Just weighed my yield with this tek, is 270 mg from 5 pulls typical with this technique? It felt a bit disappointing.
I don't have access to VM&P Naphtha where I live so used a similar solvent that's readily available. (Essence C & F)
Essence C is very volatile so evaporates too quickly when heated, essence F is slower to evaporate than VM&P so I blended both and used a heat bath.
I did 5 pulls on the first day, the first 2 pulls took a while to separate but after the 3rd, the solvent easily reached the top of the soup. I ended up with 270 mg of spice.
The 2nd day, I did another 5 pulls, using more heat and more essence F than C. The solvent came out more yellow, it is currently in the freezer, will collect the goodies later today.
I figured that because I used shredded bark ground up in a coffee grinder, it might require more breakdown of the plant material by the lye to increase the yield, so I'm going to wait a week to do more pulls. I'm guessing about this, it's my first extraction with root bark, do you think this assumption is correct?
Edit: After my second 5 pulls (10 plls in total), the yield is up to 638 mg - I think that I'll just keep pulling until nothing else comes out. I'm guessing the solvent I'm using doesn't have the pulling power.