Herb, first of all thank your very much for this tutorial!
Let's talk about terms. What do you mean with trim? My trim is just the cutted parts of manicured flowers. Or do we speak about the sun leafes too?
Herb, what's your advice for relation of amounts of material - water - ice?
My setup (how to upload pics here?)
- 80 l insulated ss thermoport with false bottom and motor driven stirrer (40 rpm)
- OG Bubble Bag 5 gallon 8 bags (220, 190, 160, 120, 90, 73, 45, 25µ)
- Bucket-on-bucket setup: 1 bucket with sealed hole in the bottom on a 2nd one with corresponding hole in it's lid
Material with ice and water into the thermoport - stirring
The Lauter/false bottom as pre-filter works awesome. It holds back nearly all material. Liquid is going through the lauter to the bottom. In the middle of the bottom is a countersunk (?) tube opening (hope you understand what I mean), and the tube is going under the bottom to the side where it ends with the tri clamp valve.
Thermoport vessel is standing on an table. In front of it there are two buckets standing on each other. Into the upper one I put the 5gal bubble bags on a distance plate to the bottom. In the bottom is a sealed hole where drain can rinse down into the 2nd bucket.
So I have just to open the valve of the insulaled ss bucket, drain is flowing into the first/upper bucket with the bb, water will be filtered and is flowing through the bottom hole.
Material above the lauter is working as a pre-filter itself. So I do some more washes to wash out the remaining precious out the plant material.
Description is a bit difficult without vizualation. Hope you do understand what I mean? Will make some pics of my next run to show you the whole setup.
I call the leaves that you find in manicured flowers 'sugar leaf' whereas those removed during post harvest manicuring would be called trim. The sugar leaves are proximal leaves near/inside the buds and so will have much more resin than the large sun leaves and other trim.
Typically I let the material take up 1/4-1/3 of the volume of my machine. maybe 1/10-1/8 of the volume with ice (ice below the material is crucial, as well as a thin layer across the top of your material) and then fill the rest of the volume with water. Be careful not to overfill with water so that your machine doesn't have any spillage.
Be sure that your water quantity is enough to fit in the bottom 2/3 of the volume of the vessel that the water drains into, or you're going to have major wastage of your hash as the water pushes your bags up, inverts the screen and causes your collections to spill over the sides.
The rest of your setup should be no problem in my view, pictures would certainly help so please do share if you can. I will say that you need to establish whether the motor is going to agitate too violently or not, as this entire processing setup lives and dies on that criterion alone. There's only one way to find out on that question ;)
@Drsteez good question on amounts... In the machine I tried getting more than a lb of trim in, and that was kinda messy. I also tried a couple of runs without the 'work bag', but for trim I'm probably going to use it. The drain was plugged with loose trim, and this will help with that.
For large loads (more than a lb) I'm thinking about moving to larger containers, and something else...
The something else... would pressure and/or vacuum work for filtering? I've been looking at Buchner filters, which work under vac. Would something on a larger scale work? Going through, say, 4 or 5 different micron screens before dumping water into drain bucket? I kinda got the idea from gold panning, which uses things called 'classifiers', which are the pans they swirl in the movies - the bottom is lined with different sizes of screen, looking for the elusive gold flecks... In my mind a selection of mesh sized could be installed inline, sealed, and water/head slurry vacuumed through the screens. Somehow in my head it seems possibly doable... The screens will plug, but a relaxation of vac should drop them to the bottom...
Does this make any sense to anyone? I might havta draw this one up before it makes any sense to either try or not.... although 4" PVC could easily have 5 different layers of mesh across it, load up a 40 gallon drum with air pressure, and force the watermix through the screens, with water coming out the end. Not unlike
a potato gun but without the violent 'whomp' of a minivan being crumpled by a spud, instead releasing water, and leaving the heads in their screen for extraction...
What kind of machine are you using man, your drain should not let that sort of amount of trim get through! My drain has a screen with some 1-2mm (our imperial system really fail us when we start to talk about these kinds of measurements lol) slits that prevents most of my trim from getting through. The gentleness of my agitations ensures that the trim is not broken up further in the wash and so less of it is able to get through these slits. My bubblenow never has that problem if I don't use a work bag, very little contaminant is ever found in my catch bag.
