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Fucked up ephedra steam extraction

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place:
SWIM hate those plantshit  ;)

Friday, SWIM tried to make a steam extraction of ephedra 8%. After trying steam extraction 350g ephedra 8%  he learned that it is important that the flasks are big enough :-(  Max 50-100g ephedra 8% i 300mL water in a 1l. flask.

After the first accident he tried again with only 50g in 300mL water. The system worked fine, but the result was only water, no freebase ephederine. There was one problem. How can SWIM make sure that the water + plant is base? pH 14. He tried to add a solution of 100g NaOH in 500mL water, but he couldn't read the liquid with his pH papers, because the ephedra brown plantshit coloured his papers totally brown, so there was no colour to read after.

Is there anyone who can help?

DrLucifer:
All your problems can be solved with practice and a digital pH meter,  :P  $100 will buy you a good meter with a 0-14 range, maybe even a 12 month warranty!
May i suggest that you start small and work your way up, dont want to be wasting any more herb!  ;)

Bandil:
Try filtering through a glass frittet funnel (or a normal funnel w. filter paper) a small sample and read the pH of that...

biotechdude:
he learned that it is important that the flasks are big enough

Indeed, you DONT want to overload the flask.  NEVER go beyond half full otherwise foam and bumping will FUCK your distillate.  One drop of crud can kill purity. 

Swix uses these ratio using proper distillation glassware - 100g powdered plant, ~600mLs water, and adds the caustic powder directly (and slowly) with heavy stirring.  This sludge turns out to be about 800mLs in total.  This is added to a 2Ltr rbf.

but he couldn't read the liquid with his pH papers, because the ephedra brown plantshit coloured his papers totally brown, so there was no colour to read after.

EXACTLY, and wally world digi pHers wont cut it either and the crud dirties the membrane and gives unreliable readings.

To rectify - when you have the well mixed plant/plain water slurry...Swix adds raw caustic powder in sprinkles and it starts to get gummy and black and a bit stinky.  You keep adding caustic until the thick solution THINS out again and it is really black and almost makes u puke cos it smells really strong and fishy/basey.

Now, just boiling the flask and generating internal steam CAN work using vacuum and a vigourous controlled boil.  However, the volume will go down, and if using 100g of 8%, the 400mLs or so that u could bring over without running dry, probably wont be enough to carry all the goodies.  Also, as the volume decreases, more microscopic crud will come over.

Conversely, external steam (superheated even better) will carry the freebase better.  Secondly, you can keep collecting distillate (and ALL the goodies) and the flask volume will stay the same (as long as you keep it at ~95c).

Hope that helps...

place:
NEVER go beyond half full otherwise foam and bumping will FUCK your distillate.  One drop of crud can kill purity. 

That was exactly was happened  ::)

SWIM tried to filter the liquid with lab filters, but was not possible; the brown shit simply would not go away. Even a small drop and the pH papers were fucked.

Biotechdude: SWIM used to flask, one with steam and one with plant. It was easy enough to get the oliebath in the steam flask to work, but it was pretty hard to keep the plant flask under the 100c. Every time the hot steam was bubbling up, the water and plant started to boil.

What is raw caustic?

Would it be possible to make a dH2O solution with NaOH ph 14 first, and then afterwards put the ephedra powder in? Or will the burn up all the ephedrine?

rgs, place

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