I like to dry sift onto glass like a large mirror or picture frame, or a glass table. I use my TrimBin with the 150 micron screen and a vibrating tool to shake the bin with, it works great but I don’t love the static cling of the polypropylene bin, though it is smooth enough it scrapes up easily. I used to use a desktop kif box I’ve had for decades but it’s just too small and not nearlg as efficient as this approach. Glass or sheet metal, no problems with that. This next time around I think I’m going to just use the top half of the TrimBin with the screen, sitting on a large mirror, that should be easier to gather up at the end. Cold temperatures and dry bud are the key to sifting, just like the traditional ways you want to let that bud get good and dry and cured, and sift it in subfreezing temps if you can, it’ll make the trichome heads brittle just like the ice water in the bubble process.
had to
Yeah, “Sift, Sift, Sift” somehow doesn’t work quite as well… 
It looks 
Tastes good, too! 
It’s not the greatest of pictures, it’s the last tumble i expected it to have a much high % of leaf matter, I’m absolutely delighted with what I’m seeing, not for a minute did i expect that % of resin after hours of tumbling.
Taken from the lid of my tub lol.
Great snapshots buddy! 
Thanks for saying, I’ve a couple of others you might be interested in.
They’re from a drop of run off, there’s a lot more life that doesn’t stand out I’m going to try staining a sample.
Cheers 
Run-off water?
What are you using to take these photos?
Yes from run off with coco and a+b nutrient.
It’s a compound microscope with a digital camera attached.
I see a lot of critters in my Coco After using Just A+B,It Is springtails jumping in runoff.Wonder how we got Life without organic nutrients/material added.Maybe they are in Coco coir?
@Star_Dog
Awesome; I will give this a try. (:
Remove sift material from plants, or sift parts, or whole plants?
I’m preparing a batch now, and the bottoms halves of a batch, and I wonder… Is it worth my time to take all these fan leaves off? and to take it a step further and remove all this bud from the stick too? I would imagine the fan leaves and sticks generally get in the way of my trichomes while sifting, and also that they add a significant amount of green particles to the end result. This extra material takes up space in my sifting bag, causing me to sift more batches, and also the sticks might hinder the mixing? It is tedious and time consuming to remove a bunch of fan leaves and sticks from this dry-sift raw material.
I take all fan leaves off right after cutting the plant down, then wash and dry them whole or in the largest chunks I can. At that point pretty much everything could just get sifted, depending on the strain I’ll go through and take out the smaller leaves with visible petioles and no frost and toss them. Anything with frost is worth dry sifting, to me.
You definitely need to remove the buds from the stems as much as possible and gently grind the herb to a rough joint-like consistency, I do that after letting it dry down to 50% humidity or lower because it goes fast when it’s crispy and more trichs fall off in the process. It is a bit tedious to do by hand but you can also just screen it through a medium metal mesh like a kitchen strainer or even a window screen. That’ll make a good consistency to sift, you want it broken up to shed trichome but not fluffy, still particles that will slide over each other since that friction is what knocks the trichome heads off besides vibration and shock.
Thank you for a prompt and informative reply; that’s exactly what I wanted to know. About gently grinding these buds, whats the best way to do it? A little hand grinder for smoking, will take a long time, and perhaps fancy blender is a bit too abrasive, chopping the trichomes into goo. Maybe it’s fine in the blender if I just pulsate a second or two? Maybe I need to go and buy some other kind of ‘gentle grinding machine’?
Drying this stuff out now, fan leaves removed, looking really nice
Yes, remove the leaves and grind the buds but not too fine
Hey buddy, I’ve read springtails actively seek food and water when there supply is getting low or the colony is getting too big, i also read that they get into tents through the zippers attracted by light.
Life in coco…
the dampness in coco is sufficient moisture for that scale of life to get around the world, if you look at what appears to be damp coco or perlite under a microscope its actually sufficiently wet for the creatures to swim freely around in it.
I’ve been recycling the same coco for around a 18 months, after i sieved out the bigger roots i leave the springtails to clean up the finer stuff.
For some reason there numbers are dwindling i couldn’t find one under the pot to put under the microscope 
I have tried the dry ice method and it makes the leaves completely brittle while the ice clumps smash the leaves even more and therefore you end up having lots of fine dusted green leaf material in the end product. It was very low quality.
Thank you bud that’s very helpful, lots of folks will be under the impression that ice or freezing is needed for dry sift and it’s not.
I would’ve been making sift for years had i know it could be so convenient to do.
My first attempt on hash was around 1996 and it was dry sift but didn’t go too well as the technique and material wasn’t very refined. So I went and did bubble hash since 2012 after growing again, which worked fine, but this thread makes me want to do a little dry sift with good material and tech and because I have everything laying around I probably will do it today or tomorrow. What can go wrong, yeah…