Hello once again! SWIM has been making attempts at an STB MHRB extraction with noman's tek plus a sodium carbonate wash. If you want the long story I have already made a couple posts about it(
[first post],
[update]), but I am making this thread just for a couple quick, simpler questions.
so right now SWIM has...
- Some unbleached coffee filters onto which his first pull's worth of crystals had melted, they had soaked into the paper.
He attempted to re-x these once by soaking them in klean-strip VM&P naphtha and then evaporating that. some was retrieved from this re-x but other things were also being re-x'd and solvent was consolidated so he isnt sure how much came from the filter paper.
His plan for these is to repeat this re-x with isopropanol, since he read this will absorb more of the DMT from the paper than naphtha would.
Do you think this is true? would there likely be that much more still trapped in this filter paper? he noticed that even when soaking the paper in naphtha it will still be soaked in it, seems like this might make it hard to get a lot of the DMT out.
- Some orangish gooey sludge which was obtained by evaporating some water that had been sitting in our used solvent (detailed in my 2nd link 'update' above).
- And also some more goo, this time obtained from simply evaporating naphtha that was used in his extractions and had already been freeze-precipitated from.
He also attempted to re-x these latter 2 varieties of goo, this time using isopropanol and evaporating. this produced a lighter colored orangish goo with a little clear spot in the middle of the goo.
SWIM thinks that perhaps it wasn't the best idea to use isopropanol for the re-x of this goo which he suspects was probably a large part impurities? He has seen it seems to be generally easier to use isopropanol because it seems to dissolve much more of these things easily than the naphtha does. He isnt sure if naphtha might be better in its selectivity with what it dissolves, and would therefore have been a better choice for dealing with this largely impure goo.
SWIM plans to re-x all 3 of these gooey substances again but with naphtha, to recover what he can from them, as he wants to save all the DMT he can from this, in addition to that from the re-x of filter paper, and...
make some infused leaf! he picked some mint leaves from his yard the other day and has been drying them out, tested a couple little bits out in his magic flight launch box vaporizer today and they burned easily so they should be just about ready to be infused now i am assuming?
my main question here is do you think SWIM's solvent choices are/have been good in terms of the ones that he has available(naphtha and isopropanol)? and what about his plan for the next re-x and which of the two he should use for each of the things he is re-x'ing?
also: SWIM has still some more used solvent that he is trying to evaporate and it is going along at an ungodly slow pace! probably because it is so cold here this time of year. anything he could do to speed up the evaporation, other than using a fan?
And another thing, SWIM will try to borrow a scale from his FOAF but he might end up not having access to one! in this case what is the best thing he can do about infusing his leaf? he thinks he could maybe try making a balance and doing a 1:1 ratio, but hasnt really thought practically about how he would go about doing that, especially with such small weights, so he may end up just eyeballing it... and even if he gets to use his FOAF's scale it is only to 0.1g so it wouldnt be optimal.