Hi all -- thanks for any and all help with this! I have been reading the forums here for quite a long time and am quite inspired by all the knowledge and helpful people on this site. A friend of a friend has been trying some acacia extractions and is quite puzzled. He is hoping that some experienced people can lay this to rest. The issue is yield (only like a few gs of freebase DMT from 500g acacia root bark, he understands the hope is for more like 1g/100g bark), and wondering if this problem sounds to you all like the bark being off or if it's perhaps because of some other reason.

TEK:

500g (pretty decently shredded, prob 2/3 powder) ACRB bark -> acid boil with 1800ML water/200ML vinegar for 1hr45mins (x3) -> reduced total resulting liquid to about 1L (33% the original volume). This is basically Joshisom's tek acid boils. Reduction is cooled, basified with 120g lye.

Then only one 500mL xylene pull -> agitating with xylene/allowing to separate 4-5 times. Xylene becomes dark yellow and friend is using heat throughout, picking up EVERYTHING - actives and also lots of plant oils. Further xylene pulls have no color at all and yielded nothing, zero. (does that even make sense to you folks? Xylene is a pretty strong solvent from what I understand, plus high heat here. He knows 500mL of it is a high amount too. Friend perfectly understands that common recommendation is to use 3x pulls...but the first xylene pull seems to grab literally everything)

Mini A/B is done on the Xylene (backsalt with 100mL vinegar/200mL water)-> successfully removes Xylene AND the middle layer of weird gunk between the two layers...(did friend just throw out gunk with DMT trapped in it there?? It was a fair deal of gunk and bubbles and to be honest it looked like it may have all been trapping freebase, exact same light tan color) -> basify acid water again with 30g lye -> re-pull with just 300mL hot Xylene now -> salts out DMT-Fumarate with FASA. Friend has EVEN tried repeated backsalting from the original Xylene a 2nd time re-pulling with 300mL Xylene again, and salted out nothing at all with his FASA on subsequent tries. Also he sees nothing being dissolved in any new acidic water he tries to use, ever

Fumarates stick to the side of friend's jar. He picks them up by dissolving them in minimal very hot water, and slowly evapping the water away on the lowest possible stovetop setting. He does this to evap off the very last of any acetone/solvent. Unfortunately friend did not weigh the fumarates here, but he figures that the fumarates would have weighed about 3g at that point.

Friend is then bewildered when this rich-looking 500mL Xylene pull yields only about 2 - 2.5 grams of freebase DMT in the end.

a) Is discarding the gunk middle layer during the mini A/B game over? The gunk and bubbles were mostly a light tan, which is the exact color his friend's freebase ends up being.
b) To get rid of the taste of acetone in the end product friend dissolves the fumarates in water and evaps the water as mentioned already. He figures that this evaps away any undesired solvents effectively as it results in very clean, pleasant hits previously. Is this a bad way of cleaning the fumarate salts?

Thanks again for reading hope somebody can chime in and explain this madness thank you, cheers!