There are a bazillion ways to dewax effectively. Here is a run I just did. My process this month will utilize counter current seperation later in the refinement chain which will use hexane, methanol, and water. So this month for dewaxing I went to methanol which really goes to town on pulling out the waxes and DNA and gunk. This month the added benefit is that the compound is then already in methanol and counter current seperation of the terpenes and such can proceed without an intermediate step.
Here is the steps I used this month for dewaxing:
- disolve the compound in pure methanol. Let sit in freezer at -7C overnight.
- I first put a layer of alumina into the Büchner funnel and packed it then packed a small layer of silica gel 60 to use as a simple filtration media. Silica gel can form a colloidal with methanol which can allow some to pass but this is of no concern here because of the later refinements which will remove any gel beads if they do pass the filter. Silica gel when packed is effective as a filter. Here it is before the vacuum was applied and the column was packed. I use a handheld massage wand to vibrate the powder under vacuum and it becomes level and tightly packed then. No protection for the gel is needed as this is a filtration mode only.
- I pull it all through with a chemical duty diaphragm pump set on a low vacuum. The filter loads up fast with wax and the solvent passes very slowly as the wax builds up on top of the gel. It is easy to boil the methanol inside the filter with too much vacuum so only just enough vacuum was applied to keep the stuff running.
No sand layer is needed on top of the gel to prevent disturbing the surface when pouring the compound in because this is a filtration. So the top becomes a bit uneven and the gel mixes a bit with the alumina.
- Flush the column with pure methanol. Keep pulling until the column is dry (15 minutes or so). Tweezers then easily recover the wax components from the filter top. As a first step this is hyper easy to do.
Here is the last of the methanol being pulled down through the filter column.
Final results. The more stuff I can pull out at each step the closer to absolute purity I get. The waxes I will refine seperately into very pure stuff (it is like lotion feeling).
The waxes can act as an anti oxidant if you add them back in at the right stage of refinement but this is not the plan this month.
