Thanks! While I have not been making it very long, I have spent the last year and a half working with a local guy who has run hundreds of pounds of this quality, just hanging out, watching and asking questions. In no particular order here is everything I know about making clean shatter. This is fact mixed with opinion.
Let me start with this: If I get wax or honeycomb, I have fucked up the process somewhere (usually too hot). In spite of the tons of pics that people drool over in the extracts forum, if I get crystallization, I use it for cooking and not smoking.
1) First, not everything will shatter. It is strain dependent. That said, the great majority I've run or seen run will shatter, and those that won't will give you a nice clear bendy slab.
2) Use fresh trim that has dried thoroughly and cured in a ziploc for a week for the best looking shatter. The older/dryer the trim gets, the darker the run.
3) If you're doing a pure bud run (as opposed to trim), do a second run of it and save separately to use for cooking. Don't bother doing trim a second time.
5) LOW FUCKING TEMPERATURES. Never, ever let it get about 115 degrees F. That's why my ghetto vac oven works so much better than a hotplate.
6) Buy a good pump. A Robinaire is worth the $175. I'll run it for 36 hours straight sometimes, it's a tank. If you *do* decide to go with Harbor Freight, get the extended warranty so you can keep returning them as they fry...
7) Wear latex gloves for all steps.
Get an infrared thermometer so you can quickly and easily know what temperature your material is at. Eventually, you'll know your equipment well enough that you will know how chamber temperature correlates to material temperature (for my proof box, the material temp is around 10 degrees over the thermostat set point).
The Process
- Make sure everything is as well de-stemmed as you can, and broken down into pieces about 3x the size you'd use in rolling a joint. I don't want any piece larger than a healthy bong hit. Clean everything with ISO (pyrex measuring cup, blast tubes, etc.)
- I have tubes made from 15" of 36mm heavy wall pyrex glass tube. Each one holds right at 2 ounces of trim. Pack it tight.
- After the tube(s) has been packed, shove it in the freezer while you continue to prep. Stick your butane in the freezer as well.
- Boil some water. I use an electric tea kettle, heat to 210 F and have it hold. I also turn on the 'oven' to 96 degrees F, which I know from experience gives me a 105 F material temperature. The SS bowl I use as a chamber, as well as the vac lid, are also in the oven preheating. There is a 4" square slick pad in the SS bowl. It doesn't touch the bottom, but instead makes a platform about 3 inches above the bowl bottom. Make a 'bowl' out of parchment paper that fits inside the chamber.
- Coffee filters suck. I use 10 micron stainless steel mesh screen.
- I turn on my airbrush compressor for clearing butane later
- Grab the tubes and cans, and begin the run.
- It takes around 45 seconds to a minute for the butane to make it from the top of the tube to the bottom. When it's about 1" from starting to flow, I invert the tube so the can is pointing up, but keep the nozzle in the tube to hold the pressure. I hold this for about 30 to let everything soak and the pressure build, then flip back over and empty the can.
- I don't use as much butane as I've seen recommended. Generally, a full can does two ounces just fine. If there's still some color left in the runoff after the full can, I might do another half can, but that's it.
- Once the can is empty, I use the airbrush hose (set at 10 PSI) to blow the rest of the butane out.
- Important to note: I'm blasting directly into a Pyrex measuring cup -- NO SCRAPING.
- Put the cup in the hot water bath. Wait until it has evaporated down to less than a cup of butane.
The Purge
Ok, let me start this up front -- IMO, if you make wax, you fucked up your product.
Never, ever let temps get above 115 degrees F. I know there are pages and pages of pictures of wax & honeycomb with people oohing and aahing over them. These people are retarded, unless the goal is to burn off all the good terpenes and just have a neutral flavor.
Open the vac oven, remove the chamber lid, and *carefully* pour the remaining butane into the parchment paper bowl. I have a jar of denatured alcohol I reuse each time to clean the pyrex measuring cup. Eventually I'll evap it off and get the little bit that is left behind in the cup. I'll trade leftovers for scrape-induced nucleation any time.
Leave the top off the chamber and the oven, and go away for an hour or so. You want the great majority of the butane to have gone way, and there should be a sticky mess on the parchment paper. It should have evaporated enough that there are large bubbles just sitting there throughout the oil.
Put the lid back on the chamber and the oven, and give it 20 minutes to bring the material up above 100 degrees (I range between 99-105). Start the pump, pull a vac. Ideally, the muffin will not be so big it touches the interior of the chamber.
Let it run for 2-3 hours. The parchment 'bowl' should now have a pool of very sticky oil in the center, with a thin film along the 'walls' of the parchment paper where the butane level started initially.
If this next step fails, it just means you need to vac it on parchment for another hour and try again.
Unseal everything and pull the parchment paper out. Let it cool for a minute, then fold it in half so the material comes into contact with itself. Pull the paper halves apart quickly, and a good chunk of it will stay together on one side. Continue to repeat this until you have a single mass, then transfer that mass onto the 4"x4" slick pad, and replace it in the chamber. Put the lids back on, but don't pull a vac. *Always* let the material come back up to temp before vaccing -- it takes my oven about 15 minutes.
Pull the vac again, then go away, with the pump running, for at least 12 hours. When you come back, it will likely be something 40-50% clear, with bubble marring the other half of the surface. If more than 50% of the surface is still bubbling, leave it alone until it clears more (I've had it take as long as 24 hours to get to this point).
I let the vac go, then pull the slick pad out. I immediately place it on a flat surface, and cover it with a second slick pad (I have a 4"x8" one as well). Use an empty can as a rolling pin and flatten the hell out of it between the two pads. I want it in a 1mm-2mm thick film. Pull the slick pads apart, it will stick to one. If it sticks to the big one, I use my latex-gloved hands and a dental pick to move to the smaller one.
Back into the vac oven to come back up to temp. I'll bump the temp up to 101 F (giving me a material temp of 110-115) and give it an hour to settle (no vacuum).
Fire the pump back up. You will be dismayed when it muffins again, but this one will clean up much faster. It takes anywhere from 8-15 more hours, but eventually all of the bubble will work themselves out and you will be left with a pure, gloriously transparent, slab of oil.
I'm going to run some of that Phantom Cookie next week, I'll take some pics of the process now that I don't have to think so much about it
.
Check out this link, about my same size and this is just a quick search, I'm sure they have hundreds more sizes options etc.
