Well, it's like this:
Extract freebase DMT from plant material. Place freebase in scales, weigh (using cheap plastic slide balance with markings to 25mg accuracy), add about the same weight of tartaric acid (possibly slightly less is better), add water and mix until base moves into aqueous acidic solution, then evaporate on a pyrex dish. Crystals produced, if done rapidly with fan assistance, are radial pinwheels, if done slowly - without fan assistance - are hexagonal/needles and tend to grow quite long. SWIM is waiting for a slow crystallisation so adequately large crystals can be imaged.
IV bioassay proves tartrate salts are active. SWIM tried to make neutral salts by neutralising with NaOH but had a lot of trouble getting precisely pH 6, hence a lot of sodium tartrate was in the first run (makes a hot burny head feeling). Second run SWIM is doing without neutralising. If a method for separating dmt tartrate and tartaric acid can be found this will make things a lot easier. Or perhaps a method might be suggested. Sadly SWIM can't measure precise weights and all that jazz, he's too poor to have good scales or glassware. Recrystallisation purification is a definite possible method of resulting in optimal purity. Probably a week or more to do that though. When SWIM has excess he will start playing with more purifications.
Some SWIM with good equipment and pure synthetic dmt might be able to illuminate us on it's physical properties, solubility in water, ethanol and acetone, mp/bp, this stuff would be nice to know. Certainly it appears to be quite readily soluble in water.
edit:
oh, the crystals are optically active too, very obvious with rapid evaporation, look a lot like pseudo HCl crystals.
