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official extraction help thread

Migrated topic.
Should I let it soak longer then?
It probably doesn’t really make a big difference. You could do it a bit earlier or later, these are minor details that won’t drastically affect the final result. Adding salt can help a little with emulsions, and it can also make it slightly easier for the DMT to move into the non-polar phase. Still, it’s usually best to add it at the basic stage, though I don’t expect major differences either way.

If you really want to know, you could run a side-by-side comparison, follow the same procedure twice, but add the salt at different points. That would be interesting to see, and you could share your results😃.

Other than that I don’t recall anyone specifically testing this to confirm whether adding salt significantly changes yield or not. The most important thing is to work cleanly and carefully, separate your polar, non-polar layer well, avoid spills, and stay precise. Those habits make the biggest difference.

Good luck
 
Should I let it soak longer then?
You could put the bark through a few freeze/thaw cycles, but that's only worth it if it isn't already finely powdered. Cooking it would also increase hydration but tbh, it's again only worth it if you're using a coarser form of bark.

My first extraction went fine just with dumping bark, water and lye into a jug and mixing it up a bit. I actually used boiling water, principally due to insanity although I'm also a trained chemist with the appropriate PPE and an overworked team of guardian angels. The bark back then (nearly 2 decades ago 😬 ) was superlative, I got over 2% yield with minimal effort.
 
Washing == what it sounds like, mix the thing to be washed with some liquid and then separate them out again by settling or filtering. Note the emphasis on using dry acetone as any water in solution with the acetone will try to dissolve your fumarate and steal it. Dry the acetone with anhydrous epsom salts ( dry the salts in an oven ).

Recrystallisation == dissolve solid in a small amount of (often warm) solvent so the stuff you want is now all dissolved, filter or decant the solution to leave behind unwanted things.
Then allow the solvent to evaporate or cool so the wanted product recrystallises out of the solution and decant or filter off any remaining solvent to leave behind a purer product.
So just to do a little recap:
From the initial limo pulls I mixed with FASI, the first precipitation was total goo, then left to precipitate and then got a small amount of fluffy off-white fumarates. Those fluffy white fumarates were then breebased using slow sodium carbonate method (they were sitting in the fridge for 5 days) after which I found some crystals floating around. I cleaned the crystals with acetone and clearly some sodium carb was left behind. The cleaned product was oily clear yellow goo first but then solidified into more yellowish opaque stuff that I haven't tried yet coz I'm a bit nervous if it's okay to smoke.

The precipitated goo, on the other hand, I have left alone until now. I just now took a small amount of it and mixed with warm water, the fumarate-water is absolutely not see through, but more like milky chai. (Any wise person knows whats up with the opaque chai-colour?) Anyway I still dropped some sodium carbonate water and saw immediate clouding. So now just waiting to see what happens.

After the initial limo pulls, I did one more separate limo pull, (with a limonene that I had cleaned from some old used limo), from which I gathered some see-through crystals, and some yellow sticky stuff that were stuck to the jar. I did the recrystallisation with boiling IPA for the yellow stuff, and for some of the goo I tried to wash with dry acetone a few times, which produced a little bit less gooey, but sticky stuff. Trying to freebase any of these from the second limo pull-batch (the see-through crystals, the yellow stuff treated with IPA, and the goo washed with dry acetone) produced absolutely nothing. There was no clouding with sodium carbonate, no crystals forming. I'm wondering if that is because the later limo pull simply didn't have much DMT in them, (but then what were those crystals that were left behind as I also understood that Fumaric acid doesn't really precipitate?) or if the drying of IPA or Acetone was not successful and I just lost my yield in that, OR I mixed them with way too much water?

Also! I now have those later pulls crystals mixed with water and sodium carbonate (that produced no effect), can I just pull with limonene and try again? Or is it most likely just waste of time and limonene :D

So many wonderings with so little answers!
 
The precipitated goo, on the other hand, I have left alone until now. I just now took a small amount of it and mixed with warm water, the fumarate-water is absolutely not see through, but more like milky chai.
Did you use tap water for this? If so, you're probably looking at calcium fumarate. If it's dissolved in distilled water, I'd have to take a guess at the clouding being due to undissolved excess fumaric acid - its solubility is rather poor.

