Introduction, First Attempt, and a Few Questions to Proceed

[smurfman]

Hello,

I have been prowling the forum for a while, and this will be my first post, hopefully I put it into the correct thread, if not, no issues with MODS moving it and schooling me.
I am a NY native, who moved to San Diego a couple months ago, and enjoying all that brings with it... you know, warmth, sun, and dispensaries.
I have been migrating to E-Cigs and Vaping for the sake of fun and health. I still like my cigs and doobs, 20+ years of habit are hard to break.

So, after reading for a while, I decided my first try would be with KleenXtract (KX).
I believe I followed the guides pretty well, I think I faltered a little when I got to filters maybe (15 micron instead of 10, and maybe my dumping into the measuring cup is wasteful....).
If you catch any other mistakes, please let me know.
My entire process so far is written below.

So anyway, I am at the point where the next steps will come in and I have a few questions.
1) Should I clean the filter between runs of different strains? SHould I clean the filter before I go ahead and run the second wash tonight?
2) Do you think I should have frozen for longer than 8 hours... I have seen a lot of variety ranging from 4-24, so I figured 8 hours, plus Ice wash, plus working in the freezer, puts me somewhere in the upper range of the estimates as far as cold... but I could be off track.
3) Do you collect the Gold/Dirty powder left on the SS filter? What do you do with it? Do you have to clean it? Do you use it as bowl topper? Do you reextract from it?



QKX - Quick KleenXtract

Starting:
Super Silver Haze, Sativa, 5gm, (Abbreviation... .SSH)
Blueberry OG, Indica, 5gm, Abbreviation.... BOG)
Both buds were purchased about 2 1/2 weeks ago, but I have no way of knowing how long / what they were stored like before that. They were all beautiful pristine delicious smelling nuggets that almost broke my heart attempting this instead of putting them in the bowl or rolling it up or vaping it. I think the vaping has opened me up to the experiments, seeing all the ABV I guess gets you used to being ok with leaving something behind maybe.

1. Placed fine buds on tray, cut and broke into small pieces ensuring no major stems, and buds where open but not very ground. What I would consider larger bowl pieces, maybe smaller.
2. Each strain was cut and placed into individual 4oz mason jar, put into freezer for 8 hours
3. KleenXtract put into freezer for 8 hours
4. Filled a bottle with salt water and froze also (won't really freeze), also a bunch of ice cubes, and a large Pyrex dish all in freezer.
5. Once everything was frozen, I put the ice cubes in large Pyrex and dumped the salt water into there, which does not really freeze due to lower freezing temp in salt. This creates an Ice Bath. I made it tall enough to submerge about 70% of the 4 oz mason jars height.
6. I put the first strain (SSH) into the ice bath for 15 minutes before I went to work with it.
7. I took out the jar, I did the whole process inside the freezer with the door open. So, I took the jar, opened it quickly and filled it with KleenXtract fully submerging the nugs, and quickly closed, gently stirred for 4-5 seconds and placed it back into the ice bath.
8. After minute 1, took jar, gentle swirling for 5-8 seconds, put back in ice batch.
9. After minute 2, took jar, gentle swirling for 5-8 seconds, put back in ice batch.
10. After minute 3, took jar, gentle swirling for 5-8 seconds, put back in ice batch.
11. Just before hitting minute 4, around 3:50, I went to freezer and took bud jar, opened it and flipped it into a larger strainer over a measuring cup in, to quickly separate, I let that drip into the cup, then i replaced the bud in jar, sealed and put back to freeze for later roundes/washes.
12. I took the cup with the liquid, and gently poured it over Stainless Steel 15 micron Filter folded into bowl, held over a wide surface pyrex dish. (For future runs, I will line the dish first with PFTP (not silicon, the stuff good for solvents, I believe made by Oil Slick) Sheet).
13. I put that dish resting on some chop sticks inside a bigger Pyrex dish. and covered with cheese cloth to prevent some dust. There are 2 fans blowing over this. Ambient temperature around 60 degrees.
14. I put strain 2 (BOG) into Ice Bath, and repeat process from Step 6->13
15. Worth noting, for BOG, the measuring cup and filter, had not been cleaned of whatever was left from the SSH run, I figured I don't mind if it mixes a tiny bit of Sativa into my Indica, and it couldn't have been enough left to really affect the yield measurements later.
16. I took some pretty warm water and filled a bit of the bigger bottom Pyrex holding the 2 trays/strains.
17. Left over night, the water cooled quickly and did not evaporate fully as expected. I changed and added some water in the morning, about 7 hours later. By this time moist of the KleenXtract had fully evaporated, but there seemed to be some left, and I wanted to give it more evap time just in case. So far it looks like some golden/amber/oily stuff has started to collect all over the pan, and maybe I could have tried collecting already, but I wanted to exap longer to be safe. I will give it at least another 5 hours, totaling 12 +
    
    
    This puts us at the point of this posting, a couple hours later, in 2 hours we will just about hit 12+ hours of evap time for Wash 1.
    
