hey guys

thank you for the dialogue i really appreciate it.

i should mention that doing this i have ended up with a good sized jar of red "jungle spice", but the thing that is drawing so many lines for me is the question of if a broader spectrum solvent will increase the yields im already seeing, as it stands its just under 3%.

their is a very real possibility that the ionic strength is high enough that it is forcing all the alkiloids that want to get out of the goop to do so, compelling them more forcefully than originally intended, but one of the other things i have been wondering about (and i think the conclusion is yes) is that freezing or boiling the bark while acidic with the salt in it also increases the totals.

this is one of the points where my understanding of chemistry and ionic strength fail, because i dont know if the ions are "pulling" the alkiloids out of the bark so that they attach onto the molecules with the excess ions on them or are "pushing" them out of bark and making them clump together, the reason i bring this up (and i need to be clarified on this) is that if it is "pushing" everything out, what i would have to wonder is what else would be being pushed around, besides the alkiloids, which may or may not be being picked up by the solvent.

from here comes the idea of using an electrolysis machine to increase the ion levels artificially, i dont know if it would be possible to get the alkiloids to "plate" onto a surface much like gold plating on jewelry (or if you could just force them into the solvent this way while in an inert enviroment) but this is the next step that will need to be examined once a conclusion is reached on wither a broader spectrum non polar solvent will capture more alkiloids than what is currently being found.

oh a side note to all this is a whole other strange question, does anyone know what added zinc dust (to act as an oxygen scrubber) to a solution would do to its ionic strength? i think this may be another avenue of increasing results as well given that nn-oxide does not bind to naphtha (but supposedly does bind to xylene and toluene).

my apologize if this message is long and convoluted, but now that i know what was causing those "limnic eruptions" to occur and how to control them, im just posting everything that has come to mind over the last few months i have thought up, hoping that all of this stuff can be answered in some way.

in short im starting to wonder if the ionic strength plays a much larger function than previously though.

thank you.