Introducing my uncle Bob

[unclebob]

Hello Nexus!

My interest in psychedelics has been growing steadily over the last few decades, and it probably started with the renaissance of research in that area that started in the 1990s. Over that time, I was going from “this is interesting” to “this challenges my worldview” to “I have to see this myself.” I started reading Rick Strassman, then James Fadiman, then Terence McKenna.

A little while ago, someone who is not me decided that it is time get going. That someone is my uncle Bob, and I will report on all the things he does to explore the hyperspace. Bob is currently in the middle of doing an extraction using Q21Q21’s Tek 1 with D-limonene. He just completed the second pull today, and things are looking good so far. Having actual pictures as part of the Tek article really helps a lot.

I definitely plan to share stories about Bob’s successes and failures to help build the common knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. I am also interested in alternative, more sustainable source materials.

Cheers,
Me

 

[potnoble]

Hi

You and your uncle are welcome :thumb_up:

Have a gud one

 

[endlessness]

Welcome to the Nexus!

Good luck with your extraction!

What is your planned method of vaporization?

Any interest in oral use too?

 

[Voidmatrix]

Greetings and welcome to you and your uncle.

We look forward to seeing what you have to share and where the molecule takes you guys.

Are you interested in any other psychedelics? If yes, which ones and why?

One love

 

[unclebob]

Thank you for the warm welcome!

What is your planned method of vaporization?

Any interest in oral use too?

Evaporation, yes … Bob and I have been reading a lot about the various options, and Bob has decided to try something different. From all the info available, dabbing appears to be a formidable choice. The only problem with dabbing is that the traveler holds a blazingly hot contraption while taking off to another dimension. That could be safety concern for solo travelers, so Bob was looking for a safer launch device.

He came across a device that looks like it’s relatively new on the market. It’s basically a fully integrated nail and coil and it has a connector that fits any 14mm pipe. It also comes with an 18mm adapter. Now, most of these integrated nail devices only support a temperature range that works for hash, and that’s way too hot for DMT. But this particular device that Bob found can do a range from 200F to 750F, so it might work. The good thing about it: its fully enclosed, no hot surfaces on the outside, and it shuts off automatically after 60 seconds. Bob’s DMT is not ready yet; I’ll let you guys how it went.

Oral use is definitely in the cards. There’s a box with some B. Caapi and P. Viridis sitting on Bob’s shelf. However, the potency of P. Viridis appears to be pretty much unpredictable, so he might substitute that with some DMT acetate tincture extracted from MHRB. Also, making an extract from the B. Caapi is being considered.

Are you interested in any other psychedelics? If yes, which ones and why?

Other psychedelics of interest … Bob got into growing P. cubensis and likes them very much for microfilming and the occasional trip. He might be looking into extracting LSA from HBWR some time this year. Salvia is another wonderful substance that Bob likes very much. I seems to me that a lot of folks shy away from Salvia because of some of the horrible trip reports out there. If people were to approach that substance with some basic respect and humility, they’d certainly find that Sally is wonderful. However, if people load their bongs full with 80x extract and smoke away, Sally is sure going to hand out some severe punishment for their disrespect.

I am planning to do a write up of Bob’s first successful extraction and go into detail about some observations and things that he did and how it went. Bob has a strong focus on a clean and precise process, and he’s allowing a lot of time for liquids to clear up and separate fully. I think such a post could end up being some interesting additional reading for others looking into doing an extraction using only food-safe materials. I might also do post about Bob’s first unsuccessful extraction attempt and discuss what Bob did wrong, what he cold have done differently, which step probably lost the the DMT. There’s always value in learning from other’s mistakes.

Love

 

[Bisy]

i have an uncle bob too. hes a pain in the butt. always second guessing me, sometimes hes helpful, but never without the cost of a headache from arguing w him at least. he tries to take the credit for everything and my best friend swim cant stand him. but for some miraculous reason, the 3 of us make a pretty good team.. whenever any of us try to cut the others out, failure is eminent.