The use of a work bag is going to fuck up your trim washes, it ruins the vortexing motion that we need from the washing machine to gently encourage the heads to come off of the stalks and instead traps them in a smaller space with little room to move. This reduced volume that the trim is able to occupy also increases the violence of the agitation, especially if you use as much ice as most people tend to. You basically create a large grinder inside the work bag, using ice cubes to gradually mill the leaves to oblivion.
In extra cold conditions, some of your trim may become encapsulated by ice which is going to limit the extent to which you can remove all of the resin glands.
The something else... would pressure and/or vacuum work for filtering? I've been looking at Buchner filters, which work under vac. Would something on a larger scale work? Going through, say, 4 or 5 different micron screens before dumping water into drain bucket? I kinda got the idea from gold panning, which uses things called 'classifiers', which are the pans they swirl in the movies - the bottom is lined with different sizes of screen, looking for the elusive gold flecks... In my mind a selection of mesh sized could be installed inline, sealed, and water/head slurry vacuumed through the screens. Somehow in my head it seems possibly doable... The screens will plug, but a relaxation of vac should drop them to the bottom...
You would need to get some custom filters and custom buchner compatible, vacuum safe collection vessels made man. I know that there are larger scale, more advanced buchner filters used in large scale manufacturing of various consumer products from food to pharma, but that is likely going to cost you more than hiring the best extract artists in your neighborhood to come and do the work for you!
The problem with traditional buchner filters is that they do not generally provide the larger pore sizes required for bubble processing (160/190/220u screens), additionally, they have very small filter screen surface area compared to even the smallest bubblebag screens and will clog incredibly quickly. Large loads of resin under vacuum may even be able to break some kinds of buchner filters in the event of a clog and too much build-up of pressure.
If you wanted to try something with a vacuum, I'd suggest an enormous amount of money and willingness to burn through it with trial and error. In my view, you'd be better off considering other large scale options that are proven to work. I know that Bubbleman/Reinhardt and Frenchie Cannoli are both either working on or already retailing large scale machines that would meet this purpose, but those are also going to be expensive.
Any vacuum would have to be applied after you have run the wash through the larger bubble bags mentioned above. Otherwise, I would be concerned that the vacuum would pull plant material into the screens with too much force and break them up more, contaminating your resin collections.
The reason I'm pervaricating and identifying alternate methods is purely for speed, volume, and an inquisitive mind.
But, having said that, any suggestions on best way to wash 50 lbs of trim per month? It's not mine, but a buddy has some spare, and I just found out how much... If the method were to scale to, say, 200 lbs per month, I'm thinking a shipping container, top cut off, and use an outboard motor to agitate...
Holy shit man. That is an insane quantity! You are not going to be able to buy or design a machine to process that without sinking some incredible amounts of money and time into it man.
My question is how much volunteer labor do you have available? In my mind, unless you can afford to buy larger scale all SS industrial bubble machines, you are going to be best off from a cost/safety standpoint getting a number of smaller units and processing multiple runs by multiple processors. Even 50lb would be a full time job for one person to process in a month with conventional home use machines. The conventional home-use machines must be impeccably maintained and over time replaced if you are to have sufficient SOP to be sure that your product is not going to eventually become contaminated by surfaces in the machines themselves, which are plastic and not easy/nor entirely possible to fully sterilize between uses.
Motor agitation is not necessarily going to work well, especially if the propeller/spinning part attached to the motor's armature is too small to create a large enough vortex for such a large vessel. A shipping container also brings to mind considerable materials safety concerns, that shit is not resistant to corrosion from water etc and would not be expected to be clean when you get your hands on one. To clean it would be an absolutely colossal undertaking. The shape of a shipping container does not facilitate the vortexing agitation and is likely to be counter-productive.
The problem with jerry-rigging a large scale processing setup in this situation is that clearly, this is going to produce extracts that are distributed to patients. The materials safety concerns that emerge in this kind of jerry-rigged design are not acceptable in a medical context (or even recreational really).
I do wonder whether your context will allow spending on sufficient equipment for such large scale processing or whether as above, smaller scale methods simply need to be applied repeatedly by multiple processors. I would have to quit my employment to be able to process 50lb a month
