Sambo: First, let me say your work is notable. Congrats…
You make quite a deal about separating heads and stalks.:
I don’t know if many know this or not but stalks from hand sifts (say about 150u bag) in rosin processing which are looked down upon for pressing, actually make excellent biomass for selective extraction of Cannabinoic acids, pentane, alcohols, or water tek…so do not discard.
Are you marketing your electrostatic device to sift for fine hash ? Or as a general mechanical process to refine biomass for further chemical extractions.
I would like to see COA of input material, and then both green and red. If the input is like 70 to begin with…it is a disminishing return going toward a more pure mechanical separation excepting for perhaps the finest hash on earth.,
Depending on the strain chemisry.
I am not sure you can really compare your refined electrostatic method to CryoMass Unit. The scales and inputs are so different. Although photomicrographs for their Out put tirichome fraction …sort of resemble your input photo , if my memory servers me. Personally, because of my knowledge of stalk-extraction, I don’t see any reason to get rid of them …in terms of costs and time…
Quickest thing and I am sure you have done it, is have your friends hit up both the green and red piles in a hash pipe…
(Do a blind test) , I think you will be surprised. Keep me posted.
A number of years ago, using water Tek, we developed a proprietary method of stripping ing the chlorophyll out of the stalks and leaving the THCA behind to produce a “white hash”.
Edit: added photo of original stalks fraction. The rosin fellows I worked with rejected this upper fraction and the lower sub 50u fraction that contained the reddish brown.
Stalks in general have an unpleasant flavor, at least when pressed for rosin.
So much of what we do as a company is to remove contaminants from other chemical processes; Winterization, Color Remediation etc… The Plasmastatic process is the only true solventless process to remove contaminants from the round heads. The process is scalable and can isolate round heads that contain cannabinoids from everything else. By removing stalks and other contaminants you remove most of the potential issues common in other methods.
We beleive the value in the technology is that its a scalable way to isolate round trichomes like we do in IWE/CWE, without the waste or high CAPEX and OPEX. The spent biomass can be reprocessed via solvent extraction. Cost savings and higher quality products are also a benefit.
The COA of the feed, heads and tails is in the previous post on this thread. You can download and check that out.
As for the Cryomass question, Plasmastatic would take the feed from their device (or Resinator, Pollinator, Green Fantasy, etc…) and clean that up by separating out round, mature trichome heads.
In mining I worked with static separators that did many tons per hour. We have designs that can be scaled to ANY size. Remember this is not an extraction device. Think of it as a glorified sieve that can sort particles, in part based on their size and chemistry.
Yes, I am aware of what you have…
I like the idea of CryoMass to Cold plasma clean up…
So your product would be multi use:
1.Hash
2.Rosin press
3”many ways” Extraction biomass.
It can, or cannot be used with fresh wet biomass.
Yes , no? Is there a minimum level of dehydration necessary?
High end Rosin quality demands fresh frozen sourced material…some what like a “cult”?
Sorry I missed those COA’s …right there.
When doing water TEK for Cannabinoic Acids no one is going for TERP TASTE or any other taste…just pure cannabinoic acid…The pour taste is most likely they are put aside for high quality rosin. When rosin-folk hit up water processed THCA they usually say something like, I didn’t know you could get that high on a marijuana product….the 3 big deep draw people… By the time they realize how fucked up they are…they have usually forgotten all about the rosin taste.
There is no reason why the industry has not switched over to trichomes as the preferred biomass for extraction. The future is trichome separation (biomass reduction)in the field or nearby, no transportation and about 90 % reduction in biomass space volume and weight for storage.…It is most preferable biomass for water TEK…
Your process is an intergral aspect of the “future” of 4200.
Off topic
Did I exchange a note with you about dropping by your operation last April?
Just peaked at your analytics …they look good. Very nice and honest. How would you decide to describe a standard value of percent yield based on dry weight pre dry sift or post dry sift?
Do you find a difference in yield of Hemp trichomes vs Marijuana trichomes.
