Serious question, tell me if I'm an idiot though, acetone for extraction?

So, many a moon ago, when I was just a wee midget I read that acetone was used for hash extractions. I’m now somewhat curious to whether or not this is a stupid thing to do. I’m about to go do some research on it, but I wanted to throw it out there. I pretty much use it to clean everything, so that’s pretty much why my brain posed the question. What do you guys think? Am I being an idiot for even thinking about it?

pulls a lot of color and other not so desireables on crude extract.

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It does? I’m reading this just now.

Acetone tends to dissolve a lot of various plastics and rubbers that are generally used for sealing. It also tends to evaporate at a faster rate (than ethanol) at room temperature. I’m not sure of the safety factor but I’d guess that acetone is more dangerous to our health. Ethanol is a great solvent (especially at lower temperatures) to use for cannabinoid extractions and so it generally seems to be the better choice.

I’ve used acetone for small runs to make THCa crystals but that’s the limit of my knowledge.

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acetone(propanone) is not the same as acetonitrile

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We used acetone to make crude back in the day. It’s on the FDA’s GRAS list so it’s fairly safe…in general :). It definitely pulls undesirables but as with everything, the colder the better. And it does recover faster than ethanol.

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Yeah, I figured after reading a bit more. Found some other articles. Most likely gonna stay with the etho, doesn’t hurt to be curious about things though. Thanks for the replies all of you.

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Would you say it pulls more undesirables than etho? I ask because I had the hardest time getting the water solubles out of my bf in the beginning when using iso and acetone, so for some reason I thought maybe it wouldn’t pick up the water solubles?

This might have answered my question for me.

Edit: Always remember, safety first!

back in the 70’s the iso 2 machine.
you had 3 choices iso,acetone or everclear
for solvents. i chose iso or everclear. others used
acetone. dark oils from any of them. flavor wise
were about the same. hope this helps
Lrus007

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Have to degum the crude. That’s the biggest difference

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Biggest issue is attacking most gaskets. Make sure to check compatibility! Your options are very limited.

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personally i cant stand the smell of acetone, i usually dont care about solvent smells, i just mask up, but something about acetone makes my stomach churn, more than anything else ive encountered

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Hexane :nauseated_face:

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As mentioned above, acetone grabs a bunch of chlorophyll

I used to do it up at our lab in the hills because acetone was more readily available and we used the crude to make distillate anyway. We used a mix of etoh and acetone. It pulled higher yields, was very dark, and absolutely had to be degummed and winterized. But overall we ended up going with it because for our purposes it worked better. Now that I’m using a centrifuge and -40 ethanol, obviously there’s less preprocessing, and I like that too. Just depends on your needs. But don’t be afraid of acetone, in general it isn’t that dangerous, especially if you have proper ventilation, just like methanol

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Using acetone as a winterizing solvent works great. Combine it with a little pentane and it forms a nice azeotrope.

Curious that it’s good as a winterization solvent, considering that iso is worse than ethanol, I’d figure acetone would be worse since it’s more polar. Is it better because ketones have lower affinity for waxes than alcohols?

I suppose knowing some broad functionality of the waxes might be helpful.

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Really? That’s not consistent with my experience that it dissolves wax easier than ethanol does.

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@Neutral @MagisterChemist

I made a lot of absolute for omicrons using acetone winterized BHO. It really seemed to work better than ethanol, but I could be suffering from a bit of nostalgia.

Waxes seemed to drop out quicker and at warmer temps during winterization, and it seemed to dissolve concretes a lot quicker than alcohols. It was difficult to purge, but that’s where the pentane came in handy.

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