Curious how people with pour spouts on their collection tanks are making shatter? Seems to agitate everything too much when pouring out?
1 Like
We had one and it would nucleate the work, we tried a lot of things, shoot with more residual gas, let it sit longer in the oven with no vac didn’t work. So we would just pour, we then attached a hose to the pour spout and ran it to a smaller collection tank so we can do a final reduce and pour from that. Allowing us to run much more continuously.
1 Like
I have a pour spout and have 0 I mean 0 troubles making shatter. I littereally have not changed the sop except for the fact I no longer remove the bottom… I just pour out the top.
1 Like
My buddy bought a small 6in recovery vessel to attach to his pour spout with a hose . He uses it as a Honeypot and puts it on dry ice. He puts all of his runs into that honey pot two or three of them and pours it all at the end of the day on to four different pans. He was having serious nucleation just using the pour spout as well.
3 Likes
the Idea it is the pour spot causing this is interesting to me. I have never noticed a difference when I switched
3 Likes
Like mentioned above, this should have zero effect in your final product. Agitation causing nucleation is a myth. There’s something else wrong with your SOP.
6 Likes
If your butane solution is homogenized prior to evaporating the solvent, you can agitate mildly with no nucleation. However, if your solution is precipitating solids (cold) you will increase the likelihood of nucleation.
2 Likes
I have literally ran 60+ runs with no nucleation. While also creating at least 30+ plus runs with nucleation. But it was always intentional. The other thing to keep in mind is higher levels of thca in a supersaturated solution will precipitate out. That is basic chemistry. The runs nucleation most likely have a higher concentrated of thca then his norm
2 Likes
In other words… squirt it out hot and soupy 
6 Likes
The shop I used to work at made plenty of shatter using an extractor with a downspout, and had little issue with nucleation, just as some of the others in this thread have been saying.
Cool, thanks for the responses! Think I’m starting to figure it out. I believe not depressurizing the collection tank before pouring may be the culprit as that will make everything violently shoot out from the pour spout.
1 Like
I’m gonna “me too” on the “pour spout works”, with the admonishment that leaving yesterday’s pour in the spout will add seeds to today’s pour…based on my observations of others practices
2 Likes
I will second the fact that if you have old material at all left behind in your lines or else where that it may cause early nucleation.
I’m not sure that is your problem either… I use at time 20 psi of pressure. No real need to honestly unless your product is so thick due to the lack of butane you need to liquify with pressure
My question is wouldnt the seeds redisolve back into the mix. Eliminating the seed from growing
I’ve had issues with the spout as well! We run with a honey pot on one system and a spout on another. Zero nucleation on the honey pot pour off vs nucleation issues with the spout on our other system. We clean the spout in between each run and always have our pressure around 1psi when opening the valve on spout. I’ve tried everything i can think of and still have issues here and there. Definitely noticed a huge difference with low pressure and clean spout.
1 Like
Only if you want them to grow.
If the object of the game is flawless shatter, then a dirty pour spout will wreck it.
Every time? No. But repeatably enough that you’ll see it within your first 1/2dozen pours imo.
3 Likes
Interesting…
I flush my system every batch which goes threw the spout back into the flush tank. We also clean our flush tank once every 2 weeks by distilling it and start over. I wonder if there is possibly build up still stuck in both our spouts. I’m pretty confident my spouts clean but 220 batches later on this setup and I havent taken it apart.
I have even gone as far as flushing each line and cleaning material columns, filter plates, hemis, filter housing, collection pot and every piece of the spout at the end of each day and still managed to get nucleation. We always properly dry our material and purge with low temps and gentle vac as well. When I use the other system with pour off, we will only get nucleation if intended. I’ve even used the spout to spray off into glass beaker and poured from there with a little extra solvent to check that and still managed to have nucleation. This has been done with the same material from the same batch on different systems so I do have many controls in my experiments. In conclusion i always come back to spout vs honey pot pour off being the main difference. I would honestly say we only get nucleation on about 15%-20% of my slabs but still kills me not to understand why. Just adding one more reason why i want to get shatter out of our inventory. Luckily the market is finally realizing that badders and sugars/sauces are more enjoyable extracts.
2 Likes