Rosin press suggestions?

Smoker's Lounge
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:joy: I feel your pain. My brothers wife is just like that. A long time ago my brother was losing it because he could find a brand new bottle of eye drops he had just bought, His wife swears she has no idea where they are. hours later, by some miracle he finds them inside a tissue box in the bathroom. His wife then says… “oh yeah, i put them in there when i was cleaning!”

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, since when is that the place to put stuff when you are cleaning :smiley: I think there is some body to the theory that they come from Venus.

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You sir are a charitable man.
I tend to say you “adopt” a woman because of those things.

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Alright, so I pressed ten grams each of the Time Bandit and Goji, got back 0.8 grams of rosin from each one haha… Shit, man, I dunno. Took both of the “pancakes” or whatever you wanna call pressed weed and pressed them again, together, got another 0.3 grams.

I have two theories. One, maybe the weed wasn’t at the proper humidity levels, although I have a couple eight gram 62% Bovedas in each jar and the weed itself is only a few weeks old. Two, maybe the plates aren’t at the displayed temperature. Maybe they’re a little cooler than what it says. I pressed them at 200 degrees, maybe I’ll try it at 210 next time. Which won’t be for a while, not until I have more trim. I’m not gonna waste any more of the TB or Goji flower on pressing.

Or maybe the Goji and Time Bandit just aren’t good for pressing, I dunno. Anyway, yeah, so y’all have seen my journey now haha! From asking about presses to getting one to pressing. I like it, just wish I was getting better returns…

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Yep, there’s a ton of variables, especially for flower. I can’t really justify pressing my good flower as I love to smoke/vape it, but I have zero issues pressing all the dry sift I can. Easily 20+% returns and the best part is when you’re done, you still have hash to smoke/vape/eat/whatever!

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well it’s like 9 to 1, so that seems better yield than the others. I included the .8 and .3 for a 1.1g. What do you figure you should yield to make it worthwhile?

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Right or you could call it a 8% return. On the low side, 10% is the minimum i will bother to press. My record is around 26% with some Creme Brulee.

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Yeah something’s got to be going on here. I’d personally be expecting at least 15 - 20% yields from good flower at proper humidity. Problem is sometimes you need lots of material to fine tune your process.

Do you have a thermal gun or some way to check the plate temps?
Are you using pre-press molds and filter bags? If so, what kind?

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minitiger said he is pressing trim, not good flower. Personally, I’ve never had good results from pressing trim, even when pressing the buds yield 20%+.

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When it comes to dialing in your pressing technique and to figure out what a particular strain likes you need to focus on the one product at a time. Only press one of the Goji or Time Bandit. I would use a small pollen press to create small pucks then press the pucks without a screen. This way you can do 1 gram presses at a time without wasting screens. If you press wrong then you only waste 1 gram. Once you find out the best temp, time, pressure for that strain then you can add the screens and start pressing 10g at once and just fine tune the method for the larger amount. The screens do not clean the product that much. They mostly allow for you to press large amounts without it squishing out of the plates. So small presses wont squish past the plates while you learn.
Once you have done a bunch of pressing you will be able to start cutting corners on the process. The variance in what each strain likes is a lot more than I would have thought. An example is the Jack Herer I have now starts leaking oil if you look at it sideways. Give it 75C and a small squash and you get 26 to 28% return on the more solid buds. Where as I have some medicinal provided weed that if I press with the same conditions would literally give me about 4% return. I had to crank the heat all the way up to about 97C then it suddenly produced about 15%.
If you do small presses without screens you will get a better sense of satisfaction as you will only be using tiny pieces and you can do many presses over a short time to learn the strain. It will be a more enjoyable experience for you rather than stressing out that you just crushed 10g of your weed and got hardly anything back for it.

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Looks pretty great for trim, from what I hear most trim yields like 5-10% I think you’re doing pretty well.

