OK It's here! and it works!
Ta Dah!!
Mechanical Dry Ice Kiefer/Hashish Extractor
I am so excited to unveil the mechanical dry ice kiefer/hash maker. It actually works! All the images are clickable to bigger versions.
You need these things:
You need 2 25s, 1 75, 1 100, 1 200, and 1 400 of the screens. If you can afford more than 2 25s, get 2-4 more.
Start with the jiggly thing, which comes unassembled. If you're high when you put it together, take it from me, turn it upside down. All the clever ways you can think of to keep those little square nuts in their space do not work when it is right side up. Trust me on that.
Once you've got it together, flip it over, and put the post in. Now, you'd normally put the lid on with the wing nut. Put the lid on but save the wing nut. Drill a 1/4" hole in the center of a bucket. Put the bucket on the post, and now put the wing nut on. Your machine is pretty much complete at this point!
A note on drill bits - the ones for wood, on the right, make cleaner holes and are easier to push through plastic buckets.
First you use a second bucket to freeze your trim/bud. Put the second bucket in the machine. Fill with shattered dry ice and trim - it works best when there's twice as much plant as dry ice. Say 2 inch of trim then 1 inch of dry ice and layer til you're out of trim. Put a 25 micron screen on the bucket just to keep any CO2 vapor from carrying away any kief. Turn the jiggler on and let it go for 5 minutes - this is just to freeze the trim. If you're working with more than 3 or 4 inches of trim, stir it once or twice during this time. If you're using cured bud, skip this step.
A note about plant matter and dry ice and jiggling time - If you start with fresh trim, you're going to take a long time to freeze and start producing kief. As it jiggles, crush the frozen stuff between your fingers, remove the stems that jiggle up to the top, stir it pretty frequently. The smaller the pieces, the faster this process goes. If you start with large cut fresh trim, it will be like ground shake in an hour. If you start with ground stuff, you start jiggling out the kief faster in the process.
Take this bucket out of the machine. Put a 25 micron screen in the machine. If you're using fresh trim, put the 400 micron screen in the 25. Put the trim and dry ice and jiggle the piss out of it until it's hard frozen, crumbles easily in your fingers with gentle pressure, and you've picked out most of the stems. Check it every 30 seconds or so, and once you start to see stuff coming through the 400 onto the 25, take the 400 screen out and set it aside. Check your 25 and scrape it if necessary. Put your trim and dry ice in the 75 screen and put the 75 screen in the 25 screen in the machine. Jiggle for 10 minutes. Move the trim and ry ice to the 100 screen and jiggle for 10 minutes. Move it to the 200 screen and jiggle for 10-30 minutes. Stir the trim around in the screen periodically. Crush any large buds you find. Take out stems. Lift the top screen periodically - when the color changes to green, you're done. Empty the screens. At this point, I put all the trim back in the 100 screen, set it in a 25 screen and put it back on the machine. I let it run until the dry ice was all sublimated. Just to see what I would get.
If you're using dry buds - say an ounce or two, stack the screens in order 25, 75, 100, 200, 400 and put your crushed dry buds in the 400 with the shattered dry ice. Turn it on. Wait about 30 minutes.
It jiggles best when the top screen is no more than 3/4 full. In the beginging before every thing was really frozen well, it wouldn't fit in one screen, so I took a 3rd bucket, cut the bottom off of it, and extended the sides of my 400 screen by setting the bucket inside it. Nothing was coming out the 400 screen, though, so I picked all the big stems out, crushed the ice up smaller, and did it by thirds in the 400 screen until it all compressed enough to fit in the screen at once.
What I find really handy is having several extra 25s. I can take it out and be scraping it while I'm running the ice/trim mix over a spare 25.
You should wear gloves and you should stir the buds with a wood spoon and not your hands. Otherwise you get kief all over yourself.
It's kinda cool while it's on, the stuff that has filtered down onto the 25 screens jiggles itself into little balls.
I got 2 g of 75, 3 g of 100, and I quit weighing the 200 at around 18g. I'll put all the 200 into a stick of butter, I think, and bake something.
You can tell which of the 200 was collected later based on how green it was.
I wanted to not miss anything, so I moved my trim/ice mix from the 75 to 100 to 200 screens several times over. I probably could have put it all in the 400, stacked them up in order, and walked away for 45 minutes too. I mean, if I were someone else.