Think of a pseudo one step water process that brings that number to 90%. I think the time factor can be reduced considerably. IN fact there should be a section here on extraction chemisry…trichome biomass to 90% THCA of methods under 10 minutes (smokeable product to distinguish from hashish) . Of course HPLC’s do this day in and day out…by I mean some jar tek., open blast or CO2. Diamonds are just a marketing fad…
Just thinking of the day when all biomass is trichomes.
Plasmastatic can remove round trichomes from dry kief, fresh frozen kief, and dry IWE/CWE.
In my opinion sift extracted trichomes are “better” than IWE/CWE extracted ones because of the loss of terps in water and in the freeze drier. Some people don’t like high terps, but the Plasmastatic technology puts you in control of that.
What I like the most about Sift/Plasma combo is you can have a final product the same day vs a few days to rosin using water. Of course also the fact that there is no wasted biomass as you can BHO, etc… the spent biomass. Notice the COA’s where there is still lots of cannabinoids in the spent bio. In some cases where bio doesn’t “wash” well, there would no longer be a tradeoff as you can first sift/plasma, and then solvent extract.
Companies are building systems where you can cryo kief on the field and remove 80% of the biomass, then plasma at the lab followed by solvent extraction.
Yields to kief and from kief vary wildly. I’m sure someone like TJ or Matt would give more precise answers but as a rule of thumb I use 20% of the bio weight into kief. Huge size reduction which makes the process interesting for in-field preprocessing. I also think doing a vigorous extraction and going for yields is key, since we no longer are concerned about shitty kief (we can fix that now).
From kief lets say you would have 10-20% TC. If you sieve that to remove fines and oversize, you achieve a bump like we did and increase potency to 40%. From there getting to 80+% heads on plasma is inevitable. Getting to 98-99% however is an artwork. Any enthusiast can make bubble, but you need a pro to make full melt, same with Plasmastatic; that’s the analogy anyways.
Back to your question, your yields are what they are. You can generally collect most round trichome heads. If you kief has say 40% heads, you will get good yields. If its mostly sesile trichomes, yields will suck. Also, remember stalks have cannabinoids, so just because bio has high potency, it doesn’t mean you can collect that. You don’t collect all heads because of liberation issues and because some heads are just empty shells with nothing inside, so this issue isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Whatever isn’t collected is post processed so no worries. Like water extraction, Plasmastatic would require you to breed/grow for head morphology. Unlike water extraction, Plasmastatic isn’t wasteful.
I’m thinking ….full melt rosin press…is the “crown jewel”… in terms of marketable product. If your highest quality trichome head fraction fits that criteria, then you have a product …or “the product”. HMM. Adding the taste/strain concept…there is really no limit to the upscale glamor price.
Yield …really doesn’t matter.
Do you have numbers on the wasteful aspects of water extraction? That is an interesting comment…do you mean water washed/separated trichomes, being wasteful…or do you mean water extraction of biomass.? I have no knowledge of Sambo Creek’s expertise in the water extraction field. You understand when I say water TEK I mean base-water extraction as opposed to BHO,EtOH & Co@. Not washing machine mechanical. Yes we work with full melt discards.
Which product from your cold plasma processing would you consider equivalent to “full melt”?
I’m a little confused about the input biomass state. Are you saying you can put fresh frozen buds into you machine?
But also, I am not familiar with the design of your “cold plasma” chamber or high voltage separator? Is there a patent diagram available?
I agree with the concept of breed/grow for head morphology….the future. Hemp has a long ways to go.
I would say any trichome storage head process…probably yields 1-2%
But the number/concept needs some sort of “definition”.
Especially in the sense, when you say you are at the 80% + heads…what is the THCA content. Is the end point of the highest quality plasmonic trichomes 50% THCA? If you are looking for a material for full melt pressings…then yes it useful. but if you are intending to extract the material as biomass…it is sort of wasteful in another sense to over purified you “heads”. If trichome heads have a 50% cannabinoic acid limit…well that is it…that is a good number for the upper limit…if you send them in freeze dried for COA we might boost that fraction up a bit.
