i understand, and agree, the inherited darkness, can not be measured with titration.
according to the following:
View attachment 320790
http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...-captain-black-pipe-tobacco.html#post12629847
captain black pipe tobacco 1 gm has 50 mg of nic.
so, if i am using 20 gm of the same tobacco for extraction, am i getting 1 full gm of nic. at assumption, full nic will be extracted.
assuming i am using 100ml of PG or VG, so 100mg/ml
if with your measure, 5 mg/ml ..... it means most of the nic is not extracted.
Hi. Those nicotine content figures seem unrealistic, to me. Though I suppose they could be true for certain varieties of tobacco, there is an abundance of bad information out there, in regards to nicotine. Also, expecting a 100% yield of alkaloids in any extraction is unrealistic.
There are only a few that I know of that have publicly done quite a bit of experimenting with such things. DVap, a chemist on the forums, has probably done the most. He made the first WTA extract, and there was much discussion of how much can be extracted at that time. The number that I've seen him say, several times, is about 1.2%, by weight. That's for a purified product, so I'd say the extract was probably a bit higher, with some losses in the isolation procedures.
A couple of references to that:
http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...rong-buzz-moderate-flavor-3.html#post11766972
http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...aois-towards-more-effective-e-liquid-145.html
You may find those threads to be interesting, as well as DVap's blogs.
I'm not able to tolerate the 'dirty' NET extracts, so I've done some experiments to achieve cleaner ones, hopefully with decent alkaloid content. I have not really had much success.
The second link, above, has some 'kitchen WTA extractions' in it, which use acid-base extraction methods. The problem with those is that they lose too high a percentage of alkaloids, and leave an extract with an excess of acid and/or unwanted salts that's not easy to deal with. Some seem to be fine with them, but they would irritate my airways.
The first link, above, may have a decent method. I have not tested it, as i don't have access to highly purified ethanol. Dvap tested it, and found it to be somewhat promising.
The products of those types of extraction cannot be titrated accurately, due to excess alkali/acids, and/or the nicotine not being freebased.
I have done one extraction that I could titrate with anything approaching minimal accuracy. I used an alkaline solution (sodium carbonate and water) as the extraction solvent, with ground RYO pipe tobacco. This also freebases the alkaloids. Then, I did a simple distillation to leave the tobacco gunk and sodium carbonate behind. I'm not at all sure of how much of the alkaloids may transfer to the distillate, or whether the heat decomposes them.
The distillate was very clear and aromatic, but would be extremely low concentration due to using an abundance of water, having extracted the tobacco twice. I reduced the distillate over very low heat, under a fume hood, to near dryness, and carefully mixed the resulting oily residue with thinned VG. I suspect that the alkaloids may readily evaporate in freebase form, though.
Titrating this resulted in 5mg/ml, which does not mean much, other than that it is dilute. A basic, unscientific assumption that co-extracted aromatic molecules may skew the results by 50-100%, either way, left me with little conclusion. If I assumed the titration result to be accurate, this would have been about 0.8% yield, as I recall.
The resulting liquid had a good flavor, but the flavor was too strong (and liquid too oily) at that concentration. Further diluted, to an assumed 1.67mg/ml, it was vapeable for me, and I enjoyed the flavor. I can't really tell if it has any 'active' effect, though. This was a lot of work, with no clear conclusions, but made a decent, relatively clean flavoring, with maybe a bit of alkaloids in it.
Originally Posted by CarbonThief 
