Woooooot. The clear vision of experience is replaced by the chaotic buzzing confusion of beginner’s mind. Not sure how useful this will be but here it is.
I will be replicating the process that I saw done where I used to work. I have approximately 450g of first pass distillate that I have put through acid/base saline wash in hexane until it ran clear. I am putting 40g carbon and 40g bentonite directly in the boiling flask and then sacrificing a small animal to Hephaestus before switching on the sysystem.
Disaster! I had a bad leak that I isolated to the thermocouple adapter. The o-ring appears deformed. Luckily I had a spare. Vac down to 85 now but during the process of leak finding I somehow managed to let my mantle get up to 107 with air in the system and smoke was coming out of the oil cap on my pump. All appears normal now but who knows what the end product will be like. I can only assume these o-rings need to be replaced periodically.
I appear to be ramping up through temp much more quickly than I would be on a first pass.
I am also seriously questioning having put carbon and bentonite directly in the boiling flask (I went with 20g carbon and 20 bentonite). I have seen it done but now I have carbon in my head. Oh man this must look like comedy hour. Hahaha.
Check stuff from @anon42519203 he has some pretty great info posted on here and IG. He goes through nearly everything if you search here or look through his IG posts will have video.
I wound up getting some great looking and clean tasting distillate with two critical problems. 1) I had a massive Azulene fraction which caused almost half of my mains to be green. I switched flasks once it turned 100% clear and then recovered what is in the picture. 2) It just isn’t potent. It produces a non-psychedelic, fast fading high that reminds me of smoking old bong resin.
The plant material I ran was old. The crude I made sat in a hot shed for two months while I saved up for my SPD rig. Then due to sheer knowin’-nothin’-John-Snow-ness I took way, way too long to run both first and second pass, thinking that more time would always mean cleaner cuts between fractions. I think I managed to destroy any THC that might have been in it.
As for the azulene I just have more reading to do. As far as I understand it may have something to do with sulfur used during growing, a acidic boiling flask (maybe leftover citric acid from my saline washes?), or the bentonite I put in the bf.
On the upside, I started with old trim and managed to produce some clean distillate… just very low THC.
I do think I have been taking too long. I am making my second attempt at a second pass right now and this time I powered through to the heads in about 1.5 hrs.
Btw the green color completely faded in about 2 days and it looked golden. How weird is that? The green colored stuff also had what struck me at least as the unmistakable smell of butyric acid - smelled exactly like a sour beer. The smell faded with the color.
I am also terrible still at judging when I have hit tails and knowing when to switch over. So I took the main body from my first pass in two flasks. The second flask of mains was darker and terpier than the first. I am doing the second pass on each separately to see how they are different. This second pass is def darker in color than the one in the photo but I also left out the t-5 clay this time so that could be a confound.
