I've been experimenting with silk screen fabric that I got from an art supply store and haven't run into a milligram of trouble.

Very easy to use, scrape and clean.

could you elaborate more?

is it fast? does it filter it completely transparent??

(you have piqued my interest!)

I haven't tried any other methods so I couldn't compare but it definitely worked fast, however I'm not aware when it supposed to be completely transparent..

are you simply putting it in a funnel and letting gravity work? What step are you filtering, the salts after salt precipitation, or the freebase, or both?

what is the procedure you are doing/amounts being used, if I may ask?

Using it the whole way through simply with a funnel and just mixing it around with a spoon.

Only tried 50g first attempt, going to try 500g next, but all in all had no problems at all..

Muslin works quite well also, swim made small pouches to hold the rue and boiled it 3 times and then used a THP setup to try and extract the remainder. He feels that it would work just as well using the muslin as a filter in the above method. As above he only used 50g to test.

but I think you are talking about something different! He is talking about filtering when what one wants is the precipitated solids.. You seem to be talking about the filtering when the harmalas are dissolved in a liquid and you want to get rid of the solids. In this step you are talking about there is not so much issue, a progressive filtering through t-shirt/cotton/similar material works well also.. but the problem is when one is making extraction and is precipitating the salts or freebase and needs a filter that doesnt get clogged, but at the same time that the precipitated alkaloids stay on top of the filter and can be easily scraped

I've got some muslin also and it works great for cooking up bark. I actually only happen to get the silk screen one time when I was getting muslin cause I thought it might come in handy and low n behold it has! Picked up some better/finer quality silk screen yesterday and will use this for next attempt so will keep updated.

I see now, muslin is a bit porous for that type of filtering. What about using different sized micron filters that you get for making biodiesel?

what types of filters do you use for making biodiesel?
i have used spin on, water filters, and ss screens. don't think any of these would work too well for harmalas. possibly a very tight ss mesh?
gotta check a catalog or something. silkscreen seems like a good idea, if it can be scraped without being damaged...

The filter bag (sock) type, ranging from 1 micron up to 200 micron filter socks for aquariums (even seen 800 micron ones). Seen a few on the bay of E for not to bad a price (might warrant a few experiments), usually made from polywhatever so should be quite durable and withstand a scraping.

Also from what I can gather the best micron size for silk screen is about 25 microns for a 160T mesh so I don't see any reason why filter bags couldn't do the same job.

Sounds interesting..

Just do an ebay search for filter bags or filter socks (theres quite a few on the UK site) and they are usually quite a good size so many filters could be cut. Swim even thought of these for bubble hash - much cheaper than those bags that they sell for making bubble hash.

just a thought, but if you are just going to be cutting the sock filter, it would probably be less expensive to find the same material in flat sheets.
also, the bubblebags come in sets, that have specific micron size in succession for near perfect physical separation of trichomes. i doubt that any poly sock filter will work nearly as well.\
i still like the silkscreen idea for harmalas.

but what we need to know is, how big are the harmala crystals that precipitate in a basic solution... ? How many microns would have to be the filter to keep the harmalas on top?