How to Turn Shatter Into Diamonds or Sauce

yea sorry i just meant to not use butane/pentane. the HTE seems to not be enough to make anything more than sauce. Do you have any ideas on what I can do to make increase the size of the crystals

With only hte, you’re most likely only going to get the applesauce consistency.

If you want rocks, you gotta use a solvent.

4 Likes

Hes getting rocks! Been coaching him through. He dissolved shatter into canna hte…sealed it and ramped temp…hes getting actually stones w no butane at all. Even though the terps are acting as solvent I thought that was pretty cool

10 Likes

That’s super cool! I am happily wrong haha

@stayjolly, care to share some pictures?

3 Likes

Its definitely looking like large sugar so far…I feel if he leaves sealed 2weeks and keeps hot they’ll keep growing

3 Likes

Good evening all!
Ive been reading on the forum now for several months, after landing a job pretty much entirely running a newly licensed BHO lab. I don’t work there anymore because of some safety and quality concerns and not being paid nearly enough for the amount of work i was doing and money I was making them, but that right there was how I got my start into hydrocarbon butane extraction. I do have quite a few college chem/bio courses under my belt as well, so i feel fairly confident that with the right equipment, i can do this (VVV) safely at home.

I have about 2 pounds of darker ultra-terpy sugarwax stored in mason jars that I have been holding onto until i would be able to polish/refine it into something not so ugly. id say it was extracted about 3 months ago and has been stored in a dark airtight environment around 70-75 degrees or so. I believe i have 5 or 6 different strains. Luckily only one of my jars has an old trim smell…you know that wet musty rotting grass smell. Im assuming this is a result of there being moisture in the material or even moisture collected in the extract itself as it has been sitting, albeit airtight…All of the other jars actually smell really nice, theyre just, well, dark. all of this extract is BHO, extracted with distilled 70/30 ntane/pane from milled dry-cure trim. solvent, material, and system all at ambient temp, around 60-65 degrees.

What I would like to do is turn this darker extract into something more aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing all of the terps. would love to end up with some golden sauce and some crystals. I have redissolved about 100g of the extract in room temp butane (all of this is CL). to do this, I added the buddery extract to the small vessel i am using, sealed it, pulled a hard vac on it, then sprayed some solvent in there. the extract fully dissolved at room temp almost immediately. i have had that vessel (basically a diamond miner) with the solution in my freezer for several days, and am hoping to get it cold enough to have some lipid coagulation and then use gravity and temp/pressure to push the solution into a small CRC vessel for filtration/dewax. the CRC vessel is from extractorsolutions, its the 1.5x12 inch and has a 1 micron sintered disc, as well as a 5-micron felt filter directly above that, which i locked into place using a piece from the BVV filter-plate/ring kit. everything pressure/vacuum tested. My idea here is to get the solution into the CRC vessel with heat/cold/pressure/gravity (ill have to flip the vessel that the solution is currently in upside-down to get it out), then drop the CRC into a cryo bath of dry ice/ethanol to re-coag lipid solids that are dissolved, and have a receiving (collection) vessel also in the cryo bath so that I can just lift the CRC/dewax vessel out of the bath (with some ice water and some warm water nearby incase i need to build pressure without inducing thermal shock on my vessel), open the bottom valve and let the solution flow through the filters and into the final vessel (additionally assisted by the vacuum inside the receiving vessel), leaving the lipids and some undesirable plant waxes behind. i’m talking about MAYBE 16 oz of solution total, and im hoping using/removing heat will be adequate enough to get all of my solution out of vessel A and into B and then through the filters and into C.

additionally, I have come chromatography powders and was thinking about adding a dash of silica 60 into the CRC vessel beforehand to pull some of the color out, but couldn’t find anything on the site about what happens when you’re not worried about channeling and don’t pack the powders down…can that be bad? will they definitely end up in my final product if theyre not packed? also since my solution will enter the CRC vessel at cryo temps, im not even sure the silica will work well enough to go through the trouble of using it until after the dewax. Assuming my filtration is adequate enough, if i let the silica slosh around in the vessel with the solution, could that be bad?
I have read that agitation affects absorption, along with temp and pressure, and powder:biomass ratio. also dilution of extract in solution 5:1 to 10:1. i’m thinking it would really only make a difference if i added way too much silica (or not enough solvent) and it slurps up my goodies.

