The Mash Mesh bags finally arrived! I got the 37u for dry sift and 90u for flower in the 2x3 inch size to match my plates. It will be a few days before I can make dry sift (my main goal) so I started with some Chocolope x PowerPlant flower that's been sitting in a bag with Boveda 62% for the last week or so. I broke it apart into smallish bits, packed in 3g then did a cold press/flattening to make more room and continued to fill it to about 6g then I folded the end over and cold pressed it again. Not enough to do anything more than flatten it out, if you have a gauge it shouldn't move. Then put it in a parchment pocket opened length wise and and pressed it on more parchment. The pic below is the first press, temp was roughly 220F, I gradually increased the pressure over a minute maxing out around 1666 I think? Didn't want to go to high and tear the parchment like I did before. First press/pass yield was 0.54g or 9% of 6g.
I did the second press after the chip had cooled and looks like a lot more dripping. You can see it drip out and and the sizzle sound is actually a bit loud like putting a tablespoon of butter on a heated frying pan. Yield for this pass was 0.45g or 7.5% bringing the total to 16.5%.
The third press was minimal, only about 0.12g or 2% and looked to be lower quality so I stopped there and didn't take a pic. I'll make another post later today when I'm done processing it, I should have gone to bed hours ago lol. But I will say that collection was a breeze. All the big blobs just peeled off at room temp with a dabber, no scraping and and the rest just stuck to it. The total yield is 16.5% for the quality stuff or 18.5% when you count in the third run which could be used for other things if I don't like it. For reference my QWET yield for the same batch was about ~16.5% and I usually don't go higher than 15%.
So this was my first real large pressing with it ever and using burrito tech too, I started it on a whim at 3am and took my time with it (edibles kicked in somewhere in that time frame) and got 1.11g out of 6g from 3 pressings. So I still actually have a long way to go but my point is I'm brand new to
actually making rosin (being an academic is different) and I made this stuff on a first try without much effort late at night high on edibles so once you've figured out the high pressure setup and plates and buy ALL the things you can at least hit the ground running.
Next step is dry sift, I might have some to try shortly. The bags should fit up 6-7g of dry sift but the yield from that should theoretically be more like 2.5-3g for 6g or 40-50%. I'm not sure if there will be a difference in net yield but I'll try to run both flower and dry sift to see for myself.
Edit: Just to be clear since I didn't mention it, I used the RosinWorks 3.5x2.5 inch plates mounted an a 10-ton H-press (only pressed to 5-ton) for the pressing. You should be able to get similar results with
@Joel W.'s plates just need to fold the pouch over more for maybe 2x2 and the "guide" is 1g per sq inch so you'd be able to do about 4g at a time.
