Haha definitely sounds like we have had similar thoughts about this! A lot of my thinking was actually inspired by some of the experiments
@Dan Morrison was doing with hash and Japanese washi paper a few years ago. Here is the
thread. That worked really well at the time, but I didn't have access to much dry sift hash at the time, so I never ended up experimenting all too much. Nowadays I have really great access to dry sift hash, so I've been experimenting a lot with the best methods to use it. The washi paper method worked alright, but was giving pretty wispy vapor. Then I came across a sneaky pete
video where he was just vaping little balls of dry sift in a Dynavap M+ with an armored cap, and it looked like he was getting a lot of vapor. So, I got that same setup and was a little disappointed. I was getting huge clouds of vapor too, but it really didn't taste so nice. With a bit less heat it worked ok, but I still felt that I wasn't getting the most out of my hash.
Next, I got a lotus and was plopping a piece of hash on the concentrate pad. That worked much better, the flavor was there now and I was getting decent vapor too but I definitely had to work for it. However, I would open up the lotus during the session and would see that the ball was almost seizing up, the outside was starting to get close to charred, and vapor production dropped a lot, but I had a feeling there was more left in the center. So I started breaking the ball up and indeed there was lots of fresh hash still in the middle and it started to produce lots of vapor again after breaking it up. After only a handful of sessions though, the concentrate pad got filthy and I realised that wouldn't be a great way of going about it in the long run. Then one day, I stumbled upon some "vape wool" from a brand called black leaf in a store, which was actually really coarse degummed hemp fibers. I made a little patty of it to use as a sort of concentrate pad in the lotus and that worked really well and the cleaning was easy. It was also easier to break up the hash into the little grooves of the hemp fiber during the session, which each time kicked up vapor production and taste a lot. I then realized I should probably just wrap some hash in the hemp fiber and squish it around to increase the surface area. It would still congeal back up into one seized up mass though. So I figured the best way to approach it was to increase the surface area as much as possible, and go with little chunks of hash that couldn't fuze together. That started to work really well, but then I ran out of the degummed hemp fiber and realised it was pretty expensive.
Then I did some research on cotton, found the ones people liked using for wicks and that's when I really started having success! Here are some pictures of how I prepared 0.2 grams of hash on a strip of muji rushi cotton:
I was vaping some very nice Morrocan hash made from their landrace beldia strain, and the first hit tasted like how I imagine those high mountain areas of Morroco must smell when there are thousands of beldia plants reaching maturation. Very nice strong mint flavor, that I'm experiencing now in a way that I've never experienced before. Huge clouds of vapor too with great effects. This method works in my lotus, dynavap, and dynavap with the rogue wax works quartz cap really well too. However, the 18 mm quartz cap is currently undefeated. I'm liking hash so much now, that I sometimes do full hash days now. I used to only go for hash once in a while because it was always a pain to vape, and never all that satisfying, but this method in the quartz cap is showing me a whole side of traditional dry sift that I didn't know existed! The vaped beldia makes me super productive, and as you can tell by this wall of text, also incredibly chatty haha. I can see why they like the beldia strain high up in the mountains, gives you lots of stamina! I can now even taste very distinct difference between different regions. Hash from the tidghine mountains in Morroco seems to have a distinct eucalyptus taste for example, instead of the sweeter mint of the beldia I always get. That taste difference I never really noticed before dialing in this method!