 

[unclebob]

Hello Nexus,

I think it is time for an update on Bob’s experiments. So far, Bob has been using Q21Q21’s food-grade A/B extraction. He has been getting the DMT out of the non-polar solvent by salting with vinegar. He did a total of three pulls and kept the resulting vinegar solutions separate. Since he’s still unsure about how to land the plane, this will grant him multiple attempts without risking the entire extraction.

Bob was going to assume that the acetate can be smoked. There are a few threads in various forums, including the Nexus, that support this idea. The reason appears to be that the DMT will break free from the acetic acid when heated and evaporate as freebase.

The first attempt was made with the vinegar solution from the second pull, which should contain somewhere between 150 and 200 mg of end product. He decided to simply evaporate this down to the acetate salt and see if it is possible to use that. He soon found out that this stuff is a total mess to work with, and a lot of the material went to waste.

The vaporizer Bob has acquired goes by the name Q7, that should be enough information to look it up in case someone is interested. At this point, Bob cannot recommend this device for vaporizing DMT, at least not yet. The device contains a tiny ceramic nail that’s heated by a coil from below. The device heats up very quickly, and unlike a traditional dab rig, one is supposed to place the resin in the chamber before hitting the go button. Using this device to smoke DMT acetate goo did not work too well since the nail only gets hot at the bottom, and any material that does not touch the bottom ceramic plate will not get enough heat.

The second attempt was made using the vinegar solution from the third pull, probably containing less than 150 mg of product. This time, the plan was to reduce it down to a concentrated tincture, just like suggested by Q21Q21. The tincture would then get dropped into the nail and let dry overnight so the bottom of the nail would be covered with a layer of acetate. This, again, did not work. As the device heats up, the acetate layer curls up and forms a lump stuck to the side wall of nail. Only very little of the DMT evaporates, and most of the smoke produced is vinegar, leading to a somewhat unpleasant vinegar toke. The effects were just enough to convince Bob that some DMT was in the mix, at the peak it was roughly comparable to one gram of dried shrooms.

At this point, Bob decided that freebase is the way to go. The remaining vinegar solution from the first pull and what was left over from the first two experiments has now been mixed with lime and is sitting in an evaporation dish at around 175F. The mild heat not only speeds up the evaporation, but also helps to convince the acetic acid to let go of the DMT. Once the liquid is gone, Bob will reduce the heat and let the residue dry overnight.

This is roughly the process described in Spiceman’s Tek. The dried residue should end up being a mix of lime, calcium acetate, DMT freebase, and the freebase forms of the jungle alkaloids. Both calcium acetate and calcium hydroxide (lime) are insoluble in ethanol, so 190 proof Everclear should work well to wash them out. Since the 5% water will carry over a little bit of the lime, Bob will do at least two washes. It is not clear how much of the jungle will carry over.

Stay tuned…

Me

 

[ShamanisticVibes]

Welcome to you and your uncle. Seems like you guys will fit in quite well here. Keep up the good work!

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Hello there and thanks for the interesting and detailed updates!

Both calcium acetate and calcium hydroxide (lime) are insoluble in ethanol

Do be aware that ethanol - and isopropanol, for that matter - readily forms a gel with calcium acetate so there is a possibility of minor difficulties, at least when processing a larger amount. Acetone is a good alternative choice of solvent, with the added benefit of evaporating very easily.

 

[unclebob]

Hello there and thanks for the interesting and detailed updates!

Both calcium acetate and calcium hydroxide (lime) are insoluble in ethanol

Do be aware that ethanol - and isopropanol, for that matter - readily forms a gel with calcium acetate so there is a possibility of minor difficulties, at least when processing a larger amount. Acetone is a good alternative choice of solvent, with the added benefit of evaporating very easily.

