Cool thanks yeah that helps. I've always wondered when it says on the vinegar bottle that it's been "diluted to 5% acidity" whether that means by volume or by weight...
Basically the reason for this post is that Swim's been trying to solve a long-standing debate between him and some friends about how to go about prepping the bark in the first stage of an extraction.
Swim used to go STB, but he had a friend that swore he got better yeilds by first cooking the bark in a 50/50 vinegar/dH2O soln in a crock pot for several hours.
Swim thinks there may be some merit to this... doing the pre-cook with gar may soften up the cell walls, making them more easily broken down by the NaOH when the base is added. Swim noticed back when he was doing STB and just adding NaOH soln straight to dry bark powder that clumps of bark powder would form and were hard to break up, so there's at least some merit to cooking the powder just to get it all nice and liquidy before basifying. The question in swim's mind now is whether all one should do is maybe cook it in pure dH2O, or whether the gar helps "soften up" the cellulose (and pull out some alkaloids in the process), or whether it's just getting in the way by neutralizing NaOH.
Of course the only real way to tell would be to conduct some controlled experiments. Swim's just having me gather some preliminary data to help him formulate his experimental design. So thanks for your help!
That's a little weird tho that it would take 35g NaOH to neutralize a litre of vinegar, as if memory serves the Mars tek calls for having like a gallon of 50/50 water/gar which is then neutralized with only 50g NaOH and still enough is left over to freebase dimitri... so perhaps "diluted to 5% acidity" refers to weight and not volume? Do you happen to know how much NaOH would be needed to neutralize then if this were the case?
As for what you said Dagger about evaping the gar and reconstituting it, yes, this is what swim does later on when he salts the medicine out of the limo using gar, he evaps it and reconstitutes it in a little dH2O. He uses that as is for oral administration, or if he wants smokable freebase he just adds a little sodium carbonate solution to it and pulls with iso, then evaps the iso and redissolves the alks in dry iso, filters out sodium carbonate residue, and re-evaps the iso onto some powdered herbage... but that's a different story
Thanks everyone for all your help! 8)