The Antarctican has been growing suspicious of a certain "high quality inner root bark" being offered by a certain bear and so decided to do a super thorough A/B on 200g to see if he got anywhere near the gram he should. The bark was powdered to woolley fiber and pink dust and cooked overnight in a crockpot five times with 1/3 vinegar water. Before the third cook, everything was dumped into a heavy duty blender and run at high speed. The last change of water was perfectly clear. The solutions were combined and boiled down to 4L. He then added lye until the solution turned slippery black and added 25% more lye. This basified solution was divided into two one gallon jars. My friend has also been wondering about how bestine (heptane) compares with naptha as an extraction solvent, so he used bestine to extract one jar and naptha for the other. So far, three pulls of 150ml have been done, two are dry, the third has been sitting with occasional agitation for a week. The first pull resulted in 200mg of virtually identical clean spice from each solvent when freeze precipitated. The solvents were then evaporated down to oily yellow goo. There was aprox half again as much goo from the naptha as the bestine and it was darker. The second pull netted 100mg each, again identical, but this time the naptha remained cloudy and didn't precipitate anything until it had been in the freezer for two days. The bestine precipitated overnight. After separating the third pull (which he has rather low expectations of) he tells me that he's going to add 15g of lye to each jar to see if that knocks anything more loose and do a fourth. Then a toluene pull. I'll post his further results, but this looks like bunk bark to me.
