?

Yes it works.

Naturally the alkaloids are in the plant as the phosphate salts. And they will also be converted to the HCl salts by adding NaCl (Manske) and then fall out.

BTW: They will fall out much better this way, as Manske works better the less acidic the liquid is.

thank you for confirming. as chemistry is something i find truly insane, i only had a huch that might be the case. tictac rulez.

Well that depends what you define as 'better' I suppose. For me the quote is not true so there we are. I admit to thinking the same as you initially but had to correct that later. For me 'better' is not about seeing a needle grow nicely but all about obtained yields. For that, a better acid level is not a parameter that is limiting at all actually. BTW even after many years of mansking with different acids and levels, still I would not sell my personal experiences as general truths. I find people saying to fast: it is such or so.
Peace and with well meant intentions.

Lol, sure the word "better" is not well defined in this relation. I should have explained it a bit better.

I just meant, that according to Fritzsche (Chemical Gazette p348 ), the more acidic it is, the more NaCl you need.


So with "better", I meant, easier to handle, as no high saturation is needed and therefore the needed NaCl will easily dissolve.
Already with a smaller NaCl concentration the salts will quickly fall out.
Whereas if you have to go for the high NaCl concentrations, time consuming heating and stirring is needed...

Its not the fault of chemistry. Its 100% your fault

This may be true, but it's also a bit harsh. I've seen too many people get frustrated with science in a similar manner. The problem is usually too many variables or something overlooked.
An ideal experiment has only one variable. Every time you add a variable, the possible outcomes increase exponentially. And for someone who has a minimal chemistry background, there is a tremendous amount of jargon and assumptions of knowledge made in so called procedures.
For instance, I once knew someone who read, "wash 3-4 times with 1 quart 3% vinegar", and assumed that a single wash with 1 gallon would do the same. It makes sense intuitively, but is dead wrong.

MOD wrote:

No discussion of buying/selling. Please read the attitude!

If you love to work with minimal NaCl salt, up concentration as in volume liquid down.

Both concentration and purity of harmalas (like: are there still quinazolines and stuff?) are the main factors imho. Not bothering with using acid level as a player in that field actually. I did in the beginning like being anal about it, maybe you recognize that a bit. Now it juts became a no-brainer. But that's juts me only.