17 replies to this topic

[MerryPrankster]

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I've posted. I've been busy pursuing my studies in chemistry and feeding the voracious knowledge monster. I've recently moved and I can finally put some of my hard earned skills to good practice! 

 

Here is my nascent lab. I'll update Lab Porn with a bigger rundown as I want to discuss my planned mescaline extraction here, but here's a pic. I'm pretty proud.

 

 

My small reagent/solvent shelf:

 

 

About 12 months ago, a superior at my university gave me more than 10 meters of San Pedro cactus because it was destroyed in a storm. I took it home and put some lengths outside and others in a cupboard to mature for a few months before I did anything with them. They sat around for 6 months or so and I took about 4 meters to my mother's place, where I have a small cactus bed. A few weeks later I chopped up the remaining 6+ meters into slices about an inch thick (take that, unit consistency!) I tried to dry some of them, but the sheer bulk of them and some unseasonably wet weather caused the whole lot to go mouldy. This was disappointing, as I wanted my first extraction to be pristine, but it was not to be so I accepted reality and changed my plan. I chucked all of the slices into a cooler and covered it with water, closed the lid and left it.

 

The cactus slices have been undergoing enzymatic breakdown over the past 6 months or so and the plant matter is basically dissolved into the solution. It's a bit smelly (my girlfriend won't go near the shed). I poured off most of the liquid into an old fermentation container (luckily made out of HDPE!!!!) for transportation, then today I poured four litres of white vinegar into the cooler and stirred it. It looks like this: (Gross, right?)

                                       

 

 

 

Tomorrow, I'm going to pour all the liquid in the fermentation vat back into the cooler, then filter the solid material and capture the filtrate in the vat once more. 

 

Then comes the NaOH. I'm going to get it nice and basic (might add a kilo of salt to break up any emulsions that form). This will be my basic solution that I will do pulls off. 

 

I have this baby, which will make my job 1000000x easier. Last time I did a DMT extraction, I was using a fucking turkey baster and shit was not easy or efficient. 



I'll take about 650mL of the basic solution at a time and do 5x 150mL xylenes pulls from it and most likely discard the basic solution (after heavy dilution). 

The pulls will be combined. Now, Kash's Mescaline HCl tek says to add 100mL of water and 0.5 mL of conc. HCl, but that is too much water to deal with. I'm going to be doing at least 20 of these things, and I don't want to evaporate 2L of water; fuck that. Would I be better off making up a 10M solution of HCl and salting my xylenes with 20mL at a time? I'll reuse them for each pull, so it's not like I'm losing any mesc. 20mL should be able to be pulled out the separatory funnel cleanly.

 

What do the old hands think? Is this a viable plan? Anything you'd do differently?

Hints, tips, tricks and criticisms are all welcome! 

Edited by Sidestreet, 05 September 2016 - 05:46 PM.
tagged archive

[PsyBearknot]

Pulling up a chair to learn.

[Pan1]

I'm also interested, would like to try mescaline and dmt extraction one day, ill keep an eye on this.

[pharmer]

when you're ready to discard the basic liquid consider neutralizing it with some more acid. that way when you discard it it will be neither acid nor basic and infinitely less damaging to wherever it goes

 

do you have the ability to reduce that mass of basic solution before putting xylene in it? I'd think anything you do to reduce that volume would make the whole process faster and more efficient. I'm thinking some kind of campfire and a few glass containers to evaporate the bulk of the basic liquid down to a couple manageable sized units before adding the xylene.

 

and some kind of filtering would also be nice if possible. you might have to sacrifice some metal screen door screen or something but it would also be a contributor to more efficient handling of all that bulk.

 

I'd be willing to bet that a 5 gallon nylon paint strainer (get at paint stores) would survive a quick pour of the bulk through it. You could keep the dregs and re-base them for another smaller extraction. Who knows what's left in them?

 

My experience in things like this says get your shit filtered early and everything flows nicely from there.

 

Oh, don't forget gloves and eye protection......

Edited by pharmer, 02 September 2016 - 04:19 PM.

[MerryPrankster]

Thanks pharmer, 

 

I have PPE covered, no worries! Gloves, coat, glasses, closed in shoes, hair tied back ,etc. 

 

I can't reduce the basic solution. It stinks to high heaven and I am in a residential neighbourhood, I'd have to go out bush if I wanted to do that. I'll just do pulls off it, she'll be right. 

 

I have some insect screen and a big funnel that I will bundle together to make a filter. It should be alright. Thanks for your tips, especially about acidifying the basic solution, I'll add some conc. HCl. I'll get back to you all later with progress.

 

I'll post pictures later, but the extraction is going well. I've done my first xylene pull and I think we have the technique down pat. It should go down pretty smoothly now. More to follow.

Edited by MerryPrankster, 03 September 2016 - 12:05 AM.

[MerryPrankster]

Boy, did I have fun today!

 

It started with the stinky cactus mucus (my erstwhile lab partner came up with that one) which was still full of plant material. Gloved, coated and goggled, I proceeded to pull out as much of the cactus skin as I could, throwing out a few of the other chunks. 

