Lately, I've been thinking about easy efficiency gains that can be had while preparing a small amount of nugs for curing and an eventual bubble run. One thing I've thought a lot about lately, which many of you will already be aware of - is we frequently throw away easily obtained headstash through careless processing and neglecting to make sure we do our work in a way that is careful, clean and contained.
Folks who are fortunate enough to cultivate (not me, sadly) benefit from trimming and manicuring their flowers over dry sift screens for example, this leads to a nearly effortless, but small yield of full melt dry sift, which is an incredibly high quality concentrate which would otherwise be shaken off the nugs during trimming and lost on various surfaces in the space.
Let me give an example of how a more simple version of this practice can benefit those of us who do not grow.
These instructions are for people who are processing small amounts of personal concentrates like rosin and bubble hash. Basically, this can be used for any extraction method which require some breaking up of large nugs/colas as a preparation step before the run. I'll be describing this from a bubble hash extraction perspective, but follow the steps below for rosin or any other extraction method as above.
For those who run bubble like me, we're seeking out the most resinous flower possible. When you get past a certain skill level in extracting, your full melt is only as good as your flower!
Bubble runs require the processor to first break up their flowers. This is to ensure that all of the resin glands have room around them in the water sufficient to be agitated and removed by the motion of the water during the bubble run. You do not want to run huge colas, flowers that are separated calyx by calyx are more appropriate here.
Of course, here we run into the same scenario as the cultivator above in one sense: If we break up an ounce or two (or more if you're very fortunate!) of super resinous, dried and cured flower, we're gonna have a lot of ripe resin flicking off of those buds!
So one easy solution is to break up the flowers over hash screens. However, if you're breaking up small amounts for processing and don't have screens (even 1/2oz-1oz), consider breaking them up on a pyrex dish (square shapes are easier to scrape the resin off of afterwards!).
1. Break up your nugs on the pyrex dish. Do all removing of extraneous leaf and stem from your flowers over the dish, but place all trim aside in your desired vessel and place all stems aside for disposal later. Only your broken nugs should end up on the dish. Make sure that dish is clean before you start!
2. Carefully, individually pick up each piece of flower up and put it into your vessel for extraction later. Do not try to scoop them all up together, this is likely to contaminate your resin left on the glass.
3. Your stem and trim and nugs have all been removed from the dish now. All you should have left will be pistils, leaves, and some other very small pieces of various plant material. Using an aluminum or glass card shaped implement (thin, so you can use for scraping!), gently brush over the top of the resin/plant parts on your dish to move the plant parts out of the resin as much as possible. This should only take 10-15 mins.
4. With fingers (wear buna-n gloves or similar) carefully remove the plant pieces and pistils from your dish. You should end up with a final product on your dish which is 80%+ glands if you're successful. Sometimes, you'll have something ready to dab: Between a 4-5 star sift can be achieved by this processing alone!
5. If your end product isn't dabbable yet, gently sift it on a single small ~73u screen (~200 mesh or so if you're looking at screens using that unit of measurement for DIY screen-making purposes).
For reference, if you process 1oz of flower in this way with very abundant resin (for example, 25%+ yields when rosined), you can expect to end up with 5-10 large dabs of deliciously dabbable dry sift by following the steps above!
I hope that some of you guys will get the chance to benefit from this technique! This thread has been dormant for far too long!
Just don't expect 6 star sift at all by following the above steps if you don't follow step 5! I've been reliably getting 5 star sift from resinous flower using only steps 1-4 however!
I am so glad to hear that you get to enjoy some full melt for yourself 
