Whew... It took me a while to catch up here. Coupla thoughts, first lead then something far more interesting:
1) I've played french horn for 20 something years now. Damn thing's made of brass. The mouthpiece is silver plated brass with some nicks which means brass is all up on my lips and in my mouth. When I pull my hand out of the bell it's always discolored from the hot moist air, sweat and whatever reaction takes place with my skin on the metal. I'm sure there's more peanut butter in my horn that Pb, but even if there was a trace amount I wouldn't panic. I've probably ingested more Pb from water or even just from when it was the additive for gas. Remember that? There's basically no lead-free place on the planet thanks to us filtering it through a combustion engine and shooting it up into the atmo out our tail pipes.
All I'm saying is I just can't see how the relatively low heat for vaporizing purposes could cause any significant amount of metal to oxidize off or whatever to become free in the air and then into our lungs. Maybe if you applied a certain kind of solvent to the metal... But I really don't know about these things. I slept through chemistry many years ago. I consider it to be generally safe (just like sleeping through chemistry
), much like how I trust thousands of years of human use of a substance (WAY better than any FDA study for safety and side-effects for sure) to be generally safe.
2) What has me more interested now is the question flouris posed a couple pages back:
flouris said:
Question - what do you guys use to get the herb out of your stems after its been vaped?
I thought we could share our tip maintenance tips here. I'll start of with my ways, which I've refined with practice (often daily
) for several years now. I'm open to suggestions that may improve on my system as well.
I generally tap the tip on the side of a container. Think of trying to knock something sticky off a spoon when you're cooking and then scale it down to a small stem. When I got started with an original Aromazap back in the day, I would tap the tip straight down onto a hard surface (hold vertically, tip down and drop from a couple inches above surface). Eventually this caused the tip to recede into the nylon, a tiny bit with each tap. It was effective in dislodging the ABV material, but may have knocked out some perfectly vaporizable material prematurely.
The ABV is less sticky thanks to the vaporization and generally falls out relatively easily with a side tap. Whatever doesn't readily fall out can be hit again. When no more will tap out, I give it a little "stir" with a plastic toothpick (floss on one end), hit it again and tap. Repeat until all ABV falls out (well, minus just a tiny bit). By "stir" I mean move the material around by gently poking the pick around in the tip, usually along the outside edge. The point of stirring is to expose new surface area to the heat. Once the stem is fairly clear, I gently blow it out into my ABV recycle bin (for cooking... which is awesome, send me your ABV if you don't want it!
).
As to the grind, I like mine to be relatively fine and I often "cure" it by keeping it in the grinder while it sits on top of my zap for a bit (maybe an hour) and then give it a final grind.
I've also recently begun using an ethanol bath for the tip of the tooty and have adopted a habit of regularly (sort of) rotating my tips from use to ethanol and back. I'm very new to tincture extraction and fairly new to cooking and wish I would have started both earlier. I love vapor for a variety of reasons, but there are many great ways to enjoy and vapor was just the start of the alternative to smoking methods that I learned about. I still prize vapor for many, many reasons, but cooking and capsulizing has serious merit, especially for medicinal users.
Which brings me to my question: Are there any dangers to consuming the ethanol that has had brass sitting in it for extended periods of time? Should I not leave the brass tip in the ethanol for more than ... 1 night or something?
Thanks and I look forward to any tips y'all can share.
So Im guessing it wasnt *that* hairy.
