Okay, I've tried asking for help in chat, but nobody seems to know what I'm talking about.

SWIM is using Noman's Tek to perform his first series of extractions and everything seems to be going great up until SWIM tries to do a Sodium Carbonate wash. The wash is necessary, as in SWIM's experience, unwashed spice is too gooey and difficult to work with.

A pinch of Super Washing Soda (food grade sodium carbonate wasn't available, but at least one other person has reported this problem using converted sodium bicarbonate) is added to 100ml of cool tap water, and mixed until thoroughly dissolved. This mixture is then added slowly to the pulled and spice containing Naphtha. Noman's Tek states that being gentle with the agitation isn't necessary at this point as hydrated sodium carbonate "doesn't form an emulsion" with naphtha. In fact, most of the people SWIM has talked with have said to "shake the hell out of it". However, each time this results in an emulsion in the form of a white layer between the SC solution and the Naphtha solution. When the clear/yellow layer is carefully pulled off the top and allowed to freeze precip, an extreme loss of yield occurs. Also, if the white layer is allowed to sit out resulting in evaporation of all naphtha, the "water" is left reeking of DMT. This leads SWIM to believe that a large portion of the spice is somehow dropping out of the naphtha into said emulsion, and a solution to the problem has yet to present itself.

Please help...

Edit: It seems the problem could be due to having reused solvent for every pull after the initial extraction... Orion (the only other person SWIM could find who'd had this problem before) suggested that leftover plant fats could be converting to soap and "trapping" the DMT. The problem is he says he THINKS he had the same problem with fresh solvent, but didn't seem sure.

Could it be due to a concentration of plant fats in the reused naphtha?

My friend recently ran into emulsion for the first time while re-useing naptha in his pulls. The emulsion formed inbetween the base soup and naptha, he decanted off the naptha and did a wash with sodium carbonate and distilled water, he didn't notice any emulsion layer then but noticed a loss of yeild and some of the crystals were not forming right during freeze precip (they had formed a white cloud that hadn't settled around the other crystals) There were some other factors, the root bark was dry and he normally uses fresh and the root bark was from a different source and he added a little more sodium carbonate than he normally uses, but he still thinks the re-used naptha could be causing the emulsion.