Do you have a reference for the people working with liquid nitrogen processing in the “field”?
With some finessing we can achieve 99% pure trichomes; this of course is full melt. Like I said, getting 80% ish heads is inevitable. <95% is straightforward just more work. 99% takes skill or manual labor.
I’m referring to Ice Water/Cold Water Extraction to extract trichomes, and not using water as a solvent.
Here is some quick math on what I mean as wasteful. These numbers are not the end all/be all and I can poke holes over any of these assumptions, however the point is the point. Money is left on the table.
In this exercise I am a lab processing 2,000 pounds of fresh frozen which I buy at $100 a pounds and contains about 8% cannabinoids. Lets assume COA would infer we would get about 72 kg of disty out of that.
So I take that bio, wash it and im lucky and about 40% of those cannabinoids are recoverable heads, so I get say 21kg of rosin once pressed. Keep in mind we are shooting for high quality so we have to be gentle in water agitation. With Plasmastatic we would hit that bio hard, so we will usually have higher yields for this reason. When we press for rosin, those stalks just pile up in the pucks so let’s just say our yield to rosin is 80%. Whatever.
With IWE, we left 45kg of cannabinoids behind. You may test the wet flower for potency and say, not much was left on it. But math is math and 8 - 3 does not equal 1. The rest of your cannabinoids went down the drain as they went straight through your 25u bag.
With plasma you take the spent bio and solvent extract that and recover most of that value quite easily. This month say you got an extra $80k from disty. That’s what im talking about.
99% Round trichomes is what I mean as full melt. You can feed the machine a powder, so Kief. That can be kief from dry biomas or Fresh Frozen, or bubble after freeze-drying. You can keep the supply chain cold and produce fresh frozen trichomes at a very high purity. The coldest we have tested is at -20C so I doubt this could not process the greasiest hash given the right environment.
In the COA posted above, 99% trichome heads maxed out at about 80% cannabinoids. In effect it is impossible for this feed to have higher potency. The balance is terps, and the solids from the trichome shell itself. We know the sample was 99% because you can visually see this in a microscope, one stalk or one piece of bio here and there rarely. Im sure other samples would test higher or lower. Rosin would always test higher as you eliminate the shells in the process.
Cryomass, Python Industries, Resinator, Green Fantasy and a bunch of other guys are getting into the business of processing at the field. We don’t mess with that extraction part as they have patents on what they do. We just take if from where they leave off. We are however these guy’s best friend. We should be anyways cause our technology complements theirs.
S.C. Thank you for answering my rather lengthy questions.
Yes, I did not see the final COA at 99% Trichome Heads.
Very nice.(73% THCA)…
Using such a sample , it would be of greatest value to the community if you could do a AES to get specifically, Na, K, Ca and Mg numbers associated with such a pure product.
X-ray fluorescence would do as well.
It would be also of greatest value to get a relative value of Palmitamide value. Early work has suggested based on Total Ion Curretnt values of Palmitamide values being similar to major cannabinoic acid values. 79 total cannabinoid and 5.5 terp…we are accounting for 84.5% of the total dry (freeze dried) weight. Doesn’t leave much mass left over on a mole basis for ion pairing with other organics. Taking the hulls into account…it may force one to think of homologous conjugate base H bonded to an acid form (50/50) as a storage form. A potassium 1:1 ion pair with THCA anion would make about 83%… Something to think about. How does this material flow when pressed. ?
I wonder how only 5.5 % terp can facilitate mass transport in a rosin press. Liquid salts , or melted pure cannabinoic acid. I’m guessing the rosin needs a high temp to flow…and seems rather crystalline…or do you get crystalline material left in the rosin bag? Just curious. Or your water value is far more than near 0 and you have hydrates by the time you press.???
Hopefully I am not boring you with such questions, but it is not every day one gets to talk with someone , with such pure trichomes in hand . Moreover, you seem rather knowledgeable.
Thanks again.