Thank you so much for the heads up.
Bob recently bought some cheap acetone sold as “pure acetone” under the brand name SuperNail. He did an evaporation test and was surprised by the amount of residue that was left behind. He’s not going to use this stuff. Based on some research, food-grade acetone is actually a thing, and there are some vendors that sell it online.
So, new plan: Bob will split the dry residue into three parts and use one part to attempt washing with ethanol. If that fails, Bob will order some food-grade acetone and use that.

Love

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Ethanol should be fine - but I'm just thinking back to a time once when I spent a good hour or two puzzling over some gloopy stuff that turned up while I was fiddling with an extraction involving lime and vinegar. I was convinced I'd located the philosophers' stone (or something) and subsequently was surprised at what a tiny amount of solid material could lead to the production of what seemed like 100 times its volume of gel.

It turns out this is basically how a lot of fuel/fire lighting gels are made. Additionally, the calcium acetate decomposes into acetone and calcium carbonate/oxide on heating (not that I'm recommending that as a means of obtaining acetone, maybe if you're desparate...)

Have fun - and I wish you every success.

 

[unclebob]

Time for another update from uncle Bob. This one could be titled “not enough lime” or “the perils of just eyeballing stuff.”

Hello Nexus,

I am writing this while Bob is waiting for some more lab equipment to be delivered. He’s waiting for a Buchner funnel, filters, and a vacuum pump. Coffee filters can do a lot, but sometimes they just don’t cut it, especially when you’re trying to filter lime particles out of ethanol.

So, Bob took all of the dried residue from evaporating the basified solution, this was a significant amount of a white powder with a few orange traces in it, and washed it with 95% ethanol. Bob had calculated the amount of lime based on the amount of solution, assuming it to be 5% vinegar. However, the vinegar Bob had been using was diluted down from 25% using an eyeballed amount of distilled water. In this case, eyeballing meant making sure that the solution was at least 5%, well knowing that it was probably more like 8% to 10%. Hence, not enough lime. There was a faint smell of vinegar in the air as Bob evaporated the partially basified solution, but not enough to clue him into recognizing his error. The problem only occurred to him as he scraped the orange goo off of the bottom of the glass dish which looked and smelled suspiciously similar to the DMT acetate that he had been dealing with before.

To fix this, Bob put a little bit of distilled water into the glass dish and spent maybe 20 minutes scraping and stirring to convince the DMT acetate to dissolve, which it eventually did. He then added a liberal amount of lime, stirred, and let it stand for a few hours. Then he put the dish back on heat, 185 °F this time, to evaporate the water and help the basification process along. He then scraped the white residue off of the dish and crushed it into a powder, put it in a jar, and added some 95% ethanol. He has run the solution through coffee filters a few times and decanted the solution twice, but getting the solution to clear up appears to be much more difficult than last time. This time, there’s probably a lot more lime and a lot less calcium acetate in the mix.

This experiment will continue as soon as the new lab equipment arrives, I’ll keep you posted.

Love

 

[unclebob]

Hi Nexus!

Temperature … yes. So, it looks like my uncle Bob screwed this one up. The lesson: do NOT use heat when evaporating a solution that is thought to contain freebase DMT. Use an evaporation dish in a relatively cool environment and a fan.

Bob is going to kick off a new extraction from 50 grams of powdered MHRB later today, and he asked me to post his plan here to get a few additional eyeballs on it. I am also planning to write up a dedicated post on all the things that went wrong for Bob. Many of the mistakes are probably facepalm material, but maybe, just maybe, some other beginner reads this and learns something from Bob’s mistakes.

So here’s the plan:

Bob will loosely follow the first few steps of Vovin’s Tek to extract DMT into water using vinegar. He will use cheese cloth, his new Buchner funnel and pump, and decanting to remove plant material and obtain a clean solution. The solution will be reduced using very mild heat (140 °F, as recommended by Vovin).

