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Best extraction Tech

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ChemE

ChemE

Rising Star
i found lots of techs online and was not very satisfied with any of them at all so i thought i would share what swim found as the best one. it may seem like more steps but its worth it.

this tech involves no freezing, emulsions are very easily dealt with so no need to be gental, and the most expensive piece of equipment is a crock pot which isn't 100% necessary. its a A/B/A/B extraction makes it very pure.

start with MHRB powder in a crock pot. cover in twice its volume of vinegar and stir occasionally while left on medium or high or whatever doesn't cause it to go to crazy and boil over or anything.

for the first extract 12 hours is plenty then the second time around a day or two.
separate all the powder from the liquid. best way is usually to do one filtration with several layers of cheese cloth then do it again with coffee filters. store the broth in glass bottles 750's and 1.75s work great.

next add the base to your broth lye crystals are ideal but i'm sure lime would work just as well. the color goes from a red wine to a gray emulsion to a black/brown soy sauce color which is when you stop adding the base. Make sure you dissolve the base in water in a separate container very carefully it gets really hot, then slowly add the liquid to the broth. you should never pour the solid base directly into the broth it can go south very quickly.

now as a solvent you can use naptha and xylene to get everything out and make spice. since xylene is really nasty and smells terrible mix it 50/50 with naptha and use that as the solvent. add about 1/5 of the volume of the broth in solvent and shake the shit out of it, don't worry about the emulsion it will be taken care of later.

now to separate the layers get gallon sized double sealed plastic bags. i know sounds cheap but they are much easier to use than a giant class separatory funnel if you could even get one. pour the broth solvent mix into the bags and let it settle out into two layers. again don't worry bout the emulsion.

now to separate hold the bag by a top corner and cut off the bottom corner of the bag. you will learn quick how big to make the hole. go smaller at first cause you can always cut more off. now let all the broth out and when you get to the emulsion layer stop and put it into a separate glass container. ie mason jars. also wear plastic gloves for this cause base is REALLY bad to get on you or anything else really for that matter. look up degloving if your interested in why it's bad.

now if more than half of the volume of the solvent emulsion mixture is emulsion your are going to have to filter it till there is less than 3/4 emulsion, and you can squeeze the liquid through the filter it will be fine you don't need to get rid of all of it. Now to get rid of the emulsion you want to go buy some epsom salt from a pharmacy in the first aid isle, pour it into a metal pan and put it in the oven at 500 or as hot as it goes, till all of the steam stops coming out and it turns into more of a white powder than translucent crystals. now add a scoop of this powder to the emulsion solvent mixture. This powder will absorb all the water from the emulsion layer and give you very clean solvent add enough powder that all the emulsion becomes a brown clump on the bottom of the jar. then just pour solvent off through a filter. If the emulsion is more than 3/4 the volume of the solvent it ends up making a big mess of goop so make sure not to do that.

now take that solvent and add an equal volume of vinegar to it and shake it up for five or ten min and let it settle. then use a turkey baster and pippet to separate the solvent from the vinegar.

take the vinegar and put it in a pot or pan and boil off about half the volume or less just to make sure all of the solvent is out and to reduce the volume.

now add your base solution very slowly drop wise to the vinegar. add until all the precipitation stops, then pour though a filter. lab grade filter paper is good for this and is easy to get on ebay or other places online but i think coffee filters would work as well.

once it is filtered put some janitorial strength ammonia(10%) in most hardware stores. in the freezer for a couple hours(usually previous to starting everything) make sure when you shake the bottle of ammonia it doesn't foam up. then use this solution to wash the contents of the filter paper and let it dry.

now i'm sure you can figure out what to do from there and if you do it right there should be no residue left behind when it boils off.

any questions i would be happy to answer and really anything about chemistry in general i have a lot of knowledge of, i am 3/4 the way though a chemical engineering degree

ChemE
 
Hi ChemE- and welcome! :)

Your tek seems sound (to a low-grade chemist like me!) but I wonder if putting a basified solution with super-added hydrocarbons into a plastic bag can be regarded as safe ie doesnt leech plastic into the solution?

