I will drop you a line soon my friend. As far as BHO, I understand the safety concerns and risks and if I ever went that route I was hoping for a closed-loop system as you mention and running it out of my shed which is detached from the house.
As for my Rosin tek, I am getting great results IMHO but I am working with a hair straightener that only goes down to 310F in a shop vice. I get really good tasting Rosin and it probably is considerably better than the terps in the BHO. The BHO I get has more of a smooth and creamy flavor profile whereas my Rosin seems to have a highly terpy Piney flavor profile typically. I am sure I could refine my tek and get it much better, but I don't really like the idea of pressing and collecting through so much because it becomes very time consuming. Perhaps it would be less time consuming if I was pressing more than a gram at a time but I don't think my setup would work for that.
Oh man that temp of your straightener is your problem. Too hot! You should never be exceeding 250f and IME I never exceed 220f. If you cannot maintain temps this low, you will get lesser quality rosin and it may be runnier/sappier and harder to collect.
A closed loop system is gonna cost you a lot of money. More than a large rosin press that would let you squish out a gram of rosin at a time, not a gram of flower! You really need to look into a 10-ton hydraulic ram based rosin press brother. Don't spend more money on solvent extraction when it will end up giving you lesser quality medicine than a good 10 ton press!
I dunno, just can't squish my trim effectively, so I still make qwet with it. Have a hard time squishing beautiful buds as well, because it feels like a crime/shame. Sometimes though, it can be fun. What I need to force myself to do is learn bubble. But the yield looks abysmal. Meh.
Definitely prefer the flavor of professionally made stuff, but I can make for about 5/gram on my own and it still costs 40-50/gram at the dumb boondock dispensaries I have at my disposal. No idea how (not rich) folks could afford that on the regular.
You need to ball up your trim with your hands - squish it tightly together prior to squishing it with no filter screen (there's a lot of empty volume inside a loosely packed collection of trim so tightly compacting it is very important to keep the resulting puck together and avoid bits of trim in your oil). If it is reasonably resinous trim, you should get good squishes this way
Make sure your trim is stored with 62% boveda packs as if not, it will be very frustrating to squish!
Yields with full melt are terribly low and even in times when I have less access to great flower (it does happen!) I have to opt for rosin. I definitely only recommend learning bubble tek for folks with a lot of patience and a very clear understanding of the yields and labor involved!
I don't grow so DIY isn't really cost effective given flower price in prohibition land. I have made some small batches of qwet, qwiso, bho, & rosin on occasion though. Really only do that when I have flower but have been concentrate dry for a while & want a change of pace. I can get dispensary quality concentrates for 30-50/g so things aren't too bad out here I suppose.
I'm contemplating squishing a little of the OG Skywalker hash I've had forever now, ha. Interested as to how different the flavor would be. May wait til my enail arrives for that project though.
I don't grow and have never grown brother, as you would guess, that never stopped me from DIY lol
Squishing hash IME loses a wonderful part of the flavor and if the hash tastes good, I suggest vaping it rather than squishing it
Vapexnails with an Evo are amazing for this purpose btw if you hash doesn't full melt!
I got a kif tumbler originally for rosin but I ended up using it for QWET. I just used flowers but it would be even better to get the good stuff off the trim and makes it easier to work with for squishing and other methods. Using bubblehash as an intermediary extract can work well too but I found the tumbler to be less labour intensive. I went with the PollenMaster but if you're handy you can build one yourself for very little. If you have easy access to dry-ice, that's probably the cheapest way. Just drop the flowers/trim and dry ice into a giant coffee tin, strap on a 180/220 micro bubblebag or screen and shake like hell over a clean flat surface.
IMO Kief (by this I mean crude dry sift - I avoid using the spelling 'kif' because this is Morrocan lingo referring to Morrocan hashmaker's unpressed, sometimes full melt headstash - because this is never what people in the West are talking about when they say 'kif') is not useful as an intermediary extraction method for rosin. Kief gets too dry too quickly and as such, is disappointing to squish. I have generally seen better yields of better rosin from the original flower than kief that came from it! Anyone who starts out with kief in rosin tek is generally going to abandon it and go back to solvents since rosin seems to get bad results with dry powder with relatively low trichome content (squishing half melt dry sift will ooze out oil on the other hand!).
This brings me to a home truth that a lot of vaporists seem to ignore. Kief made from a kief screen in a grinder or a small 1-screen kief shaker is far from just trichomes (I have read so many FC people saying that their kief is 'trichomes', if it was, it'd look like full melt, not the no-melt yellow powder they have!). This kief has perhaps slightly more trichome content than the flower it came from, but generally it is still full of contaminant (frequently containing up to ~75% ground up plant matter) when you get it under high-zoom macro. It is best to consider 'kief' in the Western sense as nothing more than the smaller granules of ground herb. Some of it is trichomes (which can be slightly more than in unscreened ground herb), most of it is plant material. Often kief is not very different in composition from the ground herb above the screen.
Also if you make dry ice sift using the above method, you will have mostly ground bud, not dry sift lol. Remember that dry ice and shaking like hell will turn even the biggest nugs into the finest powder such that the contaminant is not able to be separated from the resin (since it is all such fine granular powder!). I do not recommend dry ice sifting generally, especially not to beginners as it makes even the gentlest agitation capable of ruining your sift.
I have a friend with two scars, one on the inside of each arm. They are about 4.5 inches in length, both of them.
He had a tray blow up in his hands while they were making shatter in their house, and the explosion broke a glass dish (presumably the tray) and projected glass at him.
Needless to say, he isn't making shatter anymore, lol.
Holy shit man! That is fucked up! Glad it wasn't worse at the same time man!
For a long time now I have been sure to recommend against solvent processing in the home (especially with butane) for basically everybody who ever asks - directing people to rosin gets better oil much more safely
