Mr.Peabody said:
I was wondering, does the salt need to be added after the acid, before the base?
Best to put in the salt
After the acid and
before or with the base. The salt 'amplifies' the ionic strength of an Alkaline
(basic) solution.
If you were to add it at the acid stage I would imagine that it would excite the ions in the acidic solution and want to turn it towards the alkaline direction.
The action of putting acid in (
at first) is to dissolve the cell walls and lyse out the molecule into a salt form
(not freebase)....therefore the longer you leave in the acid...the more it will break down the plant.
The action of putting Lye in...is to
further breakdown the plant and turn the molecule into
freebase form.
I have since learned that it can take anything up to a day to fully break all the cell walls with lye alone....
(see here)
so by all means experiment with the time parameters of the soaks.
I have also learned that 'Tap Water' is also fine to use as any impurities in the water will not transfer to the NPS.
To answer your question of 'Reinvigorating' your spent mixes....
Go for it...I tried that a few times, on spent bark and only retrieved a small amount of oily goo and 20mg or so of xtal. BUT I had really
raped the mix beforehand.
I say try it...with a good amount of salt saturate and a little more lye to re-Boost the mix...shake it up and let it sit a while (few hours) and pull and see what turns up :thumb_up:
Heat is a big player as well...I have done the tek 'cold' and got nice white xtals...but only around half the yield. Heat will draw more yellow alks but to my way of thinking
(seeing as it's so scarce now)...you want to drag Everything you can out of that bark and purify later...if that is what you want to do (via Re-x or other methods)
Onwards....:thumb_up: