hey guys, today I dissolved 2.71g spice into 70ml hot shellite(what we call naptha in aus). I then separated the gunk from the solvent and let it precipitate. I then noticed that the gunk left in the jar had gone crusty, indicating dmt in it, so dissolved that in 25ml naptha and evapped more crystal.

I then added that crystal to the same amount of shellite again and added it to the other shellite which was already precipiating and heat bathed it to dissolve the crystal a bit and encourage bigger growth, but it all dissolved into a gunk again... at this point, a little frustrated i decanted the solvent again and repeated the same process on the gunk with more shellite and added to the other lot again.. when precipiated it was a gram short. I am confused as to how this happened, as I threw nothing out.. I did the heat bath by placing the jar of shellite into a saucepan of boiling water.. could this have degraded it? I evapped again after pouring off... hardly anything. devasted i lost so much!

..i'm not sure what's exactly happened, bricklaya, but i could suggest that cold conditions is the best for encouraging crystal growth, and freeze precipitation is the best method with napatha..also, though maybe not so relevant,a few people don't rate shellite and suggest lighter fluid (like zippo) as a form of napatha which works a lot better in this context..'naptha' is not always the same...

I'm certainly no expert, and don't know how shellite may differ from naptha. I have found that after experimenting with heat baths during extraction that my yields fluctuated and were generally lower (probably due to rookie error, but that's huge when you're learning). Once I went back to by the book extractions, I got better than average results. Heated naptha yielded too many plant fats and crystal dissolve.

I guess I'd suggest less heat. My experiences show me that the more heat added to the process results in more oils and less crystal product. Of course, it depends on how much pure spice you actually had to deal with. A gram loss is a lot, but if you had excess weight to begin with, not at all surprising.

If I remember correctly, I read somewhere that naphtha isn't ideal for re-x, but hexane works better. Also one should remember to do several "pulls" on the yellow goo before throwing it away, 3-6 depending on the amount.