Swim is wondering which is more efficent, freezing or evaporating? What are the advantages of freezing crystals? less fumes? Swim actually perfers to evaporate, its faster. does this result in loss of yield? also fumes of naphtha get on swims housemates nerves. how do others deal with this? do you think an onion or bowl of vinegar/water would help?

freezing is cleaner but takes all night.

with an evap all the oils get scraped up afterwards.

so; ask yourself what kind of final product u want. wax or white ;D

swim likes to evap half then freeze

swim usually freezes it over night , then after swim saves all the naphtha scrapping those crystals of the jar , and get some fresh naphtha about 10 ml of it heat it up to around 45/50c and dissolves everything again for crystalization , but that's swim, everyone does it da way one reckons it's more suitable for him
so keep experimenting until you get your preferred result

evaporating half or giving it an overnight freeze both sound good. swim'll keep those in mind, thanks guys.

how about removing fumes, any ideas?

use a container that you can cover with a lid, so no fumes will infiltrate your freezer goods (such as food or something you may have in there with it)

I prefer freezing, you can reuse the naptha over and over. Why evaporate it all away? that stuff costs money!

I have a quick question about the freeze process... SWIM has some "spiced" naptha, and has let it evap overnight and still have a good amount of it left, and wanted to know if SWIM puts it in the freezer does the naptha actually freeze? and what exactly is different between freezing process & evap process (step wise)? SWIM is excited at the prospect of harvesting even pure-er, white-ish crystals using the freeze method but doesn't want to mess anything up. Advice please :-)

SWIM put the naptha in the freezer for 3 days and sees the crystals that have formed (nice & white). There is still a good bit of naptha left, so SWIM is letting that evap now, hopefully this will work :-)

Is there a certain point during the freezing that it doesn't matter how much longer you freeze? I've had my jars in the freezer for about 30 hours or so now, think I'll still be getting more, or is it time to harvest?

This is exactly my question. I have had my 2 pulls in the freezer for about 18 hours now. I have a good amount of crystal formation on the bottom of the pyrex dishes.

Will i really get more if i leave it in the freezer for 2 more days?

What percentage crystallizes within the first 24 hours?

What if i take it out, pour the naptha into another pyrex dish and set that into the freezer? Do you think i would see left over spice form at the bottom over then next two days?

What do you think? Should i try it just for testing purposes?

Pretty sure it depends on the concentration of DMT in the solvent. If you evap'd enough of the solvent prior to freezing, you can probably get away with 24 hours. Just don't throw the naphtha away, save it and you can evap more, freeze again and see what you get.

Okay...SWIM is worried now.

SWIM let the naptha sit in the freezer for a couple of days (3), and noticed many crystal patches forming on the bottom, after the third day SWIM set the dish out to evap overnight... now there is a small amount of naptha left but all of the white crystal patches are GONE, no sign of anything except a few small specs here & there.

SWIM left the naptha by an open window and it was windy that night. Next morning SWIM sees a few crystals on the side of the dish, and wonders if the crystal patches got blown away or something. SWIM just put the rest of the naptha back in the freezer in hopes that crystals will form again

I'm afraid SWIM just lost all of his product

Please tell me that I haven't, or what I can do / should do to help SWIM out.

Did I miss the boat on something? Since when did the entire dish go in the freezer instead of a jar? Is this just from another tek, or is it more efficient?

Maybe he laid it all out in a pyrex pie dish to evap faster

Hm Gabriel. That doesn't sound good. My Friend just finished his first extraction also. He left the two dishes in a seperate room to dry out overnight. The two dishes are doing fine. No loss of crystal as they dry. The crystal is very white and fluffy. When i say fluffy i mean super light and fluffy. I could easily see a strong gust of wind able to blast them out of the dish and poof into the abyss.

You should see most, if not all, of the crystals form at the bottom of the dish after the first night of freezing.

Here are some of my pics this morning. They have been drying since last night.




Also check out the extraction @ Mycotopia Forum. More Pics included.
http://forums.mycotopia.net/botanicals-cactus-misc-entheogens-psychedelics/31976-first-extraction-via-marsfold-s-tek.html
Feel Free to Comment.

In reply to the questions about freeze-precipitation, generally:
if your solvent is cloudy, that indicates the presence of alkaloid yet to precipitate out
if your solvent is clear, that indicates the alkaloids are nearly all pulled out already, and you can separate the solvent and crystal if you want

I evap 70-80% of the solvent with a fan (1hr tops) then whack it in the freezer. After 48 hours there is absolutely no
alkaloid left in the solution (I tested it once, re-chilled the solvent to see if it had anything. nothing left)

hope it helps

That is definitely useful kaos.
SWIM still has a bowl in the freezer which is cloudy. SWIM was wondering why this was.
Thanks for clearing that up. haha.

Something to be aware of
Say you end up with 1L of solvent containing spice,

YOU SHOULD:

1. place it in the container you intend to freeze precip out of
2. fan evaporate the desired amount (down to 300mL here is good)
3.* slowly, CAREFULLY, heat the solvent to extraction temperatures (60ish Deg C)
4.* swirl it and swirl it and swirl it until the spice on the side of the jar where the solvent had evaporated has redissolved
5. now freeze precip

*have you ever done the evaporation and touched the side where it had reduced from (bad english but hopefully you know what i mean) ? that sticky honey like stuff on your finger is not solvent residue, or plant residue, it's non-crystallised spice (or micro-crystallised spice). You'd be surprised just how much you can lose, gram, GRAMS

make sure you get that back before proceeding to freeze precip


and as Kaos points out, 1 hour tops to effectively reduce it. Don't let it sit and go watch a movie thinking it'll take ages, especially if you've maximised the air contact to solvent surface area in half an our you just might have a little pool of milk sitting there (and a jar/dish/tray completely lacquered in all your spice which is a pain in the ass to recover efficiently)

Recovery technique:
If you over evaporate, or even for just recovery of that amount on the side of the jar/dish/tray, you can swirl and swirl but sometimes you'll spend a long time and many re-heating of the solvent to get it all (most) - this just goes to show how reluctant spice is to going into your solvent = high temps a MUST.
A better method may be to use a razor blade and get right there with your spice. Scrape with utmost efficiency to get all of it back (you'll run out of razor space a few times). It's like an off-white goup by the way. Place all this recovered goup into a 150mL drinking glass and add about 50mL of HOT solvent, dissolve with the aid of a stirrer, add this solvent back to your original evaporation->precip vessel and then freeze precip
and be very aware of hot/cold glass effects here, once recovering what i suspect was about 2 grams of spice from over evaporation i lost the whole lot from cold glass / hot solvent