Hey all. SWIM had a few quick questions from a Sodium carbonate conversion he is doing. Attached are two pics of the shot glass on Day 4 of Conversion # 1.

https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...e_crystallization_method

SWIM did an all natural tech with Calcium Hydroxide, Limo and a FASW to get the fumarate. Seems to have gone pretty well, but SWIM has some questions now that it is coming to a close.

He did 3 FASW pulls on the limo and evaped that ending up with .991 gram of DMT fumarate. He then did a water wash of the fumarate and decanted the undissolved fumaric acid from that bringing his yield down to something like .75g and stored that.

SWIM then took .5g of the fumarate to use in the sodium carbonate conversion. He noticed when adding hot water that some of the fumarate didn't dissolve despite adding more water. He did pour it through a coffee filter when decanting his wash, but it appears that some fumaric acid must have slipped in there not attached to the DMT.

1) From what he is reading around that shouldn't matter as he thinks you can go right from fumarate to the conversion without even doing a wash to purify the fumarate correct?

When adding the sodium carbonate (converted from Bakind soda) to a 2nd jar, he was a little surprised at how much it seemed to take to fully saturate. His solution didn't appear to be as cloudy as outlined in blab and the wiki so he added more to be safe.

2) Is there any issue if the sodium carbonate water is either under saturated or over saturated when adding it to the water that contains the DMT fumarte?

If anything he thinks he probably over saturated the solution before combining. It was a little harder to eyeball decant that since it was so cloudy and the excess carbonate didn't seem to sit on the bottom like the fumaric acid saturated water. So anyway SWIM poured that into the DMT fumarate water enjoying the reaction and then put it in the fridge. It looks like a bunch of carbonate is attached to the rim/side above the solution now. He assumes from pouring it in and hitting that. It started off only on one side, but now there is white stuff all around which he assumes must just be condensation getting too cold.

3) When collecting the crystals (see pics) will it be ok just pouring through a coffee filter and collecting them up or do you think that maybe there will then be some carbonate with them? If so should he put the collected crystals into a new glass of water to soak up this carbonate?

4) With the remaining solution should he scrape up all the white stuff on the top of the glass to re saturate and then repeat?

5) Does it matter if he covered the shot glass in the fridge? He did not this time.

Thanks. SWIM says it has been a fun process and cheers to all the great information that lead to this.

How did it go? I'm dealing with the same issues and I was like 'bingo', until I got to the end of the post and there were no replies...

As I think I said this to you elsewhere, mala, just filter the whole thing, which will probably have some sodium carb contamination, and wash it with room temp water, which should remove excess sodium carb and leave dmt freebase undissolved

Endless, I know I saw some tips for the slow freebasing, but i couldn't find the thread (a search brought me here). It said to add the sodium carbonate solution slowly and then to avoid sudden changes in temperature.

I think it would be useful to add that info to the wiki page (at least in the form of useful tips), as quite a few members seem to have issues with the freebasing phase. The process is not that forgiving either, as the solution I prepared following the tek to the best of my abilities has been sitting in the fridge for 3 days and nothing happened.

The picture of the sodium carbonate solution shows a cloudy mix, and to get that you have to go way past the solubility limit. Also, the quantity mentioned as theoretically correct is 40g sodium carbonate per 100ml of water, but to dissolve that amount of sodium carbonate you need very hot water; the tek doesn't say whether the water should be hot or not.

Next, it asks you to pour the sodium carbonate solution over the dissolved dmt, until there's no clouding or color change. Although the tek assumes that very little will be needed, I found that not too be true: it took all 100 ml of sodium carbonate solution until the clouding stopped (I guess it would have helped if I had poured it very slowly to give it time to react with the acid, but that's not mentioned either).

And isn't the clouding the neutralization reaction b/w the acid and the base, as opposed to dmt precipitating? I had plenty of clouding and, 3 days later, I can't see any spice in there. There's tons of sediment at the bottom though. The salts from the neutralization reaction are not mentioned in the tek, neither is the excess sodium carbonate that should be present since the solubility of carbonate in water is lowered considerably when the solution is chilled in the fridge.

Do you think that decanting to get rid of all the sediment and evaporating would help? I don't care about the nice white crystals anymore, I just want to recover the actives. Also I had some leftovers from a previous extraction just sitting in there, and it seems that some crystals have formed. Would it be a good idea to add lots of water to dissolve any sodium carbonate that's still in there and then filter the solution?

Oh yeah this thread was actually from before that one. It had moved to the 3rd page so I just let it die, but it got bumped. At the time I posted this SWIM hadn't retrived all the crystals to realize that they were definitely not all DMT since they weight so much. SWIM said that those odd looking clear crystals dissolved in water and he was able to retrieve the freebase with no problems. The yield was low, but he thinks he must have lost track somewhere on all his containers after the weird stuff started happening.

He later on a different conversion had some left over heavily saturated sodium carbonate solution sitting on the counter that wasn't needed and it started forming crystals as well. So if you are just wanting to grow some flimsy but big funny crystals for fun that is a way