Alright, I tried my first extraction and it went horribly wrong.
I got the orange oil and calcium hydroxide, but the hard part was drying the cactus. Where I live, dried cactus is considered a preparation and is illegal so I had to try to dry it myself which failed, basically all the cactus went black and a lot of it looked like it had mold on it; took about a week for it to dry in total. I would have used a food dehydrator but we don't have one. So I figured this would be a practice extraction with no intention of consuming since the mold issue worried me.
The steps went fine, I got to one of the last steps where you put the vinegar in with the orange oil and mix it. Which I did and left it for an hour, came back and it had seperated but instead of having 2 layers, the vinegar on bottom and orange oil on top, I had 3 layers.
the orange oil was on top, which is where it should have been, but then the middle layer was like a white really dense liquid and the bottom layer was a milky white layer that seemed to have little bits of egg in it. I got an oral syringe and tried to pull out the middle layer which I thought to be vinegar then placed on a glass dish. it was thick as fuck, sucking it up into the oral syringe was a chore. That's when I gave up and threw everything out.
I then tried to do the 69ron tek with a FRESH cactus, , tkaing out the spines and then talkng out the core, putting everything in blender.
Seperating the lumpy bits of the cactus from the orange oil was too hard, nothing would go through the filter so i just used all of it.
Again everything went fine up until the vinegar into the orange oil part, for the second time I got 3 layers, this time the orange oil was clearly on the top and vinegar in the middle, then white layer down the bottom.
I decided to just let it all evaperate, then when it's all done ill filter it, put in some more vinegar and hopefully then it will work properly.
does anyone know why I might be getting 3 layers? i've used my 2 practise cacti and it hasn't worked so well so unsure if i want to try the 69ron tek again on my final cacti. I was hoping to get it all done by the 31st but it looks like it's not gona happen.
please help!