I finally had some time to do another a/b extraction using a lb of mhrb I acquired awhile ago. I think I was a little balsy trying 1000 g of bark instead of the more manageable 500g amount so I ended up reducing 6 gallons aqueous solution to 2 gallons. 10 hours later and I was wiped out but somehow I managed to get it into the fridge to cold crash the particles. I slowly reduced it once again in two stainless steel pots to 800ml per pot then poured into hdpe half gal jugs.
So now at this point I have obligations (work and things to take care of) so I left it in the fridge for a couple days. When I got back around to adding the basic water and doing the naptha washes there was a gooey dense sludge at the bottom of the jug. This was not unusual so I went ahead and added 450ml of clean dh20 with the lye and it only took a very little bit to raise to 12ph. So I have two half gal jugs with the lye water added and poured 250ml vm&p into one of the jugs and shook the shit out of it for 5 min and then the same with other one. It created an emulsion that would not separate.
So further reading in the a/b writeup I was following gave me a solution to this problem. (Thank you Defiance). I added some lye to 300ml water got it really hot, saturated it with salt and poured my emulsion into it and it worked to break it. 5-10min later it was separated with a nice clear layer of solvent on top. I was relieved because I wasn't sure what to do. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong in the process. Maybe I got the aqueous too hot when soaking with ascorbic acid. All I had was a meat thermometer to test the water temp and I tried to keep it 90-100°F the entire soak. I thought maybe I didn't use enough lye to make the basic water but I tested it with my ph meter and it was 12ph.
Anyways I decanted the naptha and put into a couple quart mason jars. I noticed a light yellow tinge and stuck in the fridge overnight. This morning I could see crystals forming on the sides and bottom as you can tell in the pictures. I just put it in the freezer to precipitate the rest of the DMT. I plan on cleaning it after its all dried with a little more boiled naptha to get all the impurities out. I'll post some more pictures as it progresses. Thanks for reading.
Edited by Skywatcher, 24 March 2021 - 08:55 AM.
adding paragraph breaks