So the idea is to make an acidic tea and then add noniodized salt and wait for harmala salts to precipitate out. Is it better to make a salt solution or to just dump a bunch of salt into the tea directly and is 20G of salt per 100ml enough ?

I tried this about a year ago on 28 grams of rue and discovered the absolute importance of filtration. Sediment and salt all over the bottom of my container. I've been hesitant to try again but after smoking some 10x caapi I blended with Rue seeds I'm really interested in trying oral harmalas.

The emphasis on non-iodized salt is vastly overstated. The amount of potassium iodide in table salt is miniscule. More concern should be paid to the anti-caking agents in granulated salt. I use rock salt.
In the past I have mixed concentrated salt water with the rue brew and that worked. I've also just added rock salt to scalding hot rue brew all the way up to the level of 20g per 100ml and the goodies didnt start crystallizing until the solution began to cool anyway, so thats my standard now. Rock salt may leave a very small quantity of not-salt crystals, pour the solution to another jar while still hot to get rid of those.
People use anywhere from 10 to 20 grams of salt per 100ml. It seems to be more of a personal preference than anything. I once experimented by doing 10 per 100, getting all the crystals, then adding 5 more grams of salt.. I got a quantity of crystals weighting 8% as much as the first batch, then I added 5 grams more salt (to 20g/100ml) and the few extra crystals that came out were too small a quantity to weigh.
Stronger salt makes for faster crystallization and more salt contamination, weaker salt makes for prettier crystals.
To minimize salt contamination, when you filter out your crystals open the filter and put it on a double layer of paper towels (on a newspaper so you dont stain something), sort of even the crystals out so its like a little pizza, put another filter on top, fold the extra end of paper towels over that, gently massage the hidden crystal pizza, slowly applying more pressure until your whole body weight is on it. It gets nearly all of that salt water out with a minimum of loss.

Exactly what i do

Another tip is to cool down slowly for prettier cristals and to finish in the fridge close to 0°C.

Ok. I appreciate the tips. I really want to figure this out. I'm sure I'm over thinking this.

Do you guys grind the seeds a little bit or boil them whole?

I'm planning on filtering with three things, a metal strainer used for tea, a "Fijian strainer bag" I use for making Kava and then a coffee filter. In that order.

I can give you some filtering tips.
What I do is start with a Muslin cloth . Then I have 3 jars lined up with funnels .
Start with a loose piece of cotton ball in the neck of the funnels and pour liquid into all three funnels.
As one blocks and clogs or slows to a drip, pour the contents remaining in the funnel into the neighbouring funnel and swap out the cotton for a fresh piece. They will clog up pretty fast at first so you will be swapping them out quite a lot , as opposed to leaving them in place to drip through slowly.
Once everything has passed through once then use thicker pieces of cotton ball to filter.
After the second pass, use double coffee filters in the funnels for a pass.
All other filtering past this point should then be done with double coffee filters.
This is my method and it makes for a fast process and yellow finger tips.
Hope this helps.

Good question Sandgrease, and great tips from Auxin & Dansmatete & Deltaspice.

General process with notes on 10g salt per 100ml (have not used much) vs. 15g salt per 100ml (works great when you have 1:3 vinegar to water solutions) vs 20g salt per 100ml (works great when you have just hot water solutions with no vinegar).

I suspect tregar is manufacturing enough to supply a small nation
A useful filtering material to include when working with much smaller quantities than that is handkerchiefs. I got a pack for christmas many years back and rather than walking around with snot in my pocket I naturally decided to use them to make hallucinogens instead
When in doubt ...make it into a hallucinogen
Just stuff the thing in a wide mouth jar or something with the edges of the handkerchief out the top, pour the slop in, twist together the edges, and slowly squeeze/twist all the liquid out. Dont squirt rue goo on yourself.

So far I've always ground my seeds but the filtration is maddening. This year I'mma try boiling whole several times, then dry out the 'spent' seeds, grind, and extract them just to see if I get more. Because, seriously, I'd hapily take a 10% loss to avoid the filtering. I might even tolerate a 33% loss. And its no real loss as long as I save the boiled and dried seed.
tregar, did you ever try grinding and extracting previously boiled seeds? Or were the extractions always separate runs?

