SWIM is going to be helping to remove a huge stand of these invasive Acacia mearnsii trees tomorrow that are encroaching on a local wildlife area.

SWIM has never done an extraction, so I want to know what part of the tree to use. Ideally the bark from younger branches. Should you just get a knife and and scrape off the bark from the small (1-4 inch) diameter brances.

Also, SWIM has never done an extraction before, so what teks would you recommend?

And how long does the bark stay active when kept dry in storage? can branches be left lying around and then used in a few months?

Since there hasn't been rain for over six months, I expect this to be a good time for alkaloids.

hey rudder
since they are being pulled down anyway you might as well take the opportunity to try the trunk bark. generally with acacias if they have dmt they'll have it in the trunk/branch/stem(stem is usually the same yield if not a little more than trunk.. and purer alkaloid profile too) and then in lower amounts in the phyllodes. i'd reccomend doing separate extractions of the phyllodes and the bark. 200g would be enough for an indication of alkaloids. i'm going to attempt an extract on mearnsii very soon after i've finished this alpina extract.. it does sounds like a good candidate and they are EVERYWHERE down here.

as far as extraction goes theres no need to use any specific tek.. though you dont want to do STB method with acacia. theres a lot of different methods and a lot of room for improvisation but in terms of practicality and ease of understanding for the laymen, I'd reccommend the nen method.. you don't have to use ethanol as is suggested though it means you dont need to boil anywhere near as long and it is good for pulling other alkaloids too .this is a very acacia friendly tek ... as below:

1) grind phyllodes/small twigs in a coffee grinder or with mortar and pestle as fine as possible
2) soak overnight in mixture of ethanol/vodka/methylated spirits plus white vinegar and water
3) heat/boil liquid & plant material for approx 45 minutes..keep liquid..add fresh liquid and repeat X 2 (45 min boiling)
4) combine liquids and reduce volume by heating..at various stages here is when as much filtering as possible should be done..e.g. coffee filters (can be slow); reduce volume of liquid as much as possible, i.e until slightly thick..4B) defat x1 with NP solvent - optional
5) very slowly and carefully add casutic soda or pure ammonium until pH between 11-12.5
6) add equal amount of non polar solvent, and separate (optional wash with salty H20+NaOH)..evaporate slow
..all technical issues with emulsions etc are covered in nexus threads..

Oh I found the thread where you got that from.
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=35632
The version in post two on this page is supposedly the longer version of what you just posted.

My questions are:

Is the 200g of material you start with dry weight or fresh weight?

What is the storage life of the bark, branches, phyllodes?


Does this method work with the bark? If not, please link to the best tek for bark.


"Fresh liquid" = ethanol, vinegar & water in same ratios as was used to soak plant material overnight?


NP? I guess I have a lot of new acronyms to learn before I can understand any of these teks.


Does calcium hydroxide work for this step?


What are emulsions?

What are safe examples of non polar solvents to use that are available at most local hardware shops?

And lastly (for now) what is the minimum proof or percent that the ethanol needs to be. I.e. I would assume standard 40% ethanol vodka would be too weak.

Thanks for your response.

Edit: I assume it's a bad idea to use teflon or other kinds of non-stick coated cookware when doing the extraction...best to just stick with the traditional stainless steel?

1. NP = non polar solvent.

2. yes calcium hydroxide should work fine, as well as sodium carbonate.. though with the latter shellite cannot be used as the pulling(pulling is the name given to extracting the dmt into the solvent and then separating the solvent from the other liquid) solvent

3. An emulsion is "a mixture of two liquids that would not normally mix together" .. so in the dmt extraction scenario it means that the non polar solvent and the polar solvent have become trapped together in between the layers. This is a result of shaking the liquids and creating bubbles. so mix very gently ... swirl the flask around in a circular motion, or turn side over side. thats the best i can explain it..