I have some celite 545 on the way too so worst comes to worst, i end up with silica in my dabs and have to push it all back through a celite cake. right? or everything turns bright red or grey? lol
from what i understand celite 545 does nt have remediating properties and is only really used for the purpose of ultrafine filtration. will i really even need to use this with a 1 micron sintered disc and a felt filter above it, to take most of the load? seems redundant but i am inexperienced with silica.

****i bought the “30-200 micron davisil sphere chromatography monodisperse silica gel” from BVV. Any reviews? cant find anything on this stuff. it was cheap enough though, like $20 for a half kg. I have also used t5 before but never noticed it doing a whole lot on its own so i decided to try silica because it is believed to remove the darks more efficiently, apparently.

any input or ideas or experience would be appreciated! going to upload some before pics in a few minutes when i find my phone charger.

every time i come here i learn so much so im just hoping theres something i can contribute.

1 Like

Dissolve non crc’d oil with solvent inside of collection pot with dipstick or a wall mounted collection with a bottom drain, charge headspace with nitrogen, inject into crc, collect in another collection pot (dipstick is optional on this one)

You could add a fats catcher full of celite also, either on top of, or inline with your crc.

2 Likes

unfortunately i dont have a nitrogen setup, but thinking i may have to just bite the bullet and buy one

1 Like

No nitrogen necessary honestly. Just build positive pressure in the collection, vacuum down and cool another vessel, let it move itself over.

1 Like

Maybe not required

1 Like

@CuriousChemist22 exactly what im thinking. in theory it should work no problem

I forgot to consider getting through the crc in that explanation…

Melt in one pot, use the positive pressure in that pot to move it through the crc and into a chilled pot. Do you have pressure gauges in the two vessels you’ll be using?

1 Like

all vessels are gauged, the first ones i bought all leaked under 80 psi so i went swage :sunglasses:

1 Like

so instead of chilling my crc vessel, i should keep that at ambient or slightly above, warm my “dissolve pot” to get the push, and only chill my receiving vessel… this makes a lot of sense. it gives me a ‘warm’ crc cycle and prevents having to quickly go from subzero to 40F+ while soaking in the powders to transfer the solution. thanks!

To complicate things, but make for a guaranteed success, you might vac the recovery pot, add a small amount of butane and allow it to build a small amount of pressure, maybe even just 0psi, but of butane atmosphere for safety, because if the vacuum is too powerful you might evap your solvent before it carries the oil completely out of the crc.

You’ll still cool it by submerging it fully in dry ice, but when the run starts you’ll want it at 0psi, not at full vacuum.

1 Like

see thats a brilliant point, thats why I went in such great detail to ask. having the atmosphere in the collection ‘primed’ with butane is important because i don’t want it to be air, yes. but in regards to trying to doing it that way, instead of trying to use a vacuum in the collection vessel to aid in pulling solution through filters/media, it could be problematic because of the size of the collection vessel in relation to the amount of solvent im actually using. since i would be starting from vac, everything pulled into that vessel up to at least idk 5-10 psi will end up pretty much immediately vaporizing. i wouldnt really care if the vac completely pulled all of the butane into vapor and left me with shatter coating my collection vessel, because i could just redissolve again and tada job completed. whered id get screwed up is if the vac causes vaporization of all of the solvent* before all of the solution makes it into the collection pot. id likely end up with a severely clogged hose and would have to run more tane through.

do you think i should start butane-primed and at 0 psi in my CRC as well?

Here’s what I got so far from @StoneD help. Explaining everything that needs to happen to make stones.

Just shatter and hte, I see a bunch of diamonds forming on top laying that I’m assuming is gonna drop down and stack?

First time doing this and extremely happy!

21 Likes

Ur the fucking man!

No tane!

7 Likes

Some of that didn’t make sense to me, but for your straightforward question, it honestly won’t matter what pressure your crc is at as long as it’s not higher than your injection vessel.

i have acces to pure liquid terp oil. so if i disolve my shatter into that and jar and heat it diamonds will grow? ive been jaring and heating my shatter on hot plate and getting really good cake batter type consistency if i whip it

3 Likes