Opaline Silica Thread

@Curious_Roberto, Cotton is perfect as long as you do NOT allow it to compress in the direction of flow.
Use a fast flow mesh screen below them, so they cannot escape through any port holes (they can, believe me!).
You can then place cotton balls, spirals facing up, side by side tightly to fill all the gaps in a space that is about the same height as the cotton balls. I like to rub the fibers across the top, too, to ensure all the gaps are covered. You do not want more than the length of maybe half a cotton ball of open space above them, because if you ever have any backpressure (it happens!), it can blow your balls all out of whack! No bueno!
Then put a supportive fast flow mesh screen gasket over them to lock them in place, and also to support any weight above them, so they do not get crushed (crushing down would be compression in the direction of flow).
This is what I use below every biomass vessel, as well as any media vessels. It filters very fine and fast, and rarely will it ever clog outright!

I have only used this media for BHO and propane… I use gas delivery propane at room temperature to generate compressible pressure in BHO systems… nitrogen is considered an “incompressible gas”. Yes, you can use liquid propane in this media, as well as other alkanes.

At least 1 or 2 people I told at GLG want to try it with red distillate in higher alkane (e.g. n-heptane, n-pentane) solution.

I have also yet to try it with ethanol solutions of crude resin or distillate.

I do not have a lab right now, so some good people have offered to do these experiments and let me know how it goes! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

@randlerimper , You are correct that silicosis is no joke. It is painful at best and deadly at worst! Amorphous hydrated silica (like this opaline type) does not cause silicosis the way glass fiber (amorphous non-hydrated silica), sand, quartz, and cristobalite crystalline silica do. However, nearly ALL dust from the earth contains some levels of crystalline silica. Dab rigs and bangers are made of silica, and even frosted glass and “quartz” types, which can shed silica particles. We breathe silica, the bad kind, every day, in fact. Luckily, any ultra fine silica dust that could possibly make it through the processing filters from CRC would be trapped in the sticky reclaim, water and convoluted airways inside dab rigs. Even if you got a silica contaminated dab, you would probably breathe less silica from it than you would breathe driving through a dust cloud from a nearby tractor tilling a dry field. :v:

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