Two questions about a/b washing

[Du57mi73]

Someone I know uses an a/b technique to clean his goods before freezing or drying. He does an stb tek to get all his goods into naptha. Then he takes 1:1 water:vinegar acid mix for his estimated amount of dmt(100ml h20 per g of dmt expected.) Then he mixes the nap and the acid mix. He then pulls the nap, bases the acid, and pulls with more naptha.

There's no actual problems with the final product but I had 2 questions. First one being, does everyone elses naptha get cloudy when it touches acid and clear when its in a base? Second one being, does anyone know why the acid mix starts to take on a yellow coloring when its mixed with the dmt/oil laden naptha? Does some of the plant oil also absorb into the acid mix? And what's strange is that once its based, the yellow will then go from the based mix(previously known as acid mix, lol) into the clean nap. As if it followed the same rules of solubility as freebases/salts do. Any ideas?

 

[zedwings]

Why not just wash with sodium carbonate? Takes a few minutes and pulls a lot of crap.

 

[Du57mi73]

What do you mean by that? Just take the dmt laden nap and mix it with soda water? That was tried that before with another trial and it didn't do any at all. Maybe it didn't get mixed long enough. I don't know. Next trial there will be a soda wash instead. Its always an experiment.

But back to the questions I asked, anyone have any ideas? Do the plant oils mix with the water regardless of it its basic or acidic? And is this cloudy nap a normal occurance?

 

[cyb]

Then he takes 1:1 water:vinegar acid mix for his estimated amount of dmt(100ml h20 per g of dmt expected.) Then he mixes the nap and the acid mix. He then pulls the nap, bases the acid, and pulls with more naptha.

This is called 'Back Salting'.
Why would you do this? Not sure it would 'clean' the spice much.

What it does is transfer the already freebased product (in the naphtha), back into the acidic vinegar solution. (in salt form). Then it is free based once again (with lye) and re-pulled.

This most likely why you are seeing the solutions changing opacity etc.

It is an unnecessary 2 steps to take.

If you want to clean your product, you can either sodium carb wash the naphtha (from the stb), as stated above And/Or freeze precipitate the product out and Re-X it a few times to rid it of impurities.
It may still keep an off white colour...but this is just a little staining from the yellow oils...nothing to worry about.

(If you want to perform a carb wash...take some sodium carbonate (not bicarbonate), dissolve it in some water. Then add your spice laden naphtha, shake like crazy, then separate the nap and continue to freeze etc.
Discard the carb solution. This may take some of the yellow staining out)

 

[Du57mi73]

The reason those steps are taken is because it was under the assumption the when the spice naptha was mixed with the vinegar ONLY the spice would enter the vinegar and the oils would stay in the naptha so when it is basified again and pulled with clean naptha then you would have a very clean product. But I was not aware that the oils would enter the vinegar water too. The soda scrub removes plant oils? There isnt any problem with base soup suspended in the nap.

Side question, what is solubility of acetate salt in water at room temp? I was thinking its around 1g to 100ml