Converting HCl/Fumarate Tryptamines to Freebase?

[furryfreek]

Hi all, I've been lurking here a while but this is my first post.


I recently obtained some 4-HO-DET HCl which I'm particularly interested in smoking/vaporising but I'm not entirely sure what'd be the best method to freebase it. I've read up a bit on the subject (though mostly in relation to cocaine) and I'm thinking the cleanest method would be to dissolve the HCl in water and stir whilst slowly adding dilute ammonia solution (~5%). Hopefully this would cause the freebase to visibly form as a water-insoluble solid. Once further drops of ammonia seem to cause no further solids to form, I'd need to extract the freebase somehow. The simplest way would be a coffee filter or something, but I fear that if I'm working with small amounts (say ~50mg, which will most likely be the case as I'll be keeping most of the 4-HO-DET in HCl form for long-term storage) I'd loose a relatively high proportion of the product. Alternatively, I guess I could mix in a non-polar solvent, let it settle, syringe/pipette it off and evaporate. Unfortunately though, I don't know of a suitable non-polar solvent that is easily available where I live (unadulterated naphtha, for example, is neigh impossible to find here)


Failing that, there is of course the slightly more ghetto baking powder ina spoon method which does seem somewhat easier, and although the end product may not be so pure, I'm not too fussed about that unless contaminants are likely to pose some sort of health risk. The one problem I have with this method is that I'm not 100% sure what sort of soda I should be using. I'm pretty sure I should be using sodium carbonate (this would certainly be the case for coke) but I've read other posts relating to DMT extraction which contradict this and explicitly mention sodium bicarbonate. Is there some reason I should be using bicarb, or have I just stumbled across too many fellow noobs posting stuff they don't understand?


Although I'm particularly interested in 4-HO-DET, I've kept the thread title fairly generic as I guess this info would be applicable to most tryptamines and not a huge number of people are going to be interested/experienced in this particular compound out of the many tryptamines available.

 

[perpetualdawn]

Welcome to bluelight furryfreak!

Yeah personally I'd go with the ghetto baking soda method, because you won't loose any yield to speak of that way, and ammonia is awful stuff. Sure you're smoking some baking soda along with your freebase, but so what right? I don't think anything harmful in the baking soda would even vaporize anyways. I've done this a bunch of times to convert DPT HCl to freebase, and it works really well. I use plain old baking soda out of the cupboard, so sodium bicarbonate. I'm not a chemist and can't advise you if sodium carbonate is a better choice, but I don't see why it would be.

Never tried it with 4-HO-DET.

 

[furryfreek]

Nice one. If bicarbs good for DPT, it should be fine for anything else (I think most of my confusion is just from reading too many different teks). Plus I've already got a load of bicarb in the cupboard, so I'll probably have a go with that.

 

[tired of crap]

I am not sure of the solubilty of 4 oh det in non-polar solvents but for dmt one can convert dmt salts to freebase via the following

add equal amounts of product and sodium carbonate (sodium bicarbonate baked in oven at ~400 C for 2 hours) with minimal water, stir stir stir and dry (using hair dryer on low)

add a minimal amount of acetone to the above dried mixture. filter acetone. repeat x 2 (just to be sure you get it all... why not right).

evaporate acetone with freebased dmt (hopefully this would work with 4 oh det as well)

perhaps this will help

cheers
tired

 

[sekio]

best way to get tryptamines to freebase form is by
1. dissolve in distilled water
2. add 10% sodium carbonate solution to adjust pH past the pKa by about ~2. probably ph 8-10
3. extract with dichloromethane or chloroform (MEK?), ether if you can get it and your tryptamine is sol in it.
4. evaporate

 

[furryfreek]

Okay, it's been a while since my first post but I thought I'd report back on my findings so far. Shortly after the OP, I tried to freebase 4-ho-det using the "ghetto method", but it failed pretty badly. I think I added a bit too much water and as soon as the water was added to the 4-ho-det and bicarb, the solution started to darken somewhat (the 4-ho-det hcl was originally light grey in color; no where near as dark as the solution turned.) After heating the solution to boiling point whilst stirring and leaving it to settle, a brown residue had formed on the bottom of the spoon and a film of iridescent oily stuff formed atop the water. I scraped up the residue and oily film separately, though once gathered together, both seemed to be the same dark brown/black gooey substance, so I mixed them both together. Before it had completely dried I managed to deposit most of the goo onto a rizla and used it to roll a rollie. At first I was disappointed that I had yielded goo (I was expecting something more... solid) but I remembered reading about 4-aco-det freebase degrading into goo which turned out to be mostly 4-ho-det when lab tested, so I retained some cautious optimism that the goo could be active. I waited a day to make sure it had all dried out, but the substance was inactive, at least when smoked.

Yesterday, I received an order of 5-meo-dalt, which I'm also interested in smoking, but is also in hcl form so I decided to repeat the same process as above. This time however, things went a bit differently. I added less water this time and noticed a chemical reaction starting to take place immediately, causing the solution to bubble and froth up somewhat. This sort of surprised me as I didn't think you could freebase with bicarb without heat, so I heated it up in any case (though this time I didn't take it right up to boiling point) which seemed to speed up the reaction. This time however, I yielded lumps of off-white (slightly green/cyan) solid. Now, I haven't tried smoking my (hopefully) freebased 5-meo-dalt yet, and that'll be the only way to know for sure whether it worked, but does that sound right? Particularly with regard to the immediate chemical reaction (i.e. could some other unexpected reaction be taking place.) If so, then why would pretty much the same procedure fail with the 4-ho-det? (my best guess now is that 4-ho-det simply hates water and/or heat and got destroyed in the process)

I'll be testing the 5-meo-dalt soon enough, so I'll report back then. After that, I'll probably try out some of the other methods you guys have mentioned.