Butane extraction method - wet or dry?

what butane is actually doing is acting as a super solvent, dissolving the oils and resins in the plant matter. They then run out with the rest of the butane. Once it has solidified into an opaque golden gunk it is ABSOLUTELY NOT YET SMOKEABLE. You have to get the rest of the butane out of it. I scrape this gunk off a plate and put it on microscope slides. Then i heat the glass with a lighter or a burner from underneath, boiling the butane out of the gunk. It will undergo a very NOTICEABLE colour change once it's ready; it will be clear, not cloudy, see through and amber to yellow in colour, and no bubbles will form in it when heated from underneath. At this stage the oil is hot and liquid, i spread it arround the slide and then throw it in the freezer. Then it's just a matter of scraping off a bit with a razor blade and heating the blade. The oil will fall off in a little drop into your pipe, or wipe it on warm to a zig zag and roll a joint. It will knock your socks off.

Also, i have succesfully tried using wet material from that days harvest. You can absolutely use either this method or the gumby ice-hash method with wet stuff. I always save the stuff i use wet and add it dry to the next batch, because you are almost certainly not getting everything out of it wet; with butane, the temperature freezes the water left in the leaves and that crystalizes arround resin trying to escape. With gumby hash, you should save that stuff and make honey oil out of it anyway, because even dried you aren't extracting the internal resins and oils from the plant using ice water.

I really have made oil out of wet leaves, male plants, fan leaves and stem, vaporized weed, most weed leftovers, and it does work. Yeild, potency etc. will vary accordingly, but unless you've allready smoked the stuff chances are theres some cannibanoid resins left in there that butane can dissolve out.

Butane is a non-polar solvent which means non-polar substances are soluble in it while polar substances such as water are not. I would certainly use dry material simply for mechanical reasons - chemically it would be irrelevant.

Driving off residual butane should be as simple as heating the dish to a modest heat. If you float it in water on your stove top and keep raising the temp until you see your oil slightly boiling, it's working. f the water boils but the oil doesn't, there is no butane. If you want to, you could even put the oil directly into water and heat it and then let it cool and clump back up. The oil won't mix with the water but the hot water bath should do a great job of dispatching any residual solvent. BTW, no this will not work with isopropyl.

just make sure you heat it modestly until ALL the butane is gone. I don't know what smoking large concentrations of butane would do to you, but i imagine it would be bad. I've also seen people collect their oil in an ice bath instead of on a plate. They run the butane through the mats and let it drip into ice water. It solidifies immediately and you can then harvest it with a pencil, a knife or any sort of stick. It just means you don't have to scrape off a plate.

kieahtoka said:

to an extent, for THC to become psychoactive it needs to lose a carbon molecule, which happens while it is drying. A small percentage of the THC is already psychoactive when picked off the plant, but the high is short and not worth the harsh smoke.

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Not saying you are wrong just wondering where you found this out? I am very interested in the chemistry of getting high and like to inform people as to how it works and I do now want to tell people stuff I can't prove.

Dry works best

Good post Demosthenes, thanks. I think I've wasted a lot :/

JohnnyDaManiac - he's half right, but he's misunderstood. Almost all canabinoids are found in their acidic form when first harvested, so a plant will contain a lot of THC-a and CBD-a and CBG-a etc etc, but only trace amounts of decarboxilated THC and CBD etc. The process of drying and curing allows for some decarboxilation, but the reason those processes make your weed stronger is because the canabinoids break down into other psychoactive forms, not because they decarboxilate to their non-acidic forms. In fact, any kind of heating beyond 80oC or time with exposure to air will decarboxilate, so as soon as you spark your joint, cook it or stick it in a vaporizer you will decarb the THC immediately into it's psychoactive form.

I suspect this is why Simspon oil is so medicinal when eaten.... you can boil off the iso with 'warm' setting on a rice cooker because it boils off at a low temperature, so good RSO contains a mix of acidic and non-acidic canabinoids - some of which seem to cure cancer, prevent epileptic seizures, protect against neuro degenerative diseases etc.

This is quite a good video to help explain it, but you really ought to read some of the peer reviewed studies because you can save friends and family members or at least ease a lot of their suffering with it - blah blah /but seriously, save someone's life!

[video=youtube;g79HokJTfPU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79HokJTfPU[/video]

And RE butane. If you purge properly (vaccum or heat) then you end up with crystal clear 'shatter' and that contains no butane and is the purest and cleanest smoke you can get =) shatter FTW for stoners and RSO for medical use imho

Peace and love hippy friends ;P

I made QWISO with thawed wet trim. Came out golden yellow like honey. Put you on your ass

Vacuum and heat is the only proper way to purge a BHO extract. And not just once but several times. As for wet extract. You will yield a much lower potency material but it will have a broader terpene profile and the flavor is unparralleled. Good luck!

I know I'm bringing back a dead thread, but the herb DOES NOT need to be dry!