Hi Guys,
i don't know about anyone else but when i grind my bark i sieve it to remove the coarse fibres before i start an extraction.
I now have a little collection of said fibres so i thought i would do a little side by side extraction to see the % amount in the fibres compared to the sieved.
I say % amount because i am about to do an extraction but didnt want to mess about with doing 2 extractions on my remaining sieved bark.

So i have; as you can see in the pictures, 36g of fibres and 62g of sieved. Both the bowel and the bag had been zeroed/tared before anyone asks!

I will be following Cybs Max Ion tek so here we go.

I use the pour and store bags for the freeze and thaw step as they are very robust, leak proof and take up very little space in the freezer. (This keeps the wife happy (OK, not happy but a lot less unhappy than she would be if i was using jars or the like!))

I did cheat with this step and put the bags in the microwave on defrost rather than wait for them to defrost at room temp. Don't know if this affects the process? However i did it to both so the same conditions have been applied (allegedly)

In the picture the bags are shown after their final freeze, they look a little scrunched due to the fact some shopping was put away and they ended up squeezed between some chicken breasts and thighs (the thighs were chicken before anyone asks).

These were defrosted in the microwave until warm and then put into the Liter/quart mason jars before i added 50ml of distilled vinegar which had been heated with a bit of filtered water in the microwave until very hot.

The second picture is of the two jars after sitting for several hours in hot tap water before being left overnight at room temp.

The point i am at now is the acidified powdered bark has been transferred to a flip top kilner jar, for reasons that will be come clear later on in the extraction.
I have added 70g of salt dissolved in hot water (microwave again) and then added to the jar before adding the 40g of lye previously dissolved in cool filtered water to bring the final amount of liquid to the top of my jar.

I only have one of these jars now as the other one had a slight accident during cleaning (by slight, i mean in a million pieces in the sink) so the fibre is getting a bit longer at the acid stage while my other jar is sitting in a warm water bath for a couple of hours.

I will be doing 3 pulls in an hour or so and will post pics of my progress as i go.

see you soon

Kerberos

Update.

My sieved bark jar has now had a few hours warm water bath and is now on the side cooling and my naphtha is heating up in a hot water bath. I will do 3 pulls tonight when the jar has cooled to room temp and do a couple more tomorrow/later on today.

I have also added the salt and lye to my fibre jar and that is sitting in a warm water bath as we speak. It is my intention to leave this jar over night until i can get a replacement flip top in the morning. I am sure the extra time can only help to break the fibre down a bit more.
As Cyb says "patience is the key (padawan)" (OK i put the Padawan bit in, but you can just hear it in his typing!)

OK, in my first post i mentioned that my reason for using the flip top jar would be made clear later on. These are my favorite things for removing my solvent from my jar.

picture for above post!

So i am not saying my method for getting the solvent out as quickly and cleanly as possible is the best way to do this, its just the easiest of all the other methods i've tried (up till now).

I take the funnel and push it into the jar as in the first picture, this forces the solvent into the stem of the funnel.

I then use the pipette to take the solvent out and transfer it to the shot glass. as in the second picture. I can see the base mixture eventual start to come up the stem and when i do i pull the funnel up and when it breaks the surface i push it back in. This allows more solvent to be collected by the funnel and pushed up the stem. I usual find that i need to do this about 4 times before i get the majority of the solvent.

The final picture is what i collected in about 50 seconds using this method.

More later.

OK Guys the first three pulls are out dried and weighed, i used shot glasses due to space limitations in our freezer.
The first 2 pics are after the glasses have been dried in front of a fan and they look a lot more yellow than they were in the flesh.

I have noticed that i always end up with an oily ring around the top and when i scrape the glasses i always go easy to get the first lot as white as possible.

The glasses are usually rinsed in warm naphtha which i then use in subsequent pulls. Fresh solvent is being used for all pulls this time so i can compare the fiber and sieved bark.

The 3rd pic is the weight of the first 3 pulls and the 4th pic is ready to go!

