Hey guys. First off, I feel a bit uncomfortable posting this in the advanced chem forum, but I can no longer post under FAQ, and I felt like this was the next best place to ask. I hope this isn't too inappropriate

I have been reading up on mushroom alcohol extracts, and would really like to perform it on a dozen or so grams of aborts I have laying around. I would like to do a soxhlet extraction with ethanol (methanol is supposedly a little more efficient though).

Afterwards I want to evaporate a good volume of the solvent, so the goodies are left in a light solution that can be stored in the freezer.
I would like to do this through vacuum filtration. Maybe the soxhlet and vacuum filtration aren't entirely necessary for making such a simple tincture, but as a layman I'm really interested in learning these techniques for future use in other ventures. Plus, it seems like a pretty efficient way to do this tincture as well, perhaps the soxhlet might make it easier to pull more of the harder to get intracellular psilocin, although doing enough alcohol soaks would end up with the same result.

The thing I'm wondering is, what do most of you use as a pump for pulling the vacuum?
I have a buchner funnel, filter paper, buchner flask, tubing etc. on the shopping list, but haven't decided on the actual pump yet. What would you guys suggest to purchase as a cheap pump that is easily set up in a kitchen environment?

Ethanol is a pretty poor solvent for psilocybin, and psilocin solutions are very susceptible to oxidation. Some people have reported getting largely inactive oily sterol gunk from EtOH mushroom extracts.

Attaching an air venturi to an air compressor line might be a way to go. It is not wasteful of water like a water aspirator pump, and not as suspicious as ordering some kind of vacuum pump. You could probably make your own air venturi at home fairly easily. They're noisy, mind.

For an electric vacuum pump, you could try looking at the back of a freezer... beware of the coolants they're filled with, of course. Cyclopentane could be quite useful for something, though.

Hey! what i find works great for some pulling a vacuum without lab equipment, is a compressor from an old fridge, freezer, or AC unit. done properly u should have the cooling system evacuated by a technician as the Freon gas is bad for the environment. After the evac there will be two main copper lines protruding from the compressor, one is an intake and one is the high pressure side. Im sure its pretty self explanatory from here

cheers, best of luck with your tincture

Gast DOA P104-AA.
vac/pressure pump. you can safely run it for hours. do filtration and vac desiccation, then put air in your tires, if you so wish.
it also evacuates a rotary evaporator rather effectively.

hand-operated pumps work fine for filtration, but a diaphragm, rocking-piston, or rotary vane pump will better suit your needs for techniques like distillation, sublimation, and desiccation.

Modern fridges won't necessarily contain freons - I've seen a lot of fridges lately with cyclopentane in, which might be worth saving as a solvent. These might also have pumps more suited to low pressures as the boiling point of cyclopentane is slightly higher than your trad freon refrigerants R11 or R141b.

Safety edit: attempting to drain cyclopentane from a refrigerator without the necessary skills and experience is stupid and dangerous - don't do it!

Some of the hand pumps for camping air beds can also pump air out of stuff. It is not going to be a high power vacuum but I would have thought it could speed up filtration quite a bit. These pumps are cheap and have a bunch of adaptors for different uses.

a Nalgene aspirator with faucet adapter is always the perfect kitchen filtration accessory.

the only hand pump that can be recommended is the bike tire type, with a reversed valve or with dual action. don't buy anything electric or for brake lines.

A used fridge compressor makes a great inexpensive pump and doesn't waste alot of water, should be able to get one for $10-20

One thing about fridge/freezers compressors, those pumps are in an oil bath (hence the strange metal bulb form), and the outlet tube might spit some oil out. In a closed system like a fridge, that oil will go around and reach the reservoir again so no problem.

But with an open outlet you might loose the spitted out oil. Way to deal with this is to connect a flexible tube on the outlet copper tube and hang it upwards and make the diameter of that tube wide enough, so that the spitted oil will loose from gravity inside that upward tube, and flow back in the big oil reservoir, if not immediately, then when the pump is stopped.

If you`re looking for handpumps, go for the mityvac silverline.