Thanks Cyb for this (reportedly) great tek! I'm planning on doing my first extraction and will probably use your tek, although with alterations - one being that I'll be working with tea and not bark, as I've already made tea.
One thing, however, I don't understand:
cyb said:
Earthwalker said:
If you use 50g bark use 50ml naphtha if you use 100g bark use 100ml naphtha
Sorry EW...this is not correct.
You use 40-50ml of solvent for each pull regardless of the quantity of bark or water.
Think about it...if a Re-x, using 30ml of hot solvent, can hold 1g of spice...then each pull can 'potentially' hold 1g (or more) of product.
Effectively you are trying to drag out 1g at a time (although this never happens)
Using any more solvent than this is a waste and will dilute too much, making precip more unlikely.
Why would that be so? When extracting 100g bark instead of 50g, you have twice as much DMT in the soup, so if you use twice as much naptha, twice as much DMT should migrate into it, and you should end up with the same DMT concentration in the naptha.
The precipitation of DMT from naptha depends on its concentration, not the volume, because the volume is global information, and the dissolved DMT molecules only have local information of their immediate surroundings to base their "to precipitate or not to precipitate" decision on. Therefore 2g DMT should precipitate from 100ml naptha as well as 1g DMT does from 50ml.
If that wasn't the case, you could always split the 100ml naptha into two equal parts and precipitate them separately, having a setup consisting of two dishes, each holding 50ml naptha with 1g DMT dissolved in each. The DMT would precipitate, because the two 50ml solutions wouldn't remember that they came from 100ml that was split in half, so they would behave as if they hadn't.
I don't see why this tek couldn't be scaled up the usual way - X times more bark -> X times the volumes of everything (which implies the same concentrations) and give the same percentage yield with the same number of pulls.
Of course there is the practical consideration of finding large enough vessels, freezers etc.