official extraction help thread

[psilocybin]

Any questions or problems you may run into during an extraction can be asked to get other members input in this thread.

 

[drpotato]

to reiterate something in my big wall of text; many people inadvertently just use distilled vinegar as their only source of water, and totally bypass the use of home tap water, or use so little it never has any impact. unlike adding too much lye, theres no consequences in using too much vinegar.

also, maybe get a test tube and shake the heptane with water and a single grain of lye to alkalize it, and without, and just get an idea of how its behaving

 

[Transform]

to reiterate something in my big wall of text; many people inadvertently just use distilled vinegar as their only source of water, and totally bypass the use of home tap water, or use so little it never has any impact. unlike adding too much lye, theres no consequences in using too much vinegar.

also, maybe get a test tube and shake the heptane with water and a single grain of lye to alkalize it, and without, and just get an idea of how its behaving

Test tubes are so underrated!

Get a test tube rack as well though
But yes, diluting the vinegar is kind of helpful, indeed. There's no real point in adding more than a 1:1 molar ratio of acetic acid for the DMT, so the rest of the liquid volume might as well be water - otherwise it's largely a waste of lye when neutralising the excess of acid.

If the lye, heptane and water all behave themselves, it might be a batch of bark with a higher than usual content of saponins, or similar.

 

[Pyramids]

a few things cause emulsions, you can get it because something is disrupting the barrier between phases, like an emulsifier, anything can become one of these but, if your material seems kinda foamy that could do it. Otherwise, if the phases are too similar, one reason excess lye is advised is its affinity for water is so great it crashes other things out, but its also just endlessly soluble and results in potentially, extremely dense water, this is half of why overbasing is done, besides reducing solubility of literally anything else and altering the charge on the water, it also just straight up makes the water much denser, a barely ph14 alkaline sodium chloride brine will perform similarly to like, 10% lye solution in many situations. the greater the density difference the more rapidly you should see seperation occur.
instead of something interfering with surface tension via some weak surfactant, something that can occur is physical emulsifiers, which need only be very fine particulates. calcium silicates and fluoride precipitates can cause this, basically just common stuff in your tap water. they form annoying precipitates that dont go away once they form, they show up looking like a waxy skin that wraps around the smallest bubbles of your solvent, and they kinda flake away a bit once things do settle. what they are is just solvent wicked around particulates too small to interact with the main volume of solvent, so they stay trapped floating in the water. these can be avoided by using demineralized water. if you have copper in your water, it interacts with calcium and soluble silicates to form the absolute most annoying form of calcium silicate, sulfate, or perhaps just silica, imperceivable quantities of this will clog a vacuum filter.
the lack of seperation may resolve if you add a bunch of salt, just make sure its not pool salt that contains calcium or magnesium, or else youll get a bunch of precipitate. its handy to keep a bottle of salt slurry on hand, full of a saturated brine, it makes the water more dense and adding it can do things that may give insight, like crashing stuff out, or settling at the bottom and clarifying the solution there indicating a density problem, or running tests in a test tube.

if you go with a quicklime base method, you can use calcium chloride to saturate your solution.


a hot bath is needed to get heptane to dissolve your DMT, heptane is a poor solvent for DMT, which is kind of the point. this is why i dont use naptha or hexane anymore for my initial pull, it has to actually be hot or else it wont do very much. a long contact time will more than make up for a lack of stirring though. and the hotter it is, the more it will seperate, this is almost universal in fact, most things that emulsify in water will seperate when heated close to boiling.
Its probably fine to just shake it like crazy into danger-milk while warm, but not so much vapors present a pressure problem, then put it in a hot water bath at 60C or whatever is recommended for heptane, and once it seperates, thats probably going to pull most of it. if your vessel permits, actually pushing it past 80 or almost simmering with a quick stir at the end, would be ideal.

to avoid the hot bath, use a solvent DMT is actually soluble in. toluene, DCM, chloroform, ether, maybe ethyl acetate but you need to salt it and be really gentle with basifying (sodium/potassium carbonate) or youll hydrolyze it and end up with ethanol, limonene, xylene, and if you salt the living daylights out of it, even acetone and isopropanol have precedented phase seperation, though thats highly experimental, and not neccesarily as applicable to a DMT wet process, dry maybe, but not wet.