I think everyone is after the same neat result as a preference. Same result can be obtained with both 10 and 20 gr/100ml if you let the alkaloid concentration vary accordingly, i.e. how much volume of liquid one uses for each gram of alkaloids. A smaller volume of 10gr/100ml could act same (give or take) as a larger volume at 20gr/100ml, for same batch.

This item is largely unaddressed in the TAO-of-rue and there is a reason for it namely one usually doesn't know how much alkaloids there are, and this includes all stuff outside harmine and harmaline. For example a first manske will tend to crystallize faster than the second manske (when using same gr-salt/100ml-water and the same volume of liquid), because in the second manske there are already a bunch of "non-needled-alkaloids" discarded by poring of the liquid of the first manske. The total concentration dropped, the needle growth lessened.

Just pointing out one possible reason why one feels like 10 and another 20 gr/100ml.

Pressure cooker is a very usefull tool.

I did an experiment :
- PC 3x30min with whole rue seeds (freeze&thaw before) and extract
- then freeze&thaw and grind (coarsely) some of those seeds. PC 2x20min and extract

I got ~10% more of the goodies from them, so now i don't grind them and filtering is not a pain in any part of my body.

Damn. I'm pretty intimidated by this. I don't really get how to FB with sodium carbonate. Do I made a solution and then add that to the rue tea or do I add the SC directly to the rue tea andhow does the acidic rue tea react to the base being added to it?

The tao of rue is kind of vague compared to some of the other teks found on the wiki.

sandgrease converting to freebase is something you can do at the end, with caapi you can go straigt to converting to freebase, but this isnt caapi. HCL is much better for storage and oral consumption anyway.

one thing i havent seen mentioned yet is DECANTING!!!
after you do the initial boils and then reduce it to a workable liquid you really should just let it sit overnight in a tall jar/beaker (and pour off very slowly). save yourself the hassle of changing many more filters than you have to.

Hail to that!
It is my weapon of choice, let the grounded seeds come, let them try
And I do not tip over but suck the top layer of (not in my mouth!). There is a thread breeding in my head and sooner or later it will erupt as pixels

So it has started...

Ground up an Oz of rue, put said powder in a small mason jar and filled with water. Let this sit in a cupboard because I had to go to work but wanted to get this ball rolling. Gonna get some vinegar and boil later.

I'm going to keep these Harmalas as HCL for oral use. Probably just divide whatever I end up with by 28 and just work with it like that. Never tried an Harmalas orally and didn't want to make a tea and puke.

Curb said:
This is very true, the jars of liquid after all the cotton ball filtering in funnels should then be left in fridge for a few days, as this will allow a tiny thin layer of sludge to collect at the bottom of the jars, just decant the liquid from above the sludge to process on all your further steps.

So I boiled and filtered a bunch. I let all the sediment settle and decsnted and filtered again and it ran through the coffee filter within a minute or two. I ended up with 100ml of liquid, I heated this and added 12 Gs of salt and stirred this for a while. I let this sit in a cupboard for a few hours then moved to the fridge for 24 hours. I filtered this amd ended up with what looked like a small amount of goopy orange/brown stuff. I'm letting this air dry outside on a coffee filter.

I assume I screwed something up but as you all said practice makes perfect. Filtering this stuff was such a pain. At leastRue is cheap so it doesn't hurt so bad that I might have messed up. Extracting spice is waaaayyy easier lol

Your goodies are in the goopy brown stuff
Its just mixed with the stuff that got past the filter.

Can you use baking soda to base or do you need to bake it for 2 houes or whatever to get carbonate?

The homework is like this:
* what pH does sodium bicarbonate give at saturation?
* what pH does sodium carbonate give at saturation?
* what pH do I need to freebase harmaline? --> Freebase percentage AND pH calculator

I bet you can find joy in finding it out

After each salt boil, simply pour off hot liquid -- filter off liquid thru 1 funnel sitting in a 2-liter mason jar with one tight cotton stuffed in the funnel--the cotton will remove any impurities. Then place filtered liquid after it cools down to ambient into fridge for 3 to 5 hours--crystals will be become more pure with each additional cycle.

Thanks for all the help guys. I feel like I have a much better grasp on the chemistry involved.