Regard,
Can you elaborate why this would be of value? Not following your train of thought. Any labs in Washington State we can send samples to?
Again, please elaborate as i’m not following. Are you saying some Palmitamides may be mistaken as cannabinoids?
All this sounds interesting and i’d love to educate myself more. I crowdsourced the Plasma development to a small degree. The YouTube channel help me a lot as I got lots of feedback and ideas I hadn’t thought of before. Needless to say I appreciate the feedback and is why I post. There is so much I don’t know about the Plasmastatic that needs figuring out to perfect the process. Currently the pace of innovation on the device is insane, so much data to comb over.
I have some fan mail from our friend circle: we heart this process!
Will plasmastatic ever be viable for us old school home hashers?
Like will you ever be able to perform this at home for less than 5-10k? I’ve been following the thread but have no idea how much flux capacitors cost in this instance. If we aren’t seeing them I’m assuming it’s prohibitively expensive.
Legalities of home use aside of course. They’ll never take our buckets!
I’ve watched a ton of @SamboCreeck.com youtube videos but the engineering side is over my head. I don’t have time to figure it out but I’d be interested in a magic little electrickery box that refines my trim bin dry sift into a purer product. It’s already potent and tastes great but I know it would be better without the green bits. I need to get some screens and play with it manually but the idea of semi-automated electrostatic separation sounds much more enticing to me.
I’m interested mostly in the engineering aspect myself, but I know a few old heads who would absolutely love to have a little home version of one of these.
In theory this can be done. However I think a home version should retail for $3k or less.
Unless you go fully offshore, I don’t know how to make that happen. Even then there are some obstacles.
For example, you need to tribo charge particles. We do this with a suction feeder and the polymer hose we manufacture. Someday soon we should be able to make a container of this hose relatively cheap. The suction feeder needs compressed air, which add more cost to the device cause well you need an air compressor.
Size is another cost, as tribocharging is a function of friction which takes a certain residence time meaning the damn tube must be long AF. I wont keep going but my point is that if we can do this with a screen and a glove for $300, why would anyone pay $3k for the same thing?
I already have a design for the home device, but until I overcome other cost concerns it won’t happen. This will happen as soon as we get the sales volumes necessary to reduce costs. But will there be enough diehard fans to ever make this a mass manufactured product?
What does the community say? What is the price point people would pay for a home device? What capacity would make sense for that price?
This part is evolving. We are currently making a steel version and automatic cleaning plates, and fine tuning the device each day.
I think going big will help me go small.
I must say I am getting huge support from companies offering free engineering support, including huge companies in the electrostatic space. Seems there are lots of smokers out there that want to see this tech succeed.
Lots of novel methods and applications for plasmastatic are coming next MJBIZCON. The ride will be wild!
Just remember unleashing a small version for the home market will help protect the public by minimizing the “want to use butane at home.”
Making something that uses this Tek and can move up to 1lb for home use and making something that can be marketed as: “trichome refinement before you press rosin.” Would absolutely disrupt the dry sift/water hash/[hash]rosin/solventless hash area.
That won’t work unfortunately. I even tried making my own powers supply with capacitors, and even using a powdercating gun. I discussed this in our Youtube channel series, TriboElectric tuesdays where I teach the concepts for a DIY machine.
Watch this video and you can see the power supplies normally used in the process. Unfortunately the device in this video is $250k so we had to cut some corners.
I guess when you can make a smaller one you can charge whatever the newest iPhone costs.
Seems like people are fucking crazy enough to spend over 1k$ on a phone. The et+oh was selling for 1,200$ for a while. I’m guessing the tam was 1,200$ at one point. AI ovens at 0.9cu ft I think are 1,200$. A good starting bho extractor is around 1,200$. And finally a starter Chinese rotovap is 1,200$.
This is first pass of tumbled kief running about a kilo of input per hour. You can see a good bit of tails and contaminate still but we’re estimating about 80-85% heads under the scope. Wanted to press for shits and giggles and see what if any greasing may occur.