I have another 3 pulls in the freezer and i am about to start the pulls on the fiber so hopefully will have a comparison soon

More later guys.

Kerberos

Update.

820mg from 5 pulls up to now and one more to come out and then i am going to heat everything up and do another pull or 2.
The pulls from room temp soup are all white and no further re-ex required so hats off to Cyb on that one, thanks mate.

I have 3 pulls from the fiber in the freezer as we speak. An issue i had with the first pull was i added 40ml naphtha but only managed to get 20ml out!

Dont know where the other 20ml went, in the past when this has happened i have just added more solvent and heated the soup up and the missing solvent seems to come back Anybody else have this issue and if so how do you usually deal with this?

I will be heating up the fiber soup for the next 3 pulls as it is taking a lot longer for the naphtha to separate and i don't have much time over the coming days and need to get this finished.
I have attached a pic to show how dense this soup is, you can see that my funnel does not sink and i had to push it in to get it that deep! One consolation is i didn't need to worry about dropping it into the bottom of the jar.

Ill drop by later with an amount on the pulls in the freezer.

Kerberos

Excellent work Kerb...Love the Funnel Siphon idea

Nice Clean Spicey Yum !

Ingenious, that funnel idea you have there is. Thanks for that!

great work, i am following the results and the funnel idea is brilliant

i've had similar issues with missing solvent, this usually happens when my soup is very concentrated like in your case, maybe the soup somehow absorbs the solvent, adding water and heating helps push the missing solvent out

Thank you cyb, the room temp soup is definitely helping to pulling pale spice. I wonder how low you could go temp wise and if this would affect the amount of spice pulled per ml of solvent.

I might try putting the soup in the fridge for my first pull on my next extraction just to see what would happen

Hi null24, yeah i find the funnel has helped my stress levels when extracting!
Even if you pull a bit of soup up just give the pipette a little tap and it falls to the bottom, squeeze a bit of solvent back before taking it out and it is nice a clean again.

If you also squeeze the pipette in to a shot glass quite firmly before transferring to your final container (in my case another shot glass) you will find that any very very tiny bits of soup/bark will stick to the sides and bottom allowing you a final check before moving the solvent over.

I would be very interested to hear how you find this method if you ever try it out

Kerberos

Hi sakkadelic,
yes to adding more water and heating!
One massive bonus with the funnel is that you can retrieve all your solvent down to the last ml. I add less solvent for pulls 4 on wards so i do not have to reduce the solvent volume down before freezing. So not only is it easier and faster to pull, it is more environmentally friendly as well

If you guys try this please post how you got on with it.

OK update on fiber pulls.

Picture shows white spice from the first room temp pull of 47mg and the cream is from subsequent heated pulls for a total of 357mg. 5 pulls with naphtha from 36g of fiber so nearly 1%.

The difference between the room temp and heated pulls is very marked so like cyb said, room temp is the way to go if you like pale spice!

At the weekend i am going to add a bit more lye to both jars and heat the buggers up and do a couple of more pulls and hopefully get my favorite yellow/orange spice! I'll let you guys know how that goes.

In conclusion not much difference in yield between the 2 up till now but i did have to heat the fiber to facilitate solvent separation due to how thick it was so more yellow spice was pulled.

Once again i would be really interested if anyone gives the funnel technique a go see you soon.
Kerberos

OK guys final numbers were, 920mg from the 63g of powder and 410mg from the 36g of fibre.
The final pulls were orange and oily (just the way i like it!) and added to my existing orange spice. I find that if i leave the oily pulls for a couple of days till sticky and then add it to my dried orange spice it drys/crystallizes out after a couple of days.
Picture of yield here

Really enjoyed this extraction, ill post a trip report soon!

Kerberos

Hei. Very good experiment, I was concerning about this but lately I discovered that if you grind the bark more like 15 min more you will not get fiber, I use regular coffee grinder which is not the best, but if you grind more than you think is normal you will get only powdered bark