Hi all,
I am going to be pressing a couple thousand 1 gram kief pucks with an arbor press. Anyone know where i can find a 1 gram mold for an arbor press?
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have one custom made. just boring into a block of wood will to get the right dimensions will work. teflon or delrin will probably work for the real thing.
then have another made with the same bore in a 1x10 or better (whatever size array you like). If you can get away with plastic, you probably want several multi-fill molds.
you want to be able to scrape with a credit card to get the right load, then press. making the molds slightly tapered, or making the array with a removable base so you can push the pucks out will make your life easier.
CNC isn’t that expensive.
you might be able to get one off the shelf, but I doubt it.
levelling with a credit card should get you within +/-100mg. not sure what your tolerances are.
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One gram pucks are tiny for kief if pressed aren’t they? I have a dream of creating the ultimate gram of hashish based on crystal pure THC and the best kief I can find. A bit of the tips of fine blueberry kush buds ground fine and all pressed with my own arbor press into a hard puck. One gram presses paper thin lolz.
To be honest my own hope was to craft a form of a gummy bear. I already have soapstone slabs and a machining center that easily machines molds into soapstone. The soapstone will release almost as good as Teflon, it can be heated or frozen with zero issues and it is inert and safe. You can easily make a mold with just a dremmel bit by hand. Use a softer material like a small oak block to actually press it into the soapstone mold would be my idea. One stone could be engraved for several pucks. I could make one and send it but my current fees for coming out of retirement include paid vacation, dental, an expense account, company car, and a generous pay package. We are talking epically generous… 
I cut soapstone slabs on a simple scroll saw with a wood blade. A hand file easily fine shapes it. A small knife will even carve it by hand but it is pretty hard stuff.
However I too have an arbor press and this is how I was gonna do it. Keep the secret that some nut in Oregon plans to make the worlds finest gummy bear shape hashish.
It seems like a good plan…
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Machine shop can make it for you. What shape do you want it to produce? Is there any mounting holes for tooling or is it a plain flat surface?
The shape will be similiar to a nickel. The arbor press does have mounting holes.
Thanks for the ideas. I am doing 1 gram pucks because that is what my customers are demanding right now.
you planning on adding any heat? you’d need to ditch the plastic in favour of SS in that case, which will up the cost.
you could also get fancy with the plunger & have the CNC shop machine (a mirror image of) your logo into it.
Let me offer a wacky idea then if you are willing to use the press itself to make the mold. Alternately you could use a sledge hammer instead of the press and do this outside the press instead but you get the idea
Aluminum alloy 1100 is the softest and most ductile aluminum you can buy as far as I know. Nickel is VERY hard. Obtain a block of aluminum 1100 cut to size. Place it in the tooling it will be used in. Drill holes and such if you need to mount it.
Once the plate is mounted in place lubricate the surface of the aluminum with most any oil like machinist cutting oil or even motor oil. A very light coating. Now place nickels where you want the pucks on top of the lightly oiled Aluminum 1100. Place a flat steel block over the top of the nickels. Use the press and press the nickels into the aluminum (Or a sledge hammer on an anvil). You might have to do one nickel at a time but that will become obvious if needed. The steel block or bar pressing over the nickels must be thick and not flex and will serve to keep the flat parts of the aluminum intact and flat during the press. The steel will stop at the aluminum surface.
You should now have molds of nickels to press the hash pucks into. The nickels should release with some tapping of a hammer just like the kief pucks will. You might have a novel product too. The molds you press into the soft aluminum can be very easily fine tuned with even a sharp knife. That alloy is very soft. Sanding the sharp edges and such will become obvious as a need when they are broken in.
I suggest a buffalo nickel. Find a coin dealer online and get a cool old worn out buffalo nickel. 
(Edit: War years nickles from the forties are not particularly rare and do pop up. Those were made of silver instead of nickel because the harder nickel compound was desperately needed for weapons. All other years should be nickel alloy)
love it. except those nickels need to go (several times) deeper if the mold is to be filled with free-flowing kief and levelled with a straight-edge.
This link has all kinds of machines that do roughly what you are after as well. I absolutely would go with one of these instead of a custom build if it could be made to work for you.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/TDP-0-Hand-punch-press-machine-powders-tableting-machine-6MM-TDP0/182691633481?_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIM.MBE%26ao%3D2%26asc%3D20160908110712%26meid%3D19fb0b70e1774cd2bb0eb43eb1aed0e9%26pid%3D100677%26rk%3D7%26rkt%3D30%26sd%3D152285415006%26itm%3D182691633481&_trksid=p2385738.c100677.m4598
What about a pill press? I feel like there has to be a pre-made die/mold that would get you 1g pills of kief.
agreed. pill presses were certainly the only pre-made dies I saw in the appropriate size range.
However, filling 10 or 20 molds at once, simply by using a straight edge would be way more efficient than filling, or weighing, then filling, a single pill press mold (several thousand times) don’t you think?
maybe it’s just me, but the thought of individually weighing thousands of one gram piles of kief, loading each one into a mold, pressing, then empting the mold makes no sense.
call me lazy. I wouldn’t do more than 100 before heading to the machine shop for better tooling. if given the project scope up front, I probably wouldn’t press more than 20 before making a mold with at least 10 spots. if the harbour freight arbour press would take a 10x10 array, I’d start there. but it won’t. given the “about the size of a nickel” target, I believe a 2x10 or even a 4x10 (if you flip it half way through) would work. I am of course guessing at the OP’s press. theirs might have a bigger throat.
It might be that the kief source for the OP’s project is not in fact uniform enough to work with pile and scrape filling method (like making a level teaspoon) I’m suggesting. Which is were the 20 test presses come in. you drill one deep hole, drop in a measured gram a couple of times. figure out the correct depth. drill that size hole. pile, scrape, press, eject, weigh. 10 replicates should give you a good idea on repeatability. if you need to adjust the depth, do so. and redo the 10 replicates. now head back to the machine shop for the right tool.
drilling 40 21mm holes in a 4" x 10" x 2" chunk of Alu can be done with a drill press, but I’d suggest having it CNC machined to reduce variance in depth. getting the depth correct is the key to achieving advantage.
if you find too much variance in your “level nickel hole” sized test pucks, it might be necessary to weigh each hole full. in which case the holes should be drilled a little deeper in the array style mold.
shouldn’t cost you more than $200. you should get two or three. so you can have a buddy filling while you press. especially if you have to weigh each gram.
I believe @Beaker is only asking about $200k a year to do this in soapstone 
Edit: I guess in a pinch an appropriately sized scoop (see level teaspoon above) might give a slight advantage over weighing.
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I think the sticky nature of the keif would give the pill presses a run for their money, feeding from a hopper would be an issue, not to mention pills that won’t come off the top die going around for a second smashing. You would probably have to operate it in a freezer to approach feasibility. What about using a screw press to extrude a snake of keif that can be cut into 1 gr lengths? Similar to pasta production.Dominioni - PASTA EXTRUDER P55 - YouTube
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