 

Then came the straining. We cut the bottom off a funnel and put it in a bag of insect netting, then poured the cactus mucous through it. The pictures describe what's happening, pretty accurately: 
                                                             

 

This took a while, and the bag had to be drained of the thickest of the mucous and washed in the bucket. Once this was finished, a second straining was performed. This happened rapidly:

                                      

 

 

This was really good, a lot cleaner. I threw all of the junk in a pile behind my shed and set up my rudimentary smelly room in it:

 

                           

 

 

 

                           

 

I initially intended to leave the cactus mucous as is and basify in the sep funnel, but I only did this for the first lot as it was a pain in the ass. I threw in about 10g of NaOH, until the cactus mucous got nice and soapy. It will now be referred to as the basic cactus mucous.

 

The first run took about two and a half hours as we worked out the kinks and developed our method. The second run took half an hour. 

 

Run 1:

 

                         

 

                         

 

                         

 

 

Added NaOH first, then xylenes, seperated by pouring the basic cactus mucous into a 1L beaker. I collect the 100mL xylenes in a clean whiskey bottle, repeat 3 times. 

 

I then washed the sep funnel with water, poured the xylenes in and poured in 5mL of water to just wash out any emulsion and basic cactus mucous that might still be around. To my slightly cloudy xylenes I added 15mL of 4M HCl, let it settle and captured the salted product into a half pint (get fucked, unit consistency!) mason jar. That got sat on a high shelf with filter paper on the top of it so it can evaporate without shit getting in it. 

 

We had our technique sorted and had added a metric fuckton of NaOH to the cactus mucous (making it basic cactus mucous), so it was time to try it again. 

 

Oh, I also figured out this McGuyver stand for my sep funnel. It works a charm, sits there like a baby in a cradle.

 

 

I poured the clean xylenes into (another) clean whiskey bottle. This means I have one bottle for my "dirty" xylenes and one for my "clean" xylenes. 

 

The next two runs went really smoothly. I didn't wash the sep funnel with water on the second one and the jar has a couple of bits of crud in it, but that's nothing a quick ReX won't fix. 

 

                 


        

 

 

After salting the combined pulls of the third run, I noticed the xylenes were very cloudy, so I decided to pour in the undiluted HCl (8.9M) I have, stright from the bottle. Immediately the aqueous layer turned orange. . . I shook it up and left it until the evening to separate it out. It looks very clean, and the xylenes seem to be clear also.

 

                                     

 

 

 

 

 

It's all on a high shelf under filter paper, evaporating. If I cbf tomorrow, I'll put them in a water bath, but I'll see what happens. 

 

 

 

pharmer, I neutralised the basic cactus mucus with HCl, then poured it out. I just realised I forgot to add that. 

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Edited by MerryPrankster, 03 September 2016 - 08:46 AM.

[Sidestreet]

Definitely on the edge of my seat for this one.  Looking good!

[MerryPrankster]

I have an update! I set up a double boiler thing:

 

 

Over the course of 3 hours, crystals formed in the jars from the last two runs:

 

                       

 

 

 

       

 

The fluid levels hadn't changed for an hour so I put the pot holding the jars on the stove to make it evap faster. I got worried about killing the saucepan, so I added some water. Don't. This happens: 

 

 

 

 

I put it in the oven (Mesc HCl m.p. is 180) at 160 with the fan on and the door cracked in the hope it will drive off some more of the HCl. After two hours, it looks like this: 

 

             

 

 

This is the second run. I didn't wash the sep funnel between the last pull and the final salting, so there was some crap in it. A recryst in acetone should do the trick. 

 

That one was close to the fan, the others are rotated so they get lots of breeze across them, this should be sweet.

 

EDIT: So, I took the two jars out of the oven and put all three in my lab. I did a quick ReX with acetone and this is the result. I'm excited: 

 

                  

 

 

 

 

Edited by MerryPrankster, 04 September 2016 - 11:28 AM.

[Heirloom]

Just wanted to say I enjoyed the read.

[pharmer]

Oh, I expect you're going to be VERY excited  :)

 

Well done lab rat!

[fungi2bwith]

You said you started with 6+ meters of cactus, what was your final weight on the end product?

[MerryPrankster]

You're gonna have to wait for that. I'm still evapping pulls from the pulls I did the other day. I used 1600 mL of cactus mucous and I have about 25 litres left. 

[Sidestreet]

Archive Material.  Nice pics and layout.  Please keep us updated!

[MerryPrankster]

I learned from the best, mate. I am glad to be able to go away, acquire skills, come back and contribute to the community that set me off on the right foot in the first place.

[FrmSpore2Siid]

Can you explain a bit about the enzymatic breakdown ? Whats that doing for you. Are the enzymes from the mold ? There any calculation as to how long a 1foot piece would take to break the cell walls of the cacti and any way to accelerate it ? Im assuming tour trying to make the mescaline more accessable by putting it through the enzymatic breakdown. Would pre freezing the pieces help ? This would also release the waxy hydrophobic lipids on the cacti skin into the water which is why you ionize the water with salt to make it disassociate more into two layers. Im still learning could be totally off would like to know. And when you washed the crystals did you use a mortar and pestle to really grind those crystals. If im correct acetone does not dissolve mescaline hcl just washes the impurites off the surfaces.

[Sidestreet]

Any pics of the final product?

[cactus-pits]

excellent...looking forward to some reviews

[invisibilitysyndrome]

xtals?