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Crystals vanishing

Rno

Rising Star
Joined
Jun 25, 2026
Messages
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Hello,
I just extracted dmt crystals using Minty love's dptek1 yesterday and stored them in 2 mini glass jars of jam of 50g. One was for the more white crystals and the other for yellower crystals. But today I opened both jars to check on them and the white crystals have totally disappeared and have been replaced by a transparent and sticky goo while the yellow crystals are still a bit visible but very wet and also covered in goo. The temperature in the room was about 30 degrees celcius all day long. I wonder why this storage method was inapropriate and if its possible to turn the goo back into crystals ?
 
Hi Rno,

It looks like your xtlas melted into goo due to the high temperature. How long was it after you finished the tek and stored them? And did you make sure they were thoroughly dried with a fan?

To obtain xtals again, redissolve in a minimal amount of naphtha and freeze precipitate. Or allow the small amount of naphtha to evaporate undisturbed for a few days, this will result in bigger xtals.
 
Hello,
I just extracted dmt crystals using Minty love's dptek1 yesterday and stored them in 2 mini glass jars of jam of 50g. One was for the more white crystals and the other for yellower crystals. But today I opened both jars to check on them and the white crystals have totally disappeared and have been replaced by a transparent and sticky goo while the yellow crystals are still a bit visible but very wet and also covered in goo. The temperature in the room was about 30 degrees celcius all day long. I wonder why this storage method was inapropriate and if its possible to turn the goo back into crystals ?
The high temperature won't have helped at all, and if there was a little solvent residue left on your crystals they'd definitely melt under those conditions.

One question - were the jars exposed to light at all?

Polymerisation can also be associated with goo formation, so your best course of action is like to be the mini A/B process, which is more or less just running the extraction again at the far smaller scale defined by the amount of goo you're dealing with.

Simple recrystallisation, while it's often good at cleaning up the product, won't break up polymeric goo so you'd likely see a considerably diminished final yield with that.
 
The high temperature won't have helped at all, and if there was a little solvent residue left on your crystals they'd definitely melt under those conditions.

One question - were the jars exposed to light at all?

Polymerisation can also be associated with goo formation, so your best course of action is like to be the mini A/B process, which is more or less just running the extraction again at the far smaller scale defined by the amount of goo you're dealing with.

Simple recrystallisation, while it's often good at cleaning up the product, won't break up polymeric goo so you'd likely see a considerably diminished final yield with that.
Would a non polymerized goo eventually dry up and xtalise?
 
Would a non polymerized goo eventually dry up and xtalise?
Still kind of depends why it's a goo, and what the ambient conditions are. If those conditions - e.g. lower 'comfortable' temperature, high enough purity, absence of both light and solvent residue, and no remnants of base - are suitable then it's not impossible.
 
The high temperature won't have helped at all, and if there was a little solvent residue left on your crystals they'd definitely melt under those conditions.

One question - were the jars exposed to light at all?

Polymerisation can also be associated with goo formation, so your best course of action is like to be the mini A/B process, which is more or less just running the extraction again at the far smaller scale defined by the amount of goo you're dealing with.

Simple recrystallisation, while it's often good at cleaning up the product, won't break up polymeric goo so you'd likely see a considerably diminished final yield with that.
The jars were in a shelf not exposed to direct sunlight but still in a bright room. as soon as i found the crystals had disappeared, I put the jars under a small fan and just came back a few hours later and they seamed to "reappear" but not in the form of crystals and still covered in goo : the white crystal dont look like crystals anymore but rather as if the bottom of the jar was freezing and the yellow crystals now look like a wet pile
 
Hi Rno,

It looks like your xtlas melted into goo due to the high temperature. How long was it after you finished the tek and stored them? And did you make sure they were thoroughly dried with a fan?

To obtain xtals again, redissolve in a minimal amount of naphtha and freeze precipitate. Or allow the small amount of naphtha to evaporate undisturbed for a few days, this will result in bigger xtals.
after finishing the tek, i froze them then pipeted away the left naphta and then blew over the crystals with a fan for a whole day
 
what is also weird is I had a very small amount of the crystals stored in small plastic containers just next to the jars and they have not been transformed to goo
This kind of implies to me that the material in the glass jars succumbed to solvent residue which would be able to diffuse out of/through plastic, perhaps. What kind of plastic containers are they?
 
This kind of implies to me that the material in the glass jars succumbed to solvent residue which would be able to diffuse out of/through plastic, perhaps. What kind of plastic containers are they?
They are tiny 50mg plastic flasks which are made to put inside the drug you want to send for analyzing in a lab. Maybe more adequate than orange jam jars 😔. So you think by adding naphtha again then freezing ill be able to reobtain crystals and evap the whole solvent again ?
 
