I have an organic chemistry question. High Purity Hash Oil!

Taking a pound and extracting it I c u loosing money not making more

If a pound is sold for $150 per ounce, that's $2400 a pound. High grade medical marijuana has roughly 20% THC or higher. 454 grams is a pound, 20% of that is 90.8 grams. Very potent hash oil can be marketed for $30 a gram or higher. 90 grams of high grade hash oil is worth $2700 for $30 a gram. Even with a loss of $300 worth through the process (which is high for vacuum distillation) the pound comes out to the same value, only now you are in a different market that is usually coveted in certain regions, and your product is now the size of a deck of cards, give or take a few square centimeters =P
Im not just pulling this stuff out of my ass, i have calculated different scenarios. In vacuum distillation, other terpenes, terpenoids, canabinoids, and flavinoids are extracted, just like any other method, so you are likely to get more than a 90 gram yield per pound.

How do u know ur going to get a 20% return ? I was basing it on 10% return not saying it can't be done as I've done it myself but I donate my honeycomb for around 10 a gram ime not in it for the money

All that for 300 profit if ur in it to make money doesn't sound like u will be making plus the cost of ur other material other than trim and ur time

And like u said all calculated would like to see hard results so chop chop and the process

$2700 for 90 grams right... Why not sell weed for $200 per z and gross $3200 per lb? If you came out ahead on this everyone would already be doing it and the world would be awash in oil instead of buds.

Only mexicans who grow weed for $120 a kilo would come out ahead on this. <-- Hint Hint Mexican Drug Lords... Now you can smuggle 8 times as much.

240 an o where im from! comes out to around 3800 a lb. buy them for 2500-2800

vacpurge said:

240 an o where im from! comes out to around 3800 a lb. buy them for 2500-2800

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Pricey top shelf indoor for 18 to 2000 in my area

Regardless of prices in different places, the market I'm working with, I let a pound go for $2400 because I'm leaving room for my coworkers to profit for their work. Location and prices aren't the debate here. The bottom line is, I am able to reduce the size of a pound drastically so making a 40 pound shipment wouldn't be as unrealistic as moving 40 pounds of buds without loosing the value, and now its something better than buds. The market I'm in is much more willing to shell out for good oil rather than just some more buds.

As i stated earlier, Many other chemicals other than THC will be coming along with the ride. This includes terpenes, terpenoids, flavanoids, canabinoids, and other soluble molecules that dissolve in the solvent.

The weed that grows in the book I'm writing... *snickers* undoubtedly contains over 20% THC, plus the other things that come along that i just mentioned (for the second time), so yes, i think a 20% yield would be a fair estimation to say the least.

and Method2MyMadness, this obviously isn't your area of expertise and I created this post in seek of answers, not bashful uninformed poking and prodding. If you don't have any useful information to add to this thread, then I would like to politely ask you to cease posting on this topic so that the answers to these questions may be alleviated.

OK, cause the original question is above my level of expertise, I ran it past Joe, our biochemistry brain trust, who said that THC could be vacuum distilled from D Limonene, but it could be vacuum distilled without the D Limonene just as well.

He noted that the major issue might be scale, as the process doesn't scale up well.

What do you mean by 'scale up'? im sorry.

im curious as well...

i believe u been talkn with a friend of mine on another forum but of course can't remember the name

anyway he has a few gallons of D limonene and uses it 5% of his winterizing solution. im curious if he could use more? im tryn to decide what to order as my winterizing solvent and hate the smell of iso alcohol, it makes me feel sick even when i clean my bongs.

also not to thread jack but i have a 100° water bath goin right now on a run of 12 day off the vine purple kush and it seems to be milky almost. not at all like anything ive experienced yet. it is the first time blasting this strain so i guess it could be strain indicative or i hope it is at least. only thing i did different was a fan blowing on the water bath as its a very still night. any ideas?

Marzfisch said:

What do you mean by 'scale up'? im sorry.

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It means that I can do things in the lab with a small amount of material, that are hard to duplicate at the same effiiency when increasing the quantity to production sized lots.

sacpirate said:

im curious as well...

i believe u been talkn with a friend of mine on another forum but of course can't remember the name

anyway he has a few gallons of D limonene and uses it 5% of his winterizing solution. im curious if he could use more? im tryn to decide what to order as my winterizing solvent and hate the smell of iso alcohol, it makes me feel sick even when i clean my bongs.

also not to thread jack but i have a 100° water bath goin right now on a run of 12 day off the vine purple kush and it seems to be milky almost. not at all like anything ive experienced yet. it is the first time blasting this strain so i guess it could be strain indicative or i hope it is at least. only thing i did different was a fan blowing on the water bath as its a very still night. any ideas?

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D Limonene boils at 176C/349F, sowill remain with your cannabinoids after the winterizing alcohol is gone. I suppose it is a matter of taste.

Isopropyl is an extremely pungentalcohol, even compared to the simple alkane Propanol that it is an isomer of.

It also is less polar than ethanolor methanol, and doesn't do as good a job of winterizing, so consider using 190proof ethanol instead. If it isn'tavailable locally, you can order on line at http://www.winechateau.com/

The milkyness is waterpickup from the material or humidity from the air. It will go away once the water and alcoholare both purged.