using other solvents, you then end up with oil or goo that must be dissolved in hot heptane after the solvent is removed, and recrystalized. ideally it ought to be mini AB'd as this will fix any polymerization that occured, and in the case of DCM/chloroform, you might want to defat it first. unless exceptionally pure, DMT wont crystalize out of anything its VERY soluble in, or may struggle to. So thats the tradeoff, two extractions, granted the second one scales down to like 50ml or something, otherwise you have to deal with hot hex/heptane.

if you have a test tube, try experimenting to see what salt and heat does to the seperability after violently shaking it. similarly, what effect demineralized water has. PS, distilled vinegar used as your sole water source satisfies this too.

gratitude for the reply, drpotato!

I've been reading all over the nexus that heptane pulls at room temp, not actually the case?

I think i'll just go with the hot bath method if you think that might result in some usable goo.

 

[Pyramids]

Can you show us the labels of both your heptane and your lye? Your situation sounds like there's some kind of detergent effect involved somewhere.

One more thing - what kind of water are you using?

Thanks, Transform. I am using distilled water. There's more info on the heptane here.

 

[Pyramids]

to reiterate something in my big wall of text; many people inadvertently just use distilled vinegar as their only source of water, and totally bypass the use of home tap water, or use so little it never has any impact. unlike adding too much lye, theres no consequences in using too much vinegar.

also, maybe get a test tube and shake the heptane with water and a single grain of lye to alkalize it, and without, and just get an idea of how its behaving

I ended up with 650ml distilled water (as per Cyb's tek) + 60ml vinegar and 50mg lye. I then added another 300ml distiled water and 20g lye (when the heptane refused to rise).

Somehow the hot bath failed as well... 0 separation after several hours at 70c

 

[Transform]

Thanks, Transform. I am using distilled water. There's more info on the heptane here.


View attachment 109087View attachment 109088

Well - that all looks fine. Is it the same batch of bark as the previous, trouble-free extraction with naphtha?

What about trying with adding a bit more heptane? Sometimes the bark will "eat" a bit of solvent to start with.

 

[Pyramids]

I ended up with 650ml distilled water (as per Cyb's tek) which included 60ml vinegar and 50mg lye. I then added another 300ml distiled water and 20g lye.

Well - that all looks fine. Is it the same batch of bark as the previous, trouble-free extraction with naphtha?

What about trying with adding a bit more heptane? Sometimes the bark will "eat" a bit of solvent to start with.

Yeah, same batch of MHRB.

So, I ran another batch of Cyb's Hybrid ATB tek today after picking up some naptha and everything is working as it should. I'll freeze some pulls tonight but everything has finally gone according to plan, which indicates that something was getting thrown off by that particular batch of heptane. Frustrating as hell, but ultimately happy to have solved it.

Regarding the previous batch, I will add some more heptane to it, thanks (unless I should add naptha?)

 

[Transform]

Regarding the previous batch, I will add some more heptane to it, thanks (unless I should add naptha?)

If you try heptane first, and it still doesn't work, there's always the option of adding naphtha afterwards. Then again, the naphtha might be the secret sauce here - if this aspect of the puzzle really interests you, splitting the extraction in half and trying with one or other of the solvents in its own portion would be another way of going about it.

Then there's this:

Thread 'A fix for emulsion(?) Seemed to work for SWIM!'

Jul 31, 2011

Swim had emulsion in a lye/Naptha extraction. With little patience he took the turkey baster and sucked the emulsion up and instead of discarding it, he stuck the emulsion filled turkey baster deep into the mhrb/water/lye mix and squeezed the bulb very slowly until it was emptied. Naptha rose to the top and mhrb/lye/whatever that made up the emulsion was gone. swims turkey baster has an injection needle on the end of it. The needle has been ground flat and crimped into a slit because swim found that the slanted head of the needle let air go in while transferring pulls to an empty jar...

• DimensionlessBeing
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• Forum: FAQ Q&A

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