    I am not taking / posting pictures for this first try. I will probably do so in the future, or at least when I get to the final product and see the result of wash 1.
    

 

[smurfman]

Just over 13 hours evap, I went to check on it.
Blueberry strain is looking/feeling quite oily....
Super Silver Haze is looking/feeling dusty/brittle...
I changed the warm water bath, and slid the fan a little bit closer, the warm water bath cools quite quickly, ambient temperature mid 60's, warm water is about 115 when i put it in the dish, by the time i put the strains back on it's down to <110, within minutes it's <90 and heading towards balanced.

The one you see on the right is the BOG
The left is the SSH
You should be able to zoom in a bit.
I am not sure if the white stuff is....
Steam from the water on the bottom of the tray, Left over KX, water, or what... so I am leaving it. to evap longer. If any of you have thoughts on it, I would love to hear it. Clearly there is less in the BOG than in the SSH.... which is interesting. The BOG has been evaping for about 30 minutes less than the SSH due to being the second strain put in

 

[smurfman]

First scrape yielded about .2g of each strain because i had a horrible time scraping off the Pyrex.
I gave up and th rough some solvent in the dish after freezing fir a bit. Stirred occasuonaly gently and let sit in the freezer in kx for 4 and a hald minutes.
put that theiugh the 15 ss micron filer into some dishes lined with ptfe. Sheet so hopefully that will extract better.
due to that experience i sort of gave up on second batch, so i put them together in salt ice bath, and did a kx run on them similar to run 1, but with an extra minute and gentle awirl. The liquid vame out with a neonish green tint, but not dark goopey. I put all that into a 3rd dish and now ots all evaping.

I tried a sample of the small bit o got from both strains so far.
super delicious
Super strong on both strains.
perfect melt on both.
so.... id say my first experience with kx, while not smooth on my scraping twchnique and plan, was pretty happy.
i got some very potent, flavorful concentrate, that much their origin in flavor and hit....but way stronger.

 

[smurfman]

So, I ended up with about .7 of each strain, starting with 5gm of each total.
Total = 1.4g out of 10 = 14% which for my first try I am pleased with.

No, I used a tiny bit of each to dab a sample of deliciousness, both wonderful.

So... I went to mix some e-juice, with my own first personal batch of concentrate, and i have the little jar in a tiny warm water bath.... and my lovely dog walked by and caused me to flinch and knock the jar into the water while i was stirring in the ejmix.

So now i have a whole chunk of water.... with a tiny bit of ejmix, and about 1-1.1 gm of my stuff.
I am going to try and dissolve it out and just use it for an edible or something at this point, as it's obviously not meant to be... but it was a fun experiment, and I will do it again.

 

[smurfman]

I forgot batch 2 in my math yesterday which was still evaping.
THe second wash of SSH + BOG combined, This evaped, and came out looking just like RSO oil I have seen, and nothing like the previous gold dust. This matches what I have read here before about second/third runs. I will probably use that to make some cannaoil.

The big mixture of water/e-juice-thc is still evaping. I don't have high hopes for that.

All in all I liked the experience and think I did ok with yield, result.
But, I think.. It just might be cheaper for me to buy the concentrates already made instead of making them. I am possibly interested in trying the winterizing process on the concentrates I buy.

 

[smurfman]

Just to wrap up, i just finished the second batch, oily second run of BOG+SSH combined. and ended up with .7+ of nice oil/sap.
So total yield: 2-2.1 GM on 10 in... = 20-21%
For my first try, AWESOME.
I think KleenXtract worked very well for me at least with the process above.
In the future I would have to get better about:
Scraping/Collecting
More careful and have a better lab setup.

 

[Linard]

Welcome smurfman!

 

[smurfman]

Thanks @Linard

 

[walrus]

@smurfman
Sounds like a pretty successful first attempt. I would freeze for longer than 8 hours, I find a full 24 to be best. When I first started qwet runs, I only kept my materials in the freezer for 6 or 7 hours and found there to be a lot of moisture that needed evaporating. Always got a white milky color while evaping and it took forever to purge all the ethanol. Figured it was residual moisture from the bud that hadn't been tied up as ice. When I moved to making sure to chill my materials for the full 24 hours I rarely got that milky color and total evap time went down significantly.