Then, he’ll use D-limonene to defat. There seems to be some controversy around the need to defat when extracting from MHRB, but Bob has a good reason to believe the step is beneficial. During his first extraction using D-limonene to pull from basified root bark, he found that it took up to 48 hours for the solvent to clear up after the pull, and he found a significant amount of waxy sediment at the bottom of the jar. Also, his plan is to basify and wash without pulling into a non-polar solvent first, so a defatting step should really help with this.

Next, basify using lime. Since the solution was reduced, it is a bit difficult to estimate the concentration of the vinegar and calculate the amount of lime required. The plan is to use the color of the solution to monitor the pH while adding lime. The assumption is that a pH of around 12 is reached when the solution turns black, possibly with a hint of blue. This step is done at slightly elevated temperatures, 120 °F or so, to support the freebasing of the DMT.

The resulting basified solution is then evaporated in a cool environment using an evaporation dish and a fan. No heat, Bob has learned from his mistakes. The dried residue is then crushed to a powder which is expected to be relatively dark, possibly gray or brownish.

The first washing step will be done using 95% ethanol; Everclear is available relatively cheap from the local liquor store. Since there’s 5% water, this step will carry over some unwanted material, including lime. The main point of the first wash is to remove the bulk of the unwanted material using a cheap and food-safe solvent.

The second washing step is done using food grade acetone. This stuff is relatively expensive, which is why Bob is using it only for the second wash. This should get rid of the last traces of lime.

The last step depends on what the product so far looks like. If it appears to be very dark, Bob considers a final clean-up step using petroleum ether and freeze-precipitation. Bob has obtained some ACS grade petroleum ether, which should be clean enough for this purpose. For this step, Bob would prepare a heat bath using warm water to warm up the petroleum ether and slowly dissolve the DMT, using as little solvent as possible. The solvent is then placed in the freezer until crystals form. Bob will then run the solvent through a coffee filter to capture the crystals. The petroleum ether will be reused in future extractions.

If you spot a grave mistake in this process, please let me know. If this works, I will definitely post a detailed report on how it went.

Love

 

[Tony6Strings]

Uncle Bob!!! Keep it simple buddy!!!

Powder bark, 3X acidified boils (water with healthy splash vinegar) filter plant matter using bandana and funnel. Combine and reduce to fit in extraction vessel (I use a 1000 ml Erlenmeyer). Base with sodium hydroxide. For A/B I use 1/4 the weight of original starting weight of bark. So, 25 grams NaOH for a 100 gram bark tea. Pull using vm&p naphtha, I do 100 ml pulls. Place saturated solvent in your corningware and put into a cold freezer to crash out freebase dmt.

This is the method that has worked wonders for me. I wish you great success.

 

[unclebob]

Uncle Bob!!! Keep it simple buddy!!!

Powder bark, 3X acidified boils (water with healthy splash vinegar) filter plant matter using bandana and funnel. Combine and reduce to fit in extraction vessel (I use a 1000 ml Erlenmeyer). Base with sodium hydroxide. For A/B I use 1/4 the weight of original starting weight of bark. So, 25 grams NaOH for a 100 gram bark tea. Pull using vm&p naphtha, I do 100 ml pulls. Place saturated solvent in your corningware and put into a cold freezer to crash out freebase dmt.

This is the method that has worked wonders for me. I wish you great success.

Hi Tony6Strings, thanks for the encouraging words.

Well, me and uncle Bob are a bit paranoid regarding ingredients and chemicals. I certainly won’t criticize anyone who uses off-the-shelf lye and naphtha to do an extraction, even Bob has at times been close to saying “screw it” and just take the easy route.

Bob is a clumsy person with no training in handling chemicals, and putting lye into his hands is certainly a recipe for disaster. But with a little extra love, lime should work almost as well. Lime is dangerous enough, and Bob approaches this substance with the utmost respect.

