i figured i'd sign up here & say hi... so hi... longtime psychonaut, i mainly partook of Dr. Hoffman's brew until recently, at 39 years old, a friend finally turned me on to Dimitri & his wonderful world... & so here i am...

ran my first extraction tonight... used LazyMan's tek, roughly... based up the water a little stiffer than was called for, after reading several recommendations that pointed me in that direction... first 2 pulls have yielded ~1.9g spice from 200g mhrb... decided to stray from LazyMan's timing & do the 3rd pull overnight, we'll see what turns up tomorrow evening... so far, real impressed with the results... i did get a little sloppy with the baster & got a bit of junk in the first pull, but i'm chalking that up as a rookie mistake... the second pull was clean, and produced very nice white crystals with just a tinge of yellow here & there... it was the larger of the 2 pulls as well, at 1.2g...

one thing i did notice, as well, was that with the first pull, i used a fan in the evap stage as suggested in the tek... this did seem to have an adverse effect on the crystallization... i'd recommend maybe loosely covering the evap pan with a paper towl so as to keep the blown air from directly impacting the solvent... of course i'm feeling pretty strongly that a little patience would pay off, & it would probably be best to just forgo the fan altogether...

looking forward to learning a bit more here, & hoping to have some more positive results to share soon...

Welcome to the Nexus!!

Glad to have you join us now

That sounds like a good yield so far, I would do at least 2 more pulls maybe 3, and have the next ones indeed overnight or longer. Also regarding the junk that you pulled, a simple sodium carbonate wash will take care of that easily.

Curious about how it all turns out! See ya

Welcome to the dmt-nexus!

Happy to hear things went well!

I will reccomend always doing a double decant when using a turkey baster, it's really hard not to get any plant matter when sucking up the naphtha. So I always use 2 jars when I decant, the first one you don't have to be sooo careful because any plant matter you get will sink to the bottom of the jar making it easy to remove just the clean naphtha and put it into your clean freeze precip container (or evap container)

And the less naphtha you use per pull the better, I skip the evap step all together and put it straight into the freezer and always yield a good amount.

Have fun!

thanks for the welcome, and the advice... the double decant trick has me kicking myself, that should have been a no-brainer... i'm looking forward to experimenting with freeze precip, just gotta clear a little room in the icebox first...

i ended up yielding just under 3 grams total, and the spice itself was wonderful... i'm currently running a second extraction, and having some problems... switched from Kleen-Strip vm&p to Crown (availability issues) and am finding that the Crown takes considerably more time to evap, and the crystals are not nearly as beautiful... won't make that mistake again... although the end result in the spice may be the same, i do see myself in the near future getting fairly obsessive about creating the most beautiful crystals i can... after all, if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right...

again, thanks for the welcome, and the general atmosphere of friendliness that pervades this joint... that's refreshing to feel in the cold space of ze interwebs...