4.Shellite (naptha in other countries) is the most common solvent used and is more selective in the alkaloids it pulls. it'll mainly just pull dmt or nmt. other solvents that work and are more reliable for pulling other alkaloids as well are DCM, xylene, hexane, toluene, limonene

5. there is no mimimum really as ethanol is already far more effective in drawing the alkaloids out of the plant than water would is... so any alcohol is more efficient really... obviously the higher the % of ethanol the more efficient, but as opposed to using just water, any spirit would work. 40% vodka is fine especially if your boiling it with the plant material.

not quite sure... i know aluminum is a no no. stainless steels fine.. hop that helps

Yes very helpful but you still didn't answer if the 200g of plant material is the dry weight or fresh weight.

dry

Doing a little more research I'm goint to have to disagree. Using calcium hydroxide won't work, because it needs to be done as a "dry tek"


https://www.dmt-nexus.me...&m=265706#post265706

So how about using this? https://www.dmt-nexus.me...&m=268046#post268046

Also, naptha is not available in California. Very frustrating.

I assume the nen tek you outlined will also work for the bark as well, correct?

I understand the general extraction process as outlined in the sticky https://www.dmt-nexus.me....aspx?g=posts&t=1085 -but there are a couple things I'm still a bit unclear on:

1) What does the alcohol do to the plant matter?

2) When the DMT/plant matter is in an acidic solution the addition of naptha will not "pull" any DMT? Why not? At this stage the naphtha will only "pull" the plant "fats" - hence the name of the step: "defatting"?

Hey wishing you good luck. I have bumped a thread which I think is all-round helpful for such questions.

Thanks, phyllode. If you don't want to take the time to answer the question then just linking to a thread that does is the best way to help. Much better than trying to use this forum's search function.

Update: On to the pulls now. 200 grams of powdered phyllodes and small stems were split between 2 quart-size mason jars. Then 200 grams of powdered trunk bark was added to 2 more quart-size mason jars. The whole "nen method" was applied using naphtha as the defatter and puller. Each jar was full of acidic plant gunk up to about the 300mL line. Then 300mL of 50/50 drain cleaner/water was added, and then topped off with another 100mL of pure drain cleaner (is that enough?).

This is the basifying agent that was used: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...&m=403024#post403024

As you can see from the first picture that drain cleaner leaves some wild looking crystals. I assume those crystals are the leftover sodium hydroxide and trace potassium hydroxide leftover from the drain cleaner after all the water evaporated off of it. Hopefully it's OK to use, because I read one post on DMT Nexus from someone else who used it, and said it worked OK.

And the second picture is from the naphtha pulled from the phyllode jars. I assume at this early stage there's no way to tell for sure if there are any goodies in it. (A defat had already been performed at the acidic stage). The brown specks are not part of the solution - they are from the table the dish is resting on.

*It's also worth noting that although an equal amount of naphtha was added to each jar, some of the jars apparently "absorbed" the naptha because two jars had a distinct layer of naptha on top after 24 hours, and the other two jars didn't seem to have any naphtha layer. The same technique of stirring and rolling the jars on their side was applied to all the jars, so if it's an emulsion issue, then I would assume all the jars would exhibit the same problem.

YEAH! Great work brother!

thanks so much for the experimentation rudder! can't wait to see what comes of it

I'm not holding my breath. I checked today on a smaller dish that I put about 20-30mL of naphtha as a first pull from one of the bark powder jars, and all that was left was a little bit of white residue and yellow residue. No crystals

It's too bad...I really wanted to try DMT, and Acacia mearnsii is the only wattle that I know well enough to ID around town. There's lots of Acacias here, but I don't want to risk another extraction with anything, unless it's pretty much guaranteed to have hefty amounts of DMT....I'm still lamenting the loss of MHRB, since I never took advantage of that opportunity while it existed. Ah well.... I guess just grow Phalaris brachystachys - but even that's not reliable.

I'm thinking maybe I don't mix the naphtha pull throughout the jar long enough. I just move the jar around for a couple minutes...rotating on its side, inverting, swirling, etc. And then I just leave it for 24 hours before I suck off the layer with a turkey baster. Maybe it needs to be contantly mixed? I didn't think so.

Should I try freeze precipitating one of the trays? From what I've read, that's the way you can literally see the crystals stick to the glass....just pour off the naphtha and voila.



