Hey friends!
I had an idea, since most of you great folks are from the United States, I might have found an interesting opportunity for some of us.
I find theres a pretty gross “weed up-charge” that seems to get thrown on any equipment that’s used for the cannabis industry.
I’ve got a local glassblower that does very high quality custom lab glass. They’re also fairly reasonably priced ($300 for a dual neck 5L, $40 for a 1L round, $600 for a custom short path head, $475 for a mono-cow valve)… Now… The very best part… These are all in Canadian dollars!!! So that takes these prices down about 30% compared to you Uncle Sam bucks!!
I wanted to crowd source an “ideal” short path system (5L and 20L). All the bells and whistles, full bored, more necks than a hydra, etc. Etc.
I was hoping they’d prototype the system for me in trade for the design specs and sales… So… Win win win!!!
Anyone want to help me on the design? Any pieces and parts we’ve all been drooling over?
Also, please post if you’d be interested in a system and what price you’d need to work with in order to be interested!
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Could they make me some glass liners?
Likely? Send me some specs
To line a 5 gallon aluminum pot this one
You can do silvering yourself at home, but the real effectiveness of silvered glass is really observed when coupled with vacuum insulation.
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What do you use all the necks for?
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No shit? I’ll have to look up how to do that now. Glad I didn’t pay the markup for a silvered head if that’s the case.
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The chemical used for silvering is silver nitrate, used the same way you would to make a DIY mirror.
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Some of the larger (20L) systems run with a double short path head setup for faster throughput.
I’d try to keep the glass joints to a minimum and use a wider head. Joints leak and leak more as they age. This is why we use heads instead of a distillation adapter and condenser. Obviously a short path is also made to decrease surface area, but really at some scale just redesigning the head makes sense. There isn’t much sense worrying about having the smallest head if you are putting x L per hour through it.
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You might want to check a local powder coating spot for a PTFE coating. It’s better than glass imo (my souls weeps to say this I am quite a fan of boro! Hash oil is as old as time but the value of it was negligible until we had a way to smoke it.)
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I’ve got designs I’m working through right now. An adjustable packing type head to move from 500ml flasks to 12L
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So my first thoughts. Of the top of my head but!
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theoretical plates! I’m an alcohol distiller by trade, the first thing you do to take your abv from a 50% run to a 95.8% is add interference. Like any fractionating more surface area and more cycles of vaporizing and condensing, increase compound separation. I think adding height while increasing some little nubs or beads would be an improvement. This comes at a trade-off of potentially slower takeoff rate?
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Dephlegmator - something widely used in alcohol distilling is a defleg, it’s essentially a condenser at the top of the column that when ran cold it prevents compounds from passing through. It keeps everything in reflux creating very fine separation. You then control the takeoff rate via defleg condenser temperature. This would allow very very fine fractionating. In theory it could separate things so finely at the right takeoff rate that you could get 99% thc in a first pass.
(As a note I can take 3% alcohol up to 95.8% alcohol with my setup, no easy feat, and impossible without defleg & interference).
- Cold traps! I hate replacing my vacuum oil. I don’t know what I’d change exactly, other than that the current systems don’t have much surface area before they hit the pump. If it was built well enough you don’t even need dry ice in it. I was thinking multi thin chambers so it gives it a long cold vapor path. If you never had to buy dry ice or change your pump oil… It’s well into the thousands of dollars per year!
my first thoughts! Please throw criticism at me hard!
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I like the adjustable packing idea 
They said they’d do silvering
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Number 3 would be great, but I already see an issue with impeding flow. With everyone seeing such spectacular results from going full-bore, I’d assume creating a bottleneck with thin chambers at the cold trap would make such advancements in increased throughput pointless.
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However, I CAN see a market for cold traps used in the mechanical cold traps being custom made with KF25 fittings!
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Correct me if I’m wrong…
The full bore results are based on the lack of smell while running hot condenser right? So the full bore allows for additional volitailes to not condense and instead fly into the cold trap? We do the full bore design to prevent blockage?
It seems we just need high bore on the first “stage” to catch those compounds, then the remainder can be a narrower higher surface area path?
I was thinking of also trying to potentially combine materials? Or inlay some stainless into the cold trap for better conduction?
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Kf25 fittings… Sounds like a good idea.
