Whats the viscosity like? What was the starting materials age? High terp or low terp or unknown? How much residual tane, did you recover your collection pot to vacuum levels and if so how low?
Try to determine if you are undersaturated, supersaturated or getting to the amorphous/glass transition.
Is your solutions solvent terp or tane dominant.
How stable are your temps and what is the temp range?
If you get tiny grains"sugar" or jelly or some slight sugaring then stalling cause its thickening, your solution is in the supersat / amorphous area of the curve. In this case, usually, to get larger/more growth you would need to decrease your saturation levels which mean increasing your solvent amount OR increasing your solutions solubility with temperature manipulation, aka warm your solution.
There is a large range of possibilites required, some of my varieties need to be heated to 120-130 to get results like ive posted, others require temps below freezing before they get into the supersaturated or meta stable zones.
What a miner allows one to do is manipulate the amount of below room temp boiling point solvents. This is primarily a advantage if your starting material is lacking in natural solvent(terps). In the case of my varieties that I take to 120+ degree’s, If I had a miner I would be able to add butane to my solution to lower its solubility vs raising the temps.
Another important factor is the solutions vessel size, headspace, and surface area to volume. Thinner solutions have less freedom for molecular movement, basically meaning they’d be more prone to precipitate vs larger singles.
Look just as much into “why” as we do “how” will benefit anyone who wants to grow crystals.
We are growing diamonds in 7 pressure vessels (by BHOGART), under slight N2 pressure (around 100-150). We have noticed some growth in some vessels, and barely any action in the others. Will agitating the vessels (shake, move around, etc) once vessels have been seeded be beneficial? I am kind of a noob on this topic, but I have a strong grasp of chemistry.
Thats what i was thinking seed it then give some pressure back and should get going first time i tried i had no activity until i seeded and gave built more pressure still failed at diamonds got notbing but sugar but i agitated so much through the process
freeze the jar/miner to lower the psi.
once psi is 0 you can remove the lid, and drop a seed crystal on top of the frozen mass. Place the lid back on the vessel and continue where you left off. That is how I seed the solutions.
Chances are the saturation levels are about off on the ones that are not growing, try reducing the solvent level or increasing. Too little solvent seems to guarantee sugar…
Oh i hope no one was injured. Ive only been able to crack mason jars taking them too low of temps during winterization. Always thought the lid would bulge before the jar would crack. If all that was lost was some oil and no one was injured…consider yourself lucky! Its only oil and can be replaced. Thanks a million for showing me this…Despite having a miner. I insist of going with jars for convenience!
Maybe the glass was compromised prior to capping. Maybe we should be inspecting our mason jars before capping. Might be a good practice to preach!
Okay, so, we etched the glass on the bottom, we always have but I believe that compromised the glass, we also capped a little early like right at the 1/3 mark, nobody was injured we always leave the jars overnight once capped, the jar was in a 3 sided box the vac oven came in, honestly you may be sticky covered in oil but I don’t think it would injure you, perhaps wearing safety glades when handling jars should be a must, maybe gloves also…
Also it was a new jar, but it seemed like a thinner glass so be aware when purchasing not to get the ones that have no markings I think the designs add some strength to the glass
Safety glasses seem like a must have. Stout gloves too would be my recommendation. Not sure another side on that box would be a bad idea either. (I actually assumed there was another side, and that it had moved…)
Pretty sure having a canning jar do that would make you unhappy if it happened in your hand. I had more than one soda bottle dry ice “bomb” go off in my hand as a youngster, and those plastic lids can draw blood every now and then…