Regarding naphtha, I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun, but there is really no way of knowing what kinds of contaminants are in there. These chemicals are stored and transported in containers that are not used exclusively for naphtha. None of this is food-grade, and the naphtha may end up in a tank that was previously used for pesticides or other nasty stuff.

Neither me nor Bob are experts, and it is totally possible that all the worry about combination is overblown. Everyone needs to figure out what they’re comfortable with.

Love

 

[unclebob]

I have not posted an update for some time now, so now is the time. This is mostly a post about things that did not work, and some thoughts on petroleum ether.
After a series of failed attempts, Bob finally extracted some snow-white DMT crystals. But before I get to that, a few words about things that did not work and lessons learned. Bob really wanted to know if it is possible to stick to vinegar and lime to produce DMT freebase.

Q: Can you just substitute lye with lime in a wet A/B extraction process?
A: Maybe, but Bob did not manage to get it to work. The biggest problem with this approach is that lime and vinegar produce calcium acetate. This is a white, mostly insoluble substance that acts as a buffer and prevents the pH of the solution from going anywhere beyond 7.5 or so. So Bob thought, just filter it out, and a 2.5 micron filter works fine for that. After filtering, it is not difficult to get the pH up to around 12, which should be enough to freebase the DMT. Evaporating the water left behind an extremely hard and brownish residue. Bob scraped it up a little and added some acetone to dissolve the DMT freebase (if there was any). However, decanting and evaporating the acetone only left behind a small amount of residue that did not look like it wanted to be smoked. Bob’s theory is that most or all of the DMT was filtered out with the calcium acetate.
In essence, use lye for a wet process and lime for a dry process.

Bob previously had some success extracting DMT acetate by pulling from MHRB dough with D-limonene and then salting with vinegar. Bob did not manage to convert the acetate to freebase.

Petroleum Ether

Hence, Bob acknowledged that getting DMT freebase crystals probably requires some light hydrocarbon NPS. Naphtha is not an option for Bob due his paranoia about possible contamination. There are various online lab supply vendors that sell ACS grade petroleum ether, which should be a viable substitute for naphtha. ACS grade is generally considered safe for use in food production.
Since my last post, Bob ran two very successful extractions using the Q21Q21 tek with petroleum ether, and I’d like to write a little bit about the observed pros and cons.

The pros: It appears that petroleum ether with a BP between 105 and 140 °F is very specific in dissolving DMT and it leaves behind most of the yellowish jungle alkaloids. The NPS Bob poured off of the MHRB was perfectly clear for all pulls, the petroleum ether started to look like a snow globe only minutes after putting it in the freezer. The resulting crystals were perfectly white and the vapor was very smooth. Q21Q21 reports that when using naphtha, all pulls after the first have a pronounced yellow tint.
It appears that using petroleum ether as an NPS is a great way of achieving an exceptionally pure product without any extra steps.

The cons: Just warming up the petroleum ether a little gets it close to its boiling point, and evaporation is a problem. For a 100 g MHRB extraction, Bob had to use around 220 ml of NPS to make sure all of the MHRB was covered. After the pull, he only recovered around 100 ml of solvent. This means that an extraction from 100 grams with three pulls uses between 400 and 500 ml of solvent. This is significantly more solvent loss than reported by Q21Q21 when using naphtha. To keep the costs to an acceptable level, one would have to buy the solvent in bulk.
Another con is the almost inevitable exposure to fumes. The petroleum ether is almost odorless, so you might not realize how much of this stuff you’re inhaling. The primary risk is CNS damage. So it is important to have a well ventilated workspace and to stay away from the work area as much as possible. Bob is considering the purchase of a P100 respirator.

One thing is for certain – Bob is going to stay in the game. Q21Q21’s dry tek with petroleum ether as the NPS is probably going to be Bob’s go-to method, but he’s also going to keep experimenting. One goal is to move away from MHRB as the base material to something that’s more sustainable.

Thanks for reading.