Contributed by: Smokinrav
Cheap and easy trichome collection, making a simple shaker…
Hash is one of the greatest by-products of our favorite herb, but I've never found a truly easy way to make it, without being horribly inefficient or spending cash on things like bubble bags or trying to find anyone that sells silk screen. Previously, I've used the blender hash method and have made butter, but they have always left me wanting the true goodness of some compressed trichomes and wondering how much I was wasting. The method I'm going to describe below uses household or easily obtainable materials and in less than 15 minutes you can be smoking almost pure trichomes
The materials:
- A jar the size of a 16 oz pickle jar or a medium sized tupperware container.
- Rubber bands
- Panty hose (nylons)
- A smooth, hard surface to shake over and scrape from. I use a glass table.
- Some kind bud
Processing:
Remove most of the stems and break up the bud as much as you want. I personally don’t break it up much, I like to just let it pulverize against itself in the shaker. This leaves some of the buds interior intact for the oil I like to isomeritize. You can use this with trim leaf as well, but that I cut up until its like grass clippings before shaking. Adding an agitator has been known to speed things up, but with the nylon you may get a lot more excess material since its not intended to be a screen.
Now take your hose and trim the toe off. Cut it the length of the leg piece, enough to fit well over the top of your container. It'll leave a "V" in the fabric. Fit this around one edge. You can see the V through the plastic container.
I leave this much slack because the tautness of the nylon across the top is critical and the extra allows you to adjust.
You'll need to adjust after securing the nylon with the rubber band. Its not as easy as it sounds. We want it tight, but not like a bongo drum. The tighter you pull it the larger your mesh will be, the more non-psychoactive material falls through.
Now comes the fun part. Shaking the tub. May not sound like much fun, but when, after 10 minutes you get a pile like this, you'll be much better motivated to keep shaking.
This is an example of a first shake and a 7th shake. The white pile is almost pure trichomes, as pure as can be expected using panty hose. The greenish pile will still be better than much of the decent street hash out there.
This took about an hour of shaking. The pile are in order clockwise, starting top L. You can see how they green up as you go along. If you change the screen every 20 minutes or so, a lot of this may be avoided. As the bud stems become exposed, they begin poking holes in the nylon as you shake. This may improve the purity somewhat.
Once you gather the piles up (I'm using some note paper for each pile), just squeeze them between your fingers for a few minutes, You'll have to open it and scrape them together a couple times, but this is what you come up with. The balls are arranged in order of purity, left to right. The two vials in the background are my oil. That's it, I hope this helps all those like me, who have a hard time finding 120 mesh silk screen.