There are at least a couple of ways that excess fumaric acid could show up via the goo redissolving in water. It's not strictly necessary to go into detail on that point here.

I've found the whole limonene/ FAS(A/I) process to be rather more trouble than it's worth, and not really suitable for beginners. The product also ends up with an intractable smell of oranges.
So many wonderings with so little answers!
Yes, that is indeed the problem!

I mean, it's fine if you want to tackle a load of fiddly little chemistry problems, but if getting a usable product is your main goal there are better methods.

The cleaned product was oily clear yellow goo first but then solidified into more yellowish opaque stuff that I haven't tried yet coz I'm a bit nervous if it's okay to smoke
This material is highly likely to be OK to smoke. I'd be interested to know how strongly it tastes of stale oranges, though.

Another option would be to try it orally with harmalas.
 
Sooo… it crashed and turned out beautifully! I need to ask another question though. I used 50g of bark, I yielded 3.6%! Everything I’ve ever read says 1-2% yield… this was on the first pull too. Is this more common than I think?
You'd best show your calculations, just to be sure. If you're weighing the fumarate, there's probably some excess acid and moisture bumping up the figures a bit as well.

You could still, also, have been lucky with the bark - but that figure is very much at the upper limit for an excellent yield.
 
Tomorrow will tell the tale 😊

You'd best show your calculations, just to be sure. If you're weighing the fumarate, there's probably some excess acid and moisture bumping up the figures a bit as well.

You could still, also, have been lucky with the bark - but that figure is very much at the upper limit for an excellent yield.
I just weighed after collecting. Maybe it was still a lil damp. What I have left is .5 and I gave away .75g. I also loaded my vape a couple times. RN I have .4g remaining on first pull, I’m assuming it was a lil wet. But regardless, it worked!!! Thank you nauts for guidance! This is my first attempt at making anything and my friend who extrcts said it was great and wanted to know how I did it
 
I just weighed after collecting. Maybe it was still a lil damp. What I have left is .5 and I gave away .75g. I also loaded my vape a couple times. RN I have .4g remaining on first pull, I’m assuming it was a lil wet. But regardless, it worked!!! Thank you nauts for guidance! This is my first attempt at making anything and my friend who extrcts said it was great and wanted to know how I did it
Ah great - I just re-read your posts and it seems you're measuring the stuff from the sodium carbonate freebasing process. It gets a bit tricky to keep track of two four million posts on here after a while! 😂

Yeah, the yield's been inflated a bit with water and salt (i.e. sodium fumarate/carbonate) residues. A teenie little rinse or two with distilled water followed by thorough drying would sort that out to a more realistic figure.

Good work, though (y)
 
My first post/comment,
I’ve mistakenly added acetone to a mixture that has already had one pull. The solvent initially used was some type of unknown “fuel.” This mixture has been sitting n several different bottles n a dark shed for the past 3 months. 3 distinct layers have formed. A milk jug cracked & most liquid evaporated leaving a black glob. Half of that glob I added NAPTHA which has been sitting for past wk.
Can I move forward or have I destroyed any chances of reclaiming DMT?
Sorry missed this question (it was posted in an unusual place, I've moved it to the extraction help thread).

Acetone reacts with lye, making all sorts of nasty byproducts. Have you done anything with that naphtha yet? Warming it and the blob in a water bath should recover something if it's present, although it may well be heavily polymerised. Has the naphtha picked up any colour? You can try putting it in the freezer to see if anything drops out.

It would be better to try dissolving the blob in acid - dilute vinegar will do - and then treating it as though you've started the extraction all over again, minus the f*ckups :LOL: .
 
Finished this whole process, put it in a vape following a guide, absolutely burned the f/// out of my throat, still hurts now lmao. Where'd I go wrong?
Which "whole process"? I ask because you've posted in a generic troubleshooting thread - which is fine, but you'll have to go into considerably more detail about what you did:
  • what the starting plant material was
  • which extraction method(s) were used
  • observations throughout the extraction process
  • the appearance and other physical qualities of the product
  • how the product was then dissolved into vape juice
  • the juice blend (PG/VG) chosen
  • the exact vape device and any attachments
  • the settings on said device
  • your approach to inhaling the atomised juice
The more detail you can provide, the less guesswork will be involved and the better advice we'll be able to give.
 
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