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Quick Q on washing

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S

slym

Rising Star
Right. SWIM has been attempting his first ever extraction. SWIM used Noman's tek. Here's the situation.

SWIM has between 300 and 400 ml of naphtha in a collecting jar which he has just put in his freezer. However, because SWIM used a very rudimentary system of decanting (he thought he could use a turkey baster, big mistake) he also has some of the black lye mixture at the bottom of the jar.

He wants to do a wash with sodium carbonate which he hopes will a) get the lye out and b) generally clean up his product

His questions are this:
Should he do this on the naptha mixture in his jar and separate it using his rudimentary method?
Should he leave it all in the freezer, go buy a sep funnel and wash the naphtha that way?
Should he carry on with the freez precipitation and then attempt to wash the product that he scrapes out. If so, how should he go about this?

Should he do something else?


PS - all is not lost in other ways, SWIM has already seen what he hopes are crystals of some sort precipitating out.

Cheers for the help guys.
 
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If the unwanted gunk is forming a seperate layer at the bottom, I think the best thing to do would be decant the clean naphtha off from the black lye material. This clean naphtha can be treated as normal for evaporation of freeze precip. If you're concerned about lye contamination, you can wash the naphtha with a small volume of water basified with a small pinch of sodium carbonate (pH ~8.5) followed by another wash with a small volume of neutral water (water should be room termperature).

One gets the largest crystals by allowing the naphtha to evaporate until the beginnings of crystals can be seen to form, indicating the naphtha is fairly saturated. At this point, you put it in the fridge for several hours, then the freezer for several more.
 
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Should the naphtha also be room temp? How would you suggest SWIM goes about separating the washing water from the naphtha, bearing in mind how much of a prob he had separating the original np layer from the basified mhrb solution?
 
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Yes, the naphtha should be room temperature as well; we don't want any DMT crashing out of solution while washing.

As to seperating it, a turkey baster really ought to work fine. If you pull some naphtha along with the water, it's no big deal; just transfer the wash water and small amount of naphtha to another (thinner) container, and pipette as much of the naphtha as you can back into the extraction vessel.
 
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SWIM wasn't impressed with turkey baster method either. SWIM uses a 100ml syringe (no needle) to siphon naptha off the lye solution. If SWIM gets any suspicious black particles in his naptha solution, he heats up the naptha and filters it through a coffee filter. SWIM probably loses a few mg doing this, but would prefer not to accidentally smoke bark particles soaked with lye.
 
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FYI: SWIM yielded 0.4g of product from 100g of MHRB, which all things considered SWIM is very happy with.

Product looks as follows: generally white with some parts having a slight tinge of orange. Not exactly powder but certainly not crystals in the way of k crystals. Clumps together easily and also splits apart easily. Quite fluffy. Smells not very strongly (is being kept in the fridge) but what it does smell of is quite rubbery and synthetic.

If no-one has any objections, SWIM, assuming that he has some contamination and hence less D than the yield would suggest, is planning on hitting approx 60mg of the stuff as soon as poss!
 
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yeah mon, but it was my first time, and i massively messed up the decanting of the naphtha at the stage when it held the precious spice.

and frankly if i had yielded 60mg of smokeable product i would have been over the moon.

there are some of us that haven't experienced hyperspace yet!
 
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