Ive also heard a fair bit of criticism directed at using an ammonia-wash step with many claiming it causes quite a loss in yield.Ive not tried it myself so this is the impression of others who have utilised it.
 
yeah the solvents and base in a plastic bag is def the more hazardous part of the tech but you have to do it in any tech really. my best advice is don't let it sit around very long, make sure your somewhere very well ventilated, and do it somewhere where you can clean up spills safely cause the base will very literally eat away at just about everything. and with the ammonia wash the key is to get it really cold like there should be chunks of ice in the liquid and it will wash away a lot of the material that is why it is called a wash and the reason most of the stuff tastes like shitty burnt chemicals is cause they don't wash it and a lot of the base (lye or lime) is left over. Ammonia will evaporate so it wont leave anything behind and it will be as pure as it gets. and obviously finding the right ammonia is necessary it cant foam when you shake it, should say janitorial strength and somewhere say 10% ammonia
 
this is all stuff that anyone can get obviously if you have the glassware to do those separations you can use that and it would be much better. just trying to make something anyone could do. and i used glass plastic bags are way easier no cleaning, nothing breaks, and its much easier to control. also what is the point of a pressure cooker? is it for faster extraction time? it wouldn't get more of it out that you could get using a crock pot or even a pot on a stove works. this was just something anyone could do to get the best shit. you can obviously make it better if you have access to legit chemistry equipment. like a vacuum filter is very useful for this and really the extraction should be in a round bottom flask but not everyone can get that easily. leaving out the price of the plant material this whole tech costs like $50 tops and its really quick about 1 day instead of the three or four when freezing is involved, and the most common problem people have is the emulsion layer and that is fixed in this tech in a way i never heard anyone doing it online and it works amazingly well.
 
what's the point of a pressure cooker? what's the point of a crock pot?

....

same purpose: to lyse cells and facilitate a homogenous salt solution. the pressure cooker is
more effective at doing this.
emulsions aren't a problem if the pH is taken high enough, and the solvent/aqueous bilayer is swirled and not vigorously shaken.

some folks have several ways of extracting, they have it down to an art. calling something that uses plastic bags a "best tech" is dubious, at best.
 
its not art at all its simple organic chemistry, they did shit like this in the 1800's. again you can use glass if you have it its just easier to use plastic it doesn't make anything bad its just cheap and easier to deal with than glassware. the pressure cooker just speeds things up you don't need it a crock pot is way safer to leave around going for 12 hours or a couple days. your focusing on the small insignificant shit in the tech its the last A/B extraction that is different from any i have seen that makes it better. essentially everything after the separation your concerned about which really you can do whatever you want to to get to that point it doesn't matter. use a pressure cooker and glassware if you have it all i'm trying to say is if your freezing the solvent at the end to separate it that is not a good way to do it.
 
if you try it is a lot better. the whole first half doesn't matter how you did it that was just the easiest way to do it. essentially from the point of drying it with the epsom salt it where its better. there was a lot of comparisons to the other methods. it takes like an hour to get it out to the solvent rather than spending three days waiting for it to come out from freezing. i have never seen a good A/B/A/B tech online or anything involving a drying agent which is the new stuff i think would help anyone trying to do it. but if you really want to get into the best way to make it, you wouldn't be doing any extraction at all. you would just get that magical amino acid and three simple steps later you just made it synthetically, but again not many people have a lab that could do that.
chemical synthesis is an art. extraction is a lab procedure
 
I use epsom salts all the time in extractions, as do others.
like I said, this is nothing new.

regarding the ubiquitous amino acid route...synthetically, it's not very efficient.

enzymatically is a different story. enzymes are highly selective in the way molecules are oriented in the binding sites, and won't allow for funky side-reactions like pictet-spengler.

extraction is one of many procedures in the art.
 
How about rename this thread to "Best extraction Tech for me" ? Its hardly the best when suggesting to use some plastic bags. Have you read extraction teks in Wiki ?
 
seriously you don't have to use plastic bags its just easy and cheap and it doesn't harm anything, but like i said if u happen to have the glassware then use it. its not like this was the only tech tried. its the one that worked the best. freezing the solvent leaves so much of that nasty shit from the solvents behind. that is what you should be worried about. no legit chemistry lab uses freezing to separate amines from a solvent in an extraction. i have been in a college organic chem lab and this is how they did it A/B/A/B. the second A step you boil for a while so all the solvent is gone. so stop worrying about the plastic use glass if you really think it is going to do anything. you need to worry bout all that lye and solvent residue your getting from those techs. if you don't believe me just try it and you will know why its the best way to do it. maybe i should just change it to the cheap fast and pure tech.
 
If you wish to format your TEK a bit better, remove any potentially hazardous advice (like pouring solvent and base mixture in a plastic bag) and leave out subjective labels (pure, best, etc) you are welcome to make a new thread.

This one is now closed.
 
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