So you think by adding naphtha again then freezing ill be able to reobtain crystals and evap the whole solvent again ?
Recrystallisation is an established technique, and essentially like freeze-precipitating from naphtha pulls, except you'd want to use the minimum amount of naphtha that's warm but not above DMT's melting point. If you still have intact crstals in your plastic sample tubes, you could use a few of those to seed your crystallisation.

However, this won't break up any polymerised goo, which is where a mini A/B would come in - dissolve all the goo in acid, then proceed as though you're just doing a miniature extraction. The acidic phase does help break up the goo.

 
Recrystallisation is an established technique, and essentially like freeze-precipitating from naphtha pulls, except you'd want to use the minimum amount of naphtha that's warm but not above DMT's melting point. If you still have intact crstals in your plastic sample tubes, you could use a few of those to seed your crystallisation.

However, this won't break up any polymerised goo, which is where a mini A/B would come in - dissolve all the goo in acid, then proceed as though you're just doing a miniature extraction. The acidic phase does help break up the goo.

Ok thank you so can I first try recrystallisation and if it isnt enough then do the mini A/B ?
 
Personally, I'd go straight for the mini A/B - using two processes will compound your losses.
I just have a few questions on your guide for the mini A/B. "The DMT-loaded vinegar can then be treated like the first step of an A/B extraction, with the addition of just enough base, maybe a bit of salt [NaCl] for good measure and then proceed with warm pulls into the minimum volume of naphtha or heptane." Could you describe it more in detail please ? What temp is a warm pull and why use warm pulls ? Should I add the base and salt directly to the dmt vinegar or prepare a water based solution and mix the two ? How do I know the aproximate quantities to use ? And if I use a very small volume of solvent, the proportion that's really hard to pipette out without getting the base too will be quite big ?
 
Hehe, we'll discount this preamble for the moment:
I just wrote up a mini A/B description in this post, but try not to tell anyone as it's meant to be an initiative test ;)
and address a few of your questions…

What temp is a warm pull and why use warm pulls ?
Warm and not hot because it's advantageous to keep things below the melting point of DMT when going for a saturated NPS solution. Using warm solvent is based on the same principle as freeze precipitation - the temperature-solubility gradient. It allows more DMT to dissolve in a given volume of solvent than it would at room temperature, just as less DMT dissolves in freezing cold naphtha.

IMPORTANT: only ever use a hot water bath to warm your base soup and solvent, and extinguish all naked flames as well as moving out of range of incandescent material before measuring out any naphtha. Avoid all likely causes of electrical sparking when handling warm naphtha. (Hopefully all common sense, but definitely worth reiterating - vapour explosions and fireballs may cause damage to health and property.)
Should I add the base and salt directly to the dmt vinegar or prepare a water based solution and mix the two ?
Better to dissolve the base (you can use sodium carbonate, especially if there's no excess of acidity, which would be liable to foam a bit) and then drip that solution in and marvel as it turns milky from the separation of freebase DMT.
How do I know the aproximate quantities to use ?
If you know the amount, in grams, of DMT you'll be purifying, molecular weight calculations can be used to determine the precise amount of acetic acid needed to convert it all into salt form, and extend that to the amount of vinegar required by scaling to the percentage strength of the vinegar you're using.

A similar set of calculations can be carried out for the base you'll be adding.

We even have some solubility estimates for DMT freebase in naphtha, although a series of small pulls will usually work out better than one big one, so you can estimate the efficacy and level of completion by freezing each pull separately without having to calculate an exact amount of naphtha.

There's also a degree of variability between diferent batches and brands of naphtha, since it's a mixture with a range of possible compositions. This in turn affects the exact amount of DMT (or whatever solute) that any given batch of naphtha will dissolve, so giving a precise frgure here isn't altogether feasible.
And if I use a very small volume of solvent, the proportion that's really hard to pipette out without getting the base too will be quite big ?
Finding a container with a long, thin neck will help with pipetting, and there's also the inverted funnel trick. Either of these will serve to concentrate the naphtha into a narrow surface area, increasing its depth and minimising losses in the smaller amount of hard-to-recover naphtha remnant.

This is also where doing multiple pulls helps - each pull dilutes the remnant amount so that, by the time a fourth or fifth pull gets done, losses will become insignificant through repeated dilution: the remnant from a preceding pull gets taken up by the one that follows.

Final footnote: if the DMT has cleared up nicely through acidification, after the requisite amount of base has been added you may want to try putting it in the fridge to solidify into more or less of a single mass for simple physical removal. Crystals can then be obtained by recrystallisation from the minimum amount of warm naphtha or heptane. Slower cooling makes bigger crystals.

Hope this all helps!
 
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