What trouble did you have with scraping? It can be a pain in the ass until you get your technique down (and even after you do sometimes). If it was very hard/sticky and just didn't want to come off on the razor, try warming it up a bit more just prior to scraping. Make your warm water bath a HOT water bath (not boiling but pretty close), warm the pyrex up in there for a few minutes and then go at it. If it cools before you finish, return it to the hot water bath to soften things up again. A nice shatter/pull snap consistency can be tough to scrape and can be all but impossible at room temperature.

 

[killick]

First scrape yielded about .2g of each strain because i had a horrible time scraping off the Pyrex.
I gave up and th rough some solvent in the dish after freezing fir a bit. Stirred occasuonaly gently and let sit in the freezer in kx for 4 and a hald minutes.
put that theiugh the 15 ss micron filer into some dishes lined with ptfe. Sheet so hopefully that will extract better.

Hi Smurfman - welcome to a great forum! Thanks for detailing your steps so well. I've not tried KX, instead I'm trying to get a decent QWISO, and seem to be getting closer every attempt. On this attempt I tried evaping onto ptde-lined dishes, but it was a real pain to get it off, so I rewashed as much as possible from the ptfe and put it back onto glass for evap. It's almost time to check it... then onwards to purging!

 

[smurfman]

Well, I definitely felt the PFTP sheet was MUCH easier than straight pyrex. IT allows movement, and some bending and folding, and a little control, and the stuff comes off a bit easier I felt. Still STICKY STICKY STICKY. (In general, I am VERY NEW to concentrates, so overall I guess I wasn't that sure what I was getting into/expecting).
I used to live in NY, and only moved out a few months ago, until then, I didn't even know this stuff really existed. Now I learned it's starting to appear in NY as well.

Anyway..... to follow up on my experience / story.....
1) I still think buying the concentrate will be cheaper than making it myself since I don't grow. It will be a fun thing to do sometimes in small batches I suppose, but really.... not convinced it's worth the effort for me personally. I recently found my first dispensery with a good menu of concentrates so I picked up a bunch to sample/differentiate. It's really a whole new intersting world. Crumble, shatter, wax, co2 (seems to be oil always), hash I was familiar with, don't love it, but fun once in a while. So far I have enjoyed the crumble since it's a nice bowl topper or j filler. The shatter and wax and oil seemed to fall in line with my attempts to migrate to e-cig (i still smoke some )... anyway... Oh yeah, I ramble sometimes
2) My 2 gold dust, really, even though gold dust and not waxy.... to be honest, are freaking amazing, i'd say Flavor and Strength match or beat any of the things I bought (I have not sampled them all, especially not the CO2 stuff yet)... but, in that sense... it made me think it was worth it even for special small fun batches, a little patience, not so much effort, and the results were really worth while.

I ended up taking the BOG strain, and mixing it with EJMix to experiment with that (which was really my end goal, although since trying dabbing... ill get to that in a moment)... anyway, the BOG/EJMIX... came out VERY POTENT, too potent, i may dilute it. The flavor is not wonderful, but it's not bad either. To be honest, it's better than a lot of e-juice i try, since I am not so found of most the flavors. Why is tobaccoo or just refreshing hard to find, without it being too sweet, or too something.

So, that left the SSH sample, and since I had this lovely glass bong, I figured.... OK, I went and bought a Titanium Nail that fits my piece, and I had a torch, and well, you probably know .... So I fired that bad boy up, and put just a tiny bit of my SSH gold dust on it.... which is a wonderful Sativa, and well.... I believe the phenomenal result of said tiny dab experiment with the KX gold dust from the Beautiful SSH flowers I almost cried using to experiment.... would be this rant, and the abundance of energy and clarity I have right now... well, yeah.... so I might play around some more.

I think I will try with ISO on the next run, and a longer freeze time. The ISO would be much cheaper than the KX, but the KX seemed to be
1) Forgiving.... I think based on what I've read discussed here, your wash time can vary a lot, and the results are still pretty reliable.
2) Clean... I guess? Both batch A and B I felt for a first try resulted in very decent combined Yield, all potent and tasty.

So, if the ISO doesn't get off to a good start, I'll go back to the KX and make a few special batches now and again I guess, because I think what I feel is...
The process is simple and straight forward.
It is adaptable to your wants/needs based on budget, time, resources
Patience goes a long way in each step... so have some nug in reserve so you don't get antsy rushing your batch.
Give it the love of patience, which maybe some mass producers skimp out on, and you can get lovely results.

I also learned.... if you screw up.... you can probably throw some solvent on it and patience to clean it up My big spill is now re evaped... I will likely just use it to make some edibles at this point, but I think I saved pretty much the entire weight.

My last comment, I took some of the samples i got, and made a batch of jolly rancher type candies. That's a fun easy experiment that gives you like 100-200 candies with little time and effort. And for people who like to play with sticky concentrates, apparently ... sugar candy... is way sticker and messier.