I thought I’d share a picture of my extraction. It was done using the Earthwalker tek. It’s nice and clean and I’m pretty happy with it.

The problem I’ve been having though is that the yields seem low and it seems to be in the mini A/B step where a lot of the DMT is getting lost. I can what appears to be crystals floating around in the final cloudy basified solution even after 6 pulls. The naphtha doesn’t seem to want to pull it out. I’ve looked through the forum and found a couple other mentions of this problem but no one seems to have come up with a reason or a solution.

https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=149&p=107 (Post #2125 of this thread). I’ve read similar comments from a few more people on various threads, but I can’t find them right now. If anyone has an idea of what’s causing this, I’d be curious to know.

Overall, I’m happy with the results I’ve gotten so far. I am thinking of doing something different with the remainder of my raw materials though. I’m probably going to follow the same procedure, minus the mini A/B and add a defat step in the beginning acid phase. Then I’m just going to evap the naphtha and hopefully get some yellow crystals or maybe just goo, but hopefully I will get a better yield and it would be more "full spectrum". I’d then like to use this to try making a bit of changa. Whatever I end up with should be clean enough for that.

That would leave me with a bit of pure white spice and a bit of changa to experiment with. I’d be happy with that.

Since it's ACRB, Freeze, thaw, and nuke twice; MAE's seem to possibly weaken the walls pretty well from what I've heard MAE

Obviously follow through with a long acid cook

If you're salting, defatting is unnecessary as salting targets dmt specifically; as far as I know, salting should still grab the NMT and jungle spice, however this I can't guarantee

I can't find Earthwalker's tek, so I'm not sure if you've implemented this extra step already, however if you add de-ionized (canning or pickling) salt to the soup before basing, it will change the partition constant; If I'm not mistaken, this causes the dmt in the soop to be slightly more "hydrophobic" and causes the dmt to run towards the solvent being used.

Xylene pulls it a little better then naptha if it's available, however Xylene is quite a bit nastier than naptha.

Do you have crystals forming ontop of the basic layer/bottom of the solvent layer & getting trapped?

Hey, thanks for the reply.

This is the Earthwalker tek.

It's basically Cyb's Salt tek with a mini A/B. So yes, it does involve salting. It also recommends the freeze/thaw, which I've done. I've never hard of microwaving it though, and I'm not sure what an MAE is? I tried to look it up but didn't see anything. I might have to look into those steps.

I haven't seen xylene in my area. I can get Heptane, but it's expensive.

On the initial extraction, there's a layer of something there but it appears to get thinner as I pull out the naphtha. I assumed it was fats and/or a small bit of emulsion. It looks to be about the same on the mini A/B but in that step the basic solution also remains cloudy and has what appears to be "snowflakes" floating around in it.

For all I know, this might be happening in the initial extraction as well, but I can't see it because the liquid is so black and opaque.

I tend to get this as well but I don't think it Xtals though. Mainly because I figured that in the basic solution it would convert into freebase and not form xtals until it's froze or evaped off. The cloudiness I get as well and over time I have found that this is semi soluble fats in trapped in between the solvent and basic layer. I usually suck it up and discard after mini a/b. The cloudiness does look like spice crashing out at least that's what I thought when I first started extracting, turns out it was just fat. Could've just had stuff mixed up in the root bark powder that you didn't see.

Why would spice be lost during an a->b?
It's either in the nonpolar from the b->a step. So wash again with acid.
OR
It's in the acidic solution from the b->a step. That's pretty unlikely so check and make sure it's not in the first basic solution. Also naptha simply *works*. It's not even a good solvent, it just happens to work. Maybe try a different one?

This layer I to thought at one stage it may have been dmt trapped , but if you leave the mini in the bottle for a couple of days then have a look at the layer it's clearly all fats , I don't know why it gets carried across from the mini AB as " that procedure should take care of all the fats and oils " and I'm no chemist but I've done close to 30+ extractions in the last 12 months in this way and have had success and mighty fine yields " my yields were higher from ACRB then most MHRB I've read , and no matter how many times you try to collect it you won't so that leaves me to the belief it's not dmt ......

How much plant material did you use?

Thanks everyone for the advice. Like I said, overall, I'm happy with what I have so far and I'm probably going to take my remaining ACRB and make changa which will not require clean white spice.

I was curious about why I was seeming to have problems and I thought that sharing my experience might benefit some other users, but mostly I just wanted to show off my work. For the record, this was 2 separate batches of 100g each run simultaneously and resulting in a total of about 1.1 grams of spice. Not a great yield, but it's still a pretty decent amount to work with and it was very nice and clean.

I didn't keep the leftover solutions from this extraction because I knew I got a result that I was fairly happy with and I don't like to leave that stuff laying around.

Earthwalker - you could be right. it could be just fats, but then wouldn't I be able to see them in the acidic solution too? The "snowflakes" only show up after I add the lye solution. When it's still an acid it looks just like crystal clear water. I don't know though, I'm not much of a chemist either, I'm just fairly good at following instructions. It could be that I just have some not-so-great bark.

Nothing like seeing someone being successful with an extraction. In time efficiency will come. More importantly is that now next time you'll understand what to do and be successful at it. Just remember that your yield will always vary with bark.

Check this one I have done not long ago and it always works great with good yields.

Started another thread.

Tryptallmine - That sounds very close to my experience as well, but it doesn't seem to happen for everyone. maybe I will see what kind of yield I get without the mini A/B for comparison. I'm otherwise doing the exact same procedure with the same batch of bark.