You should search about distilling nicotine, there are a couple of points besides the toxic hazard--the free base (pH about 8 or so) is obtained from steam distillation of *alkaline* tobacco extracts. nicotine salts (nicotine citrate, nicotine malic acid salt) are not able to be distilled as far as I can tell. Most simple extracts seem to be somewhat acidic and thus don't contain much free base nicotine. BTW if you are going to mess with this I would advise having a large container with some vinegar water in it to throw stuff into if things don't go as planned--that way everything which might have free nicotine is converted to the relatively safe salt form. In any case distilling nicotine is nuts unless you can somehow do it outside on a breezy day, wearing gloves.
Nicotine Extraction Experiment
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well, I'm not planning on fractionating off the nicotine, so putting it through a pot still in small batches (with some added glycerin to stop the pot running dry at >100C) shouldn't necessarily pose an insuperable hazard - the danger point will be at 247C when the free nicotine evaporates, but the distillate is going to be a relatively weak solution overall. I have a laminar flow cabinet that I can reverse the airflow on to extract rather than blow, but keeping a bucket of acid to hand sounds like a good idea though, just to be on the safe side (as well as to decontaminate the condenser afterwards.)
I grant you, the base yield will be a pretty unknown quantity, and the process may not be especially efficient, but there's only one way to find out. From what I've read, it's shouldn't be difficult to crack it with ammonia to improve the yield if it's unacceptably low.
I grant you, the base yield will be a pretty unknown quantity, and the process may not be especially efficient, but there's only one way to find out. From what I've read, it's shouldn't be difficult to crack it with ammonia to improve the yield if it's unacceptably low.
This is interesting. I am waiting for my first e cigarette to arrive in the mail but I have been thinking about how to make e juice at home. Just some thoughts on it I havent tried it but take it for what its worth. Acid content of saliva is about 7.4. So litmus paper and lemon juice to make water acidic to 7.4. The mouth is about 98.6 degrees F so heat the water to a constant 98.6 on the stove and drop in some pouches of snuss. An average chew lasts about 30 to 40 minutes so let it sit at acidic level of 7.4 temperature of 98.6 constant on the stove for about that long. That should extract from the snuss all that would be extracted if you chewed it. Then you might try to find a way to filter the juice to sort of purify it a bit. What do you think?
drewterry - it really is not necessary to duplicate in-mouth conditions so accurately.
My thoughts on the issue in general:
I think soaking in water and PG/VG (and perhaps a little edible alcohol - ethanol) - i.e. in the base juice - is the best approach to using mouth tobacco for creating a vaping juice. Other forms of tobacco leave the question of concentation too uncertain. Even so, one needs to calculate the solution volume carefully, allowing for some loss through retention and evaporation. Gentle warming might speed up the process but remember that this will lead to greater evaporation. Anything further, such as distilling could be very dangerous.
The extraction, while gaining some flavour, will also gain gums and various other chemicals which may not be healthy, even if less harmful than when burnt; also, this will lead to the atomiser clogging sooner, although it can perhaps be cleaned reasonably well.
While we can buy nicotine juice that is the best thing to do. If not, extraction from nicotine patches is the easiest, most effective and safest approach, although care is still needed to choose the correct volume of solution to involve no concentration/dilution. The patches have a known dose of nicotine and are designed to leach it in water and little else (one would not expect the 'glue' to dissolve in water).
My thoughts on the issue in general:
I think soaking in water and PG/VG (and perhaps a little edible alcohol - ethanol) - i.e. in the base juice - is the best approach to using mouth tobacco for creating a vaping juice. Other forms of tobacco leave the question of concentation too uncertain. Even so, one needs to calculate the solution volume carefully, allowing for some loss through retention and evaporation. Gentle warming might speed up the process but remember that this will lead to greater evaporation. Anything further, such as distilling could be very dangerous.
The extraction, while gaining some flavour, will also gain gums and various other chemicals which may not be healthy, even if less harmful than when burnt; also, this will lead to the atomiser clogging sooner, although it can perhaps be cleaned reasonably well.
While we can buy nicotine juice that is the best thing to do. If not, extraction from nicotine patches is the easiest, most effective and safest approach, although care is still needed to choose the correct volume of solution to involve no concentration/dilution. The patches have a known dose of nicotine and are designed to leach it in water and little else (one would not expect the 'glue' to dissolve in water).
