Best Vac Grease and for which application?

So now that vac grease has become commonly accepted for glass joints in distilling cannabis, what is everyone using, and for which application?

Dow Corning seems to work good enough for all my joints except on the neck of the boiling flask, where after an hour of boiling, it starts to degrade, and sometimes cause a leak.

Apiezon 510 is decent, but it goes on a bit wet and doesn’t seem to lubricate the joints as well as the DC.

I see talk of people also using Apiezon H or L, as well as some other vac grease brands that I don’t know.

What about when distilling terpenes? DC good enough?

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Check out the stuff usalab equipment sells ( looks like it comes jna urine sample jar)
but the specs seem right. It dirt cheap as well

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Best solution? No grease except the cow, where do you think the degraded grease ends up? Its in your product! They sell ptfe sleeves to seal ground glass joints, thats what I use, In a pinch you can wrap with ptfe tape.

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Didnt you also mention using distillate vs grease a while back?

yep, I coat the ptfe sleeve with warm disty when assembling the glass. Everything except the cow, the drip tip keeps the distillate far away from that joint.

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I’ve been told sealing with distillate is risky for seizing and cracking. Something about two pieces of glass heating at different rates. Have you had issues with this? How about you, @Roguelab?

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Never had glass sieze or crack from this, by that logic the receiving flasks would break as soon as hot product hit them. The thing to avoid is dissimilar materials, for instance imagine if you had a male joint made from stainless steel inside a glass female joint. The male joint steel joint would have a higher coefficent of expansion, therefore it would break the female joint. The exeption to this rule is really large glass apperatuses, which often have a “bellows” section so they may strech or shrink without cracking.
I don’t use just distillate by the way, there is a layer of ptfe in there too. Another example imagine you were going to distill fuming nitric acid, they use sulpheric acid on the joints to seal them. There is more than one solution out there for sealing!

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Vac greese is one of the many examples of disinformation in this industry. Ptfe sleeves all day.

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@Soxhlet gave all there is to say
And his invention If greasing with disstalate works for me even at high vacuum with the beauty of his teck No contamination of Distillate possible

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Will just using the PTFE sleeves or tape hold vacuum well without the distillate coating? I bought the Dow vacuum grease but I think I’m going to avoid it on my first run from what I’m reading here.

Probably not You Will most probably Need Some Grease

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Cool, thanks. I plan on running hemp crude so I don’t want to contaminate with THC, do you think using CBD distillate will work the same for the joints?

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I literally just tried that yesterday, and it wasn’t working for me when I got into 200+ degrees. Unfortunately, the CBD distillate is just too low of viscosity, especially at those temps. And just like you, I don’t want to use THC distillate to contaminate my CBD. I had to whip out the Apiezon. It worked fine for the lower temp joints though.

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I have run them dry, I do that in the flasks on the cow. Once you get the joints together gently rotate and push in with the ptfe tape. You will see the tape deform and fill any void.

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Are you putting distillate on both sides of the sleeve? It didn’t work for me on the neck of the boiling flask with CBD distillate but worked on all the other joints just fine.

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Wrap the male joint, then apply some HOT distillate to the female joint in several peices, push the joints together and rotate 180* forward and backward to spread the distillate.
I dont like joints greased with distillate on the cow, it tends to pull strings of ptfe off the tape when seporated. The dry tape leaves a perfectally clean joint in the receiving flasks.

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Kluber RT 15 is also a PFPE grease it came out years before Apiezon 501PFPE its $127 per 100 gram tube compared to $180 for Apiezon 501 100 gram tube

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I think im about to buy your last one from eBay :slight_smile:

hvs 100 all the way. LOL at the teflon

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Anyone have a consensus on dry PTFE sleeves vs sealed with disty?

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