# Anybody with experience distilling saf from camphor?



## LoneStarHopeful (Jul 27, 2022)

Does anybody have any experience distilling safrole from brown camphor oil? I have a sample order of the stuff coming from China that is _supposed_ to contain 27% safrole. I'm currently getting together the parts to build a heavy duty aspirator as my vacuum source. Continuous duty pump that is rated at 16 GPM, I figure that coupled with ice water will do 20 mmHg easy, and down to 10 mmHg should be doable. Anybody seeing any issues with my plan? I intend on rigging up a vacuum gauge on the vac line, and using the chart found in Chromic's "Distillation of safrole" guide so that I'm not flying blind, but from the few conversations I've found online it seems like some people are having a lot of trouble pulling it out of the camphor oil? Any advice or warnings on potential pitfalls would be appreciated. 

From there my plan is to reflux with KOH to convert to isosafrole, and I'm still doing research and figuring out the best method to go from isosafrole to MDP2P. Any advice on that front would also be appreciated. Right now I'm leaning towards the oxone method, simply for how easy it is to source the required chemicals, but I'm definitely open to higher yield suggestions.


----------