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Your conclusion about a simple water extraction of nicotine from the patch as a way to avoid some of the other crap seems reasonable in theory as a starting point. Although you have a known quantity of nicotine, I doubt you are going to be able to leach it all out since the strongest ones which have about 140mg only deliver 21mg over a 24 hour period. So I think it's reasonable to assume that you're still not going to know the quantity of nicotine that it is yielding. Then you're probably going to have a large volume of water to deal with relative to the unknown quantity of nicotine you've just extracted. Everything evaporates even below boiling temperature, so while trying to dry up the water you're going to lose a lot of the nicotine. Now you need to figure out how to get the nicotine out of the water. Maybe you could cut up a patch and soak it in a few ml's of pg and hope nothing bad ends up in it.
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Okay, I've tested the first batch of my juice, and here are my first impressions with details:
firstly the recipe:
10g curly cut pipe tobacco + 20ml alcohol (75%) left to soak for 24hrs with occasional agitation. Then I pressed the juice out of it with a garlic press, resulting in a dark mahogany-coloured juice (with a rather powerful smell!) This was then filtered through a grade 2 (8um) filter paper.
So, assuming a theoretical maximum of 3% nicotine in the tobacco, the MAXIMUM possible nicotine content of this brew would be 300mg at a concentration of 15mg/ml - even twice that would be a perfectly safe juice strength, so I had no qualms about testing it.
I then mixed the 15ml of the juice I got out (5ml was lost in the mash/ filter paper,) with 5ml glycerine, to produce a still very dark liquid, and loaded a cart.
FLAVOUR: quite mild tobacco taste - that surprised me given the smell. With a better nicotine content, it would be ideal for adding flavourings to.
THROAT HIT: fairly mild, but definitely there. A subsequent test with the water-based brew (same recipe, but with water instead of alcohol,) had much less, so I think Taukimada is right that it's mostly the alcohol giving this.
NICOTINE RESPONSE: very weak. I hadn't vaped for 3-4 hours before testing this, to allow the craving to build up. It took a fair bit of chain-vaping to get the satisfaction I'd have got from a few puffs of 36mg French Pipe (though I guess that's to be expected.)
CONCLUSION: it would do in an emergency, or for occasions where I just want to chain-vape all day practicing my smoke rings without ODing, but it's too weak to be very satisfying. And being rather coarsely cut, it's difficult to soak it with any less volume of liquid (I originally put 10ml in, but it only just wetted it, with no pooling of liquid, so I doubled that.)
I tested the water-based solution too, and apart from the throat-hit, it seems almost identical.
In view of this, I've doubled the quantity of leaf in my 'bee tobacco' test jars, and I'll leave that one another 24 hours before I test it. This is a much looser and drier product, so it's taken up all the pooled juice, but hopefully it will press out a higher strength juice.
Anyway, this is a baseline - hopefully things can only get better. I'll try making a tobacco smoothie to aid extraction if I can find a cheap blender anywhere (I don't much fancy the idea of using the one we use for food
)The colour does concern me though - does anyone know if juice pigments hasten atomizer wear/gunging? I've half a memory I came across a thread discussing that, and that the consensus was that very colourful liquids were best avoided, but I can't find it now. This juice is as dark as strong tea, and I think distillation would be the only way to improve that.
Personally, I think you're playing with fire. If one of you is accidentally successful in extracting near pure nicotine, it could be fatal. (Only my personal opinion.)
I don't think accidental extraction of (nearly) pure nicotine is likely, though it's not too hard with simple distillation to recover a solution of all the volatiles with boiling points up to and including the nicotine (fortunately that includes the solvent water/alcohol.)
The only way to extract pure nicotine is to fractionate it, or to find a solvent that dissolves nicotine, but nothing else from the tobacco, and then evaporate it away to leave the nicotine (AFAIK there isn't one.)
I have to confess, although I'm continuing to experiment for my own interest, I'm not going to post any more details about my extraction methodology - I see too many scary misunderstandings of chemical processes and measurement units among some of the aspiring mad scientists at large on the forum (no offence intended to anyone in particular,) to be confident it mightn't end up getting an enthusiastic newbie killed. That has lately tempered my enthusiasm to engage in threads like this one rather.
There is a technology that originated in Russia in the 50's Live water / Dead water. By the use of electrolysis the water is separated into two streams Alkaline and Acidic. The Acidic water can be 3.0 - 3.2 Ph using a medical grade unit. A home unit could produce 4.0 - 4.5 Ph . The theory is to drink the alkaline water and use the acidic water as an astringent.
Nick O'Teen, it might be better to share most of your info since other people that are determined will hurt themselves faster without good info then with?
Just a thought
Just a thought
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