I can fit around a pound of herb in a 5000ml boiler flask. Maybe a little more. Sounds worth wile for me. The total setup is going to cost me under $600. Within the next two months this will all be purchased. So i guess ill make a thread and post on this one once i have my end product =)

Marz I went through all your threads mulling over the vac distill subject, I don't know about that thc vapour part. It's possible alright, but I think you should know that limonene isn't a 99.99% product, foodgrade limonene really throw's off your economics so think more technical grade limonene which I consider pretty cheap per litre compared to most solvents. Yes the thc will vape first, so will the 4% of misc in the limonene. I know the %4 isn't water, i've reclaimed all my limonene from previous distillations so I know what the two look like. So that 4% that's going up Pre 176 C, what is it and how will condensing it effect quality. Also that 24 degree difference between thc and D limo, your playing with fire there. About the only fire that's possible with limonene is lost thc, don't take your tempurature sensor's off anything

So that cheap hotplate you will experience Bumping like you've never imagined as the thc tries to escape the limonene, I mean the RBF just get's up and walks off the counter. You will completely goo up your condenser with resin as far as I can see which you will then probably try to torch to get it to flow out the condenser. The main thing is that $600 dollar's, maybe your in the States where everything is 3x cheaper. A reasonable ebay lab hotplate for 100 bux may go up to 500 degree's just fine but what about staying under 60 degree's so your within the bho heat purge safety range before degradation kicks in like furry. I said magnetic stirring hotplate with a +5 ambient tempurature control, find one of those used for under 200 "well in american maybe". Your basic 5 gallon put a pound in flask can only be fill up Half way MAXIMUM, i can't warn you enough about bumping unless loosing your gear is Hawt.....

You got scale issue's, it's more like a pound of kief is reasonable to do, a pound of bud is probably going to take you 2-3 days full turnaround which is cool n all if it's just for you. I'm not saying don't do it, you can tell by my warnings I'm doing it. I already had 700 worth of gear in the closet, and finding out whether it would hold a vacuum almost cost me $700 worth of gear. I've broken mason jar's trying to vac purge .2 grams so flying glass when your already half blind is serious.

If you do have any gear to stage your way up with, just start super small, your going to make mistake's like going to the bathroom before establishing your hotplate's holding temperature. Miss that one and prepare for a huge run of Brown oil because you slipped up. your not going to be able to tell if limonene came over with your condenser clogging oil, and it doesn't make your weed taste like lemon's.

I'm not trying to knock you down, and yes most people here arn't helping you chew through the "what IF" excitement, don't bash BHO because you'll be modeling everything they do just with limonene and you'll be indoor's. I wouldn't even know about vacuum distillation, never mind why I needed it so much if I wasn't watching video's of why bho is "better than". I really don't think if marijuanna is the healing of the nation mother nature's solvent is BHO, I'm trying because I've got complex ethic's issues, I look at what the champions are doing then try to figure out how to be as good as them without sacrificing what they did to get there.

I'm not MR limonene....YET...... i've only made strong stuff that taste like shit, I've also made runny crap because I tried to much shit i read on a forum Limonene will give you the same black to brown goo as hexane so do more Cross reference studying. You sound like me 3 weeks ago except I didn't know about forum's I only had youtube and nobody is saying shit about limonene.

It won't make superhash from outer space BUT...if I can make LHO as good as BHO from lemon's well that's just SUPER.
But i won't be changing anyone's minds between ages of 17-28, spraying tane, and running around with pyrex dishes and uploading to youtube is Too juicy and appealing.
I'm over $1000 deep in something I still don't know if it will work, It's certainly a method for "Oilmen" but not the masses. I have no science background, i watched 1 video of a girl explaining how to turn on a machine and got inspired. She said oh n beware of bumping, I said yah watever im a MAN. I was working away my solvent was bubbling, and all of a sudden it slowed down and stopped bubbling.
I of course moved closer to see if I had lost vac, nothing for almost 2 minutes.... then the water exploded and shot up a 7 inch vapor riser through my condenser and sprayed orange emulsified crap in my distilate flask. I craped my pants so hard I was begging the hotplate to turn off, i was so scared I forgot it was the vacuum causing it and just kept trying to lift the flask off the burner.

it sounds like it's all in your head, you better have extra money available for when you realize Oh shit what I have ain't gunna cut it. I really hope your serious about trying, I'm all alone out here and I only joined rollitup to talk to you as you kept coming up on my google searched about limonene and extraction.

Alright I'm rambling because i been on an island for so long and I'm actually starting to get somewhere that I wanted to share, even if my thought were tangential as firing a machine gun while riding a roller coaster.

For ya'll who don't know what bumping is, it is a sudden explosion of bubbles during distillation, instead of a steady boil. It makes a loud bump or thump sound, which is probably why its called bumping, and as noted by ST, can make a mess of things.

It can be reduced by adding boiling chips to act as bubble nucleation points, but they have to be removed before final finish. I often stick bamboo skewers in a boiling solution to act as nucleation points to control bumping and induce boiling, after the boiling chips are removed.

wow. thats a hell of a post!!! very informative guys
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