endlessness wrote:well it wouldnt be ph neutral because as you said yourself, there is excess sodium carbonate in that precipitated stuff so the sodium carbonate would dissolve in the water and raise the pH.. Or you can prepare a solution with a bit of sodium carbonate (not saturated!) just to make sure it will be with a sufficiently basic pH even if there isnt much sodium carbonate in the precipitates, so that the harmalas are not absorbed...
I dont know how much water because I dont know how much stuff you have there.. But just to say some number, you could predissolve a bit of sodium carbonate in 100ml water, and then add this to a container with the precipitates, shake the hell out of it, and then collect precipitates again, which should be free (or freeER) of the sodium carbonate contamination
Well, this dissolved most of the alkaloids. The reddish brown colored alk that would not dissolve in the alcohol immediately went into the basic water.
SWIM added more base in the hopes of dropping out the dissolved alks, but not much came out.
SWIM is thinking about just evapping the whole thing and using a bunch of anhydrous IPA to slowly extract everything out of it.