I guess when all is said and done, I'll post pictures, because I'm not really sure what to look for, and the idea of vaporizing unknown residue that has been in contact with petrol products and drain cleaner is not very attractive to me.

***I know it's been covered many times before, but why shouldn't I stick the naptha in a food dehydrator to speed up the evaporation?

Usually a few 'pulls' are required with naphtha to get out all the alkaloids.
Do you have a reference for what dmt smells like? That helps.
The photo looks good. Remember, there's no casutic soda extracted by the solevent. And once evaporated to dry, there Can't be any solvent left in the product.
It's you're own call, but I've vaped a few unknown similar looking acacia extracts. Worst thing that ever happened, didn't do much.
You don't always get crystals, especially crude. Have you looked at the pics in the Acacia Analysis Thread?

first of all rudder, if you really want to try dmt, if you hear its calling, you will not give up I say keep at it. Not many acacias here apart from acuminata are going to be "guaranteed to have hefty amounts of dmt" .. there are good candidates, but it is going to take a bit of work.. it is very rewarding overall, and goes beyond tryptamines after a while.

when extracting from fairly untested species, i would reccomend evapping rather than freezing.. that way if there's any alkaloids that wouldn't have otherwise fallen out of the cold shellite, you can still recover it. plus in conjunction with dmt it might add more flavour

also... while crystals look pretty... its usually the goo type extracts that are really exotic.

I'm going to put one tray in the freezer just to see if there are crystals that form in 24 hrs, then I'll just pour off and reuse the naphtha for the final pull.

HOw's your mearnsii extraction coming along?

Judging from everything I read though, I harvested the tree at the best possible time. We hadn't had any rainfall for 7 months. And they were growing in a riparian zone, which means they were growing in nice, rich alluvial soil.

Good to know that the "goo" is completely normal. The 30mL of pulled naphtha from the bark jar that evaporated just left a very very thin layer of residue....mostly yellow gunk, but also a smaller amount of white residue.



No, I've never smelled DMT. If I had had the opportunity to smell it, then that's probably not the only thing I would've done to it.

Yeah, I'm doing 3-4 pulls on each jar. I just read that it's not always a good idea to use warm naphtha, so I just did a room temperature naphtha pull. Right now I'm on my last pull for the phyllodes, and the second to last pull for the trunk bark. The most recent pull from the phyllodes got a lot darker which means it's probably mostly just oils left.

Thanks for your support

***Also, the naphtha seems to take a looong time to evaporate. It's almost as slow as water.

After two pulls from the trunk bark jars, the naphtha tray was placed in the freezer on its lowest setting and left overnight. This is what revealed itself this morning. Is this sodium hydroxide floating around? Doesn't look like crystals to me...more like flakes of dead skin or bits of liquid mycelium if you're familiar with mushroom liquid cultures. It was difficult to prevent having a little bit of the black plant matter layer enter the turkey baster during the decants, since the naphtha layers were so thin. But still I don't think that much of the plant gunk layer got into the naphtha pulls.

Why does 100mL of naphtha go in the basified jars, and then the next day the naphtha layer only looks like it is about 50mL tall? This issue did not happen at all with the phyllode jars.

Is this what's referred to as a DMT "snow globe." I haven't found any conclusive info running searches on the forum, and no one has responded. Did I do something wrong?

I wish I we had a Olfactory Scanner so I could Smell that, rudder!
Very easily could be a mix of dmt and other tryptamines.
Unless it was 'dloating around' in the basic liquid, it's not going to be sodium hydroxide floating in the naphtha..98% likely to be alkaloids.
Sounds like it's getting mixed with the basic liquid. Add more sodium hydroxide to make sure they separate.

What's in the petri dish would quite possibly look more like xtal after re-dissolving, re-extracting with naphtha, and re-crystalising (better still with hexane/heptane if can afford).

Rudder that looks like a pretty good result. And whatever the yield, would be the first picture of alkaloids from A. mearnsii on the web!! I suspect the extraction has not gotten everything out, but hard to tell remotely.

CONGRATULATIONS. And thanks!