chaoskontrol said:
I'd like to perform an STB extraction using Noman's Tek; with MHRB, Spado lye and Bartoline low odour white spirit.
There's something I'm not sure about, and I did find nothing about it on the Wiki or forum.
I know that I have to take an extra care about lye and wear every protection posssible, but does Lye remain dangerous once diluted to the water?? Would it burn my skin immediatly too??
Is the lye dilution moment the more dangerous, or is the whole process highly dangerous please?
Lye is especially dangerous when in solution, because it is more likely to find its way into your eyes in that form. Dry lye pellets are much less likely to get into your eyes and stay there long enough to do damage. Lye dust on the other hand is a real danger, but you should not encounter that when using pellets or prills. Be careful that dissolving a lot of lye at once may cause a fine mist of lye solution droplets to appear, as the dissolving lye pushes dissolved air out of the water, causing fine bubbles to rise to the surface and pop. This mist can get into your eyes, even if wearing safety glasses. Good ventilation is important. Breathing lye mist is also highly unpleasant to the throat.
Lye is really most dangerous to your eyes. A burn wound to your skin will heal over time, your fingerprints will return, but your eyesight will not. Your eyes are not as easily repaired as your skin. Be very careful with them!
Personally I find the most important reason to wear gloves when handling lye is for eye protection. You see, while lye does not cause too much damage to the skin immediately, it does cause skin fat to saponify, ie. turn into soap. Soap is notoriously slippery and this makes your hand very slippery. Holding a beaker of lye solution with slippery hands greatly increases the chances of dropping it and having lye solution splashing everywhere, including into your eyes. Rubber gloves will not become slippery upon contact with lye solution as much as your hands will, so they make working with lye solutions much safer.
I advocate always using a secondary containment for lye solutions, for example a bucket. Keep your lye dissolution cup and your extraction jar in a bucket while transporting them or working on them. If anything breaks or spills, it will be contained in the bucket.
Handling lye is not the only potentially dangerous activity in these teks, handling volatile and flammable solvents also requires judicious care. Keep away from sparks and open fire. Ensure proper ventilation so that fumes cannot build up to noxious or explosive concentrations. Always employ a preheated warm water bath to heat flammable solvents, never heat them directly on a very hot surface or even an open flame.
I don't think STB teks work well without lye (NaOH) or KOH (which is fine as a substitute). The strongly corrosive action of lye helps to digest the plant matter and frees up the dmt from its cells. Weaker bases like washing soda might not cut it. They have sufficient ability to turn the dmt salts found in the plant into freebase form, but you would need to first boil the plant material in a slightly acidic solution to bring out the dmt salts from the cells into the solution.
downwardsfromzero said:
^^ heating a thin layer of bicarb for about ten minutes in a dry, stainless steel frying pan is also effective for making sodium carbonate.
I think that boiling a bicarbonate solution is just as effective and may be easier in practice, especially since a solution is the goal anyway. You don't have to dissolve all the bicarbonate (baking soda), just keep boiling until all the bicarbonate has dissolved (and converted into the much better soluble carbonate).
InAwe said:
I was under the impression that you can't over basify a solution. In other words, better to use more lye than less lye, and the spice won't be effected. Also, more base will break emulsions.
So, does over-basifying hurt the spice or the yield?
The dmt molecule is quite stable at high pH at room temperature. The one thing that should not be underestimated is the corrosiveness of hot lye solutions. Overheating a strongly based plant soup does negatively influence the result of extractions. Mild overheating first causes impurities to be released from the plants into the naphtha but serious overheating may also damage some of the dmt. It is easy to overheat the base soup locally when you add lye pellets to it. Around the dissolving lye particles, a hot and very concentrated lye solution forms locally. Avoid these problems by only adding pre-dissolved lye solutions to the plant soup, never add solid lye.
syberdelic said:
Most definitely if the pH gets much higher than 13, any base will start tearing apart all sorts of complex molecules including DMT. This is how old fashioned soap is made. If you pour nearly saturated lye solution into a fat/oil and stir, it will rapidly rip the long chain hydrocarbons apart. The same holds true for acids, but on the opposite end of the pH scale. If someone with more chemistry credentials could, please verify this. I do have under my belt, two years of high school chemistry, two semesters of inorganic, and one semester of organic.
Soap is made through hydrolysis of the ester bond between glycerol and fatty acids that fats and oils are made of. Soaps are basically the salts of fatty acids. But dmt is not an ester, so it is not affected by lye in this way, nor will long chain hydrocarbons like naphtha or the hydrocarbon chains of the fatty acids themselves. As long a the lye stays reasonably cool, it won't do much damage beyond munching through fats, proteins and cell walls (all of which are esters and amides that can be hydrolyzed by strong bases). Your dmt will be safe.
syberdelic said:
This is one of the reasons I advocate not using strong acids and bases, especially for beginner extractions. Using weak acids and basis in nearly fool proof. It just requires a bit more patience.
This I agree with. An A/B extraction takes a little more time, but it is safer to perform and will generally yield cleaner end product than STB teks.
