Okay, SWIM has acquired a quantity of bark, he is not entirely sure it is obtusifolia, but the bark texture is right. the odd thing is that it is bearing pods at the moment and SWIM was under the impression that the tree didn't flower until october or so... so, for these experiments, the stuff that comes out at this point is a bit of an unknown. It could have tryptamines in it, maybe it won't. There is a fairly significant possibility it will have *something* in it
SWIM mixed up turpentine and methylated spirits, and discovered that they are in fact immiscible. ah well, this is an experiment. SWIM happens to know that naptha is miscible in ethanol, so perhaps that will be done in future. The mixture was dried out to a certain extent, swim doesn't know how well, so it's probably not dry. the plant material isn't dry anyway. so swim isn't following his experiment properly... *spank*
He's also using heat rather than vacuum... He rigged up a cork for the cooking container with a metal tube and some silicone tubing to vent off the vapours away from the working space.
The solvent being miscible or not may not make any difference - one advantage is that the alcohol fraction will be clearly visible as to its volume.
The bark had a strong red colour, and the alcohol turned reddish, and the turpentine is gradually turning milky and yellow. He is heating the mixture together to speed extraction.
The colour is being quickly drawn out of the bark, and as the mixture bubbles, every now and then some kind of gunk bubbles up and then dissolves into the turpentine. If the mixture is shaken up it clouds up a lot, I presume this is the defatting taking place. Turpentine certainly seems to suck a lot of junk up...
Well, anyway, there's the preliminaries for the first process run, albeit rather modified from the original, but the same in principle. In future, I think xylene or toluene would be much better solvents, and should remain miscible which is preferable. Also, methanol would probably be better too. This mixture would also dry much more effectively than ethanol and turps.
Oh, on this run, a lot more turps than alcohol was used, just seemed like the thing to do, maximise defatting.
The solvents most certainly are extracting stuff out, but I suppose that is to be expected...