So I tried EW's mini A/B tek again for the second time, this time scaled it down by half using 50g ACRB. Ended with a very clean looking spice at the end, completely white crystals, and some translucent goo/crystal mixture. The beautiful smell of new sneakers gave me the great feeling of success. MY only problem was that I harvested about 12mg of white crystal and 30mg of the goo.

I knew there was spice present after doing my initial pulls because I could smell it even over top of the naphtha. When I did my backsalt and then based it, the spice start crashing out like it was suppose to and the water was full of it. I was really happy at that point and I figured I have a good yield and was expecting somewhere at least around 500mg.

Is it possible that I should not scale down the naphtha and instead use 50ml instead of 25ml. Would that make a difference for being able to pull out more spice? It seems like I am not getting it in to my NPS, because the water was cloudy, but my NPS didn't get cloudy even after evaoping half.

I was pulling using hot naphtha, should I be keeping the whole solution warm as well?

I think there is still lots in there, so I am going to keep trying.

One of the things you should have done is reduce down your initial pulls via evaporation to get an indication of how saturated they were. Then you might have had a better idea of whether to progress to the next step. Do you still have the original soup?

50ml of solvent is about perfect for each pull. I 'usually' will do 75ml for the first pull. If its heavily saturated and thick, i'll do an additional 75ml pull followed by two 50 ml pulls.

Sometimes when you do an A/B cleanup you'll precipitate a white crystal that will float around at the top of the base layer for a bit. This isn't DMT, I've grabbed a little sample out and dried it, tried to burn it etc.

You can try to warm the whole thing up and take a couple of fresh pulls.

Have you tested that you've reached the correct pH points in each process?

The turning into white happens at fairly low yields too. At that stage it is no good indicator for how much yield it will give later. I too had an early too happy feeling once, about the whitening

Yes I still do have the original as well as the mini A/B. I didn't think of that, what I should be looking for at that point cloudy solvent? I did start to smell spice over the solvent smell, so i figured that was a great sign.



Hmm, when I originally tried the tek, I used 50ml as it requires. This time around I halved everything. I was thinking I should have maybe stuck with the 50ml of NPS to make it easier for the spice to make the jump.



I did have that layer in-between the basic solution and the NPS as well. I thought it was probably fats or some other unwanted extras and left it alone. I did also have, what I figured was , white spice completely saturating and floating around in the water once I basified.



This is what I was thinking, and using more NPS of course. I did heat my NPS up nice and hot before pulling, but the solution was cool. I was thinking it might not make much difference how hot the NPS is if it cools before pulling it out, so perhaps I should be warming the entire solution.



I did not. I do have litmus paper now, so I will check with any further work I do. One thing I am kind of confused about is the PH I should have during A/B. I have read different numbers all the way from 2 to 4 and in between. It didn't matter much before because I had no way of checking, so I just went of the tek ratios given and assumed they were close enough.
I am under the impression baseification stage should be at about 12.8.

I didn't want to hear that haha. I am not done yet, I will try to pull more out and see what happens.

What kind of yields have you seen with ACRB highest and lowest?

As for heating the whole thing up, that's fine as that's what I do, but you definitely will extract a lot of fats with the extra heat. I use a hot plate with a stir bar that constantly keeps it mixed. I get tons of fats but my yields I feel are maximized.

Yields vary greatly, from person to person, as well as from bark to bark. Sometimes it might be from the tek they are using, inexperience doing teks all the way to what time of year the bark was harvested. So to answer your question about range, from +2% all the way down to 0%. I myself haven't quite hit the 2% mark but get close most of the time. I've had very sub par results as well, again a lot of it has to do with bark quality. Really doesn't matter how effective/efficient your techniques are if you start off with poor quality bark.

Good that your keeping all solutions, you can always rework them to see if you missed anything.
Try not to deviate from whatever tek you use, this is where I see a lot of people running into problems, the ratios given by the tek are there for a reason. Check your ph often now that you have a method to do so. 12+ for basification, 2-4 is a good range for your acid stage, just try to keep it 4 or lower.

Good luck friend and be safe!

Gotta agree with spaced..

My preference is to shoot for 2-2.5 in the acid step and 12-12.5 in the base step. You can't go wrong with those figures.

Do yourself a favor and grab a cheap electronic pH meter from our good auction site.

In relation to the 50ml pulls, that's completely fine. I only use 75ml when I know the ACRB is really high yielding.

Happy extracting.