When my press finishes building & my bags ship I want to run some trim to test it’ll be nice to compare the yields

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@JoeCrowe At least 10% would be the baseline, like @ReikoX said. Fifteen percent was what I was hoping for. Well, actually I was hoping for like 20%. Or 50% haha. Just kidding. But yeah, fifteen percent would’ve been nice…

@schmarmpit I don’t have a thermal gun. At least, I don’t think I do. But I never know what we have. My girlfriend has pretty much everything, all the time, I should ask her if we have one. Seriously, every time I’m like,”I need to go get a…” whatever, she’s always like,”We have that, it’s in the hall closet,” or wherever.

And I did use the mold, but I skipped the bags. I haven’t used the bags since the first time I pressed that old Smart Move bud. Don’t you think that the filter bags could possibly restrict yields?

@BCC I actually used flower this time, for both the Goji and the Time Bandit. I pressed the trim initially, like ten days ago, but then I tried out some flower. The yields for both the trim and the flower were almost identical, which I thought was kinda weird. I would’ve expected the flower to yield significantly more. That’s one of the reasons why I was anticipating like maybe hopefully fifteen percent for the flower.

And @BudSy I did press the Goji and the Time Bandit separately. I only combined the two when I pressed the remnants from the initial pressing a second time. And by screens, do you mean filter bags? I didn’t use those this time and don’t plan on using them again, I don’t think.

That’s definitely a good idea, though, about using smaller amounts to get a handle on what temps etc are best. The reason I used ten grams at once was because I thought I’d get a much better return, just because I was basing it on the returns from the trim I pressed last week. I figured if I got a seven percent return on that, then pressing the flower should probably double it. Or close to it, anyway.

@HolyAngel Yeah, I need to try that dry sift method. The only reason I didn’t this time is because I didn’t have very much trim (40 grams from the four Time Bandits and 22 grams from the two Gojis). But I never considered adding some actual flower to the trim and sifting that. Don’t ask me why haha. I’m slow sometimes… Also, I didn’t feel like ordering the 25 micron bags, but maybe I will before my next harvest. It definitely seems like your method is the most efficient way to press. But don’t you think that you’d need quite a bit of starting material to dry sift to get decent yields?

And @WHF like I said to BCC, the second time was with flower, not trim. Sooooo… Not very good returns at all haha!

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Dry sifting 6-8 ounces of trim and popcorn buds netted me back around 40 grams of dry sift. I pressed it and got back at least 12 grams of rosin. Think closer to 15-20grams. I know I pressed ~15-18 grams of sift and got back a little over 7 grams of rosin. I knew I should’ve weighed everything out. I only weighed that first half and not the second, second looked like just as much though. Filled up two calyx containers and then some.

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Okay, so, yeah, I’d need a decent amount of trim. I’m kind of at the mercy of my seeds for the time being. Last grow I only got six females from nineteen seeds planted. And unusually high male:female ratios have been a running theme for me the last three or four grows. I’ve got seventeen plants at day 35 or 36 right now, gonna start checking for sex the next time I water. Hopefully, I’ll get more females this time and have more trim to dry sift in a few months.

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How you liking those? I really dig the square sides. Makes getting that last bit out pretty easy.

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They are fantastic! Think my wife tossed the liner in one of the containers though, not really non-stick when there’s rosin stuck to the top :rofl: but yeah they are great! Definitely seems air-tight, rosin is just like the day I put it in there and really easy to dab out of or add more in. Actually blew through all my rosin in the last month, almost 20 grams just gone between the wife and I. Going to try one more press of my sift and then that’ll be it for me for the next 6+ months or so when I can do a yield run instead of seeds :cry:

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The instructions say to put the liner in the freezer, then flex it and it should all come off. :man_shrugging:

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oooh that’s a good idea! Will remember that for the other containers… and maybe that liner is still floating somewhere on my desk :thinking:

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Yes I did realise you pressed separately :slight_smile: I was meaning to focus on one strain so you don’t confuse the pressures and temperatures, etc. Just easier to focus on one strain to figure out just what it needs. Then move on to the next. Where as if you do a press of one then a press of another and you get the returns for each and your trying to get your head around each one and what to do for each. You will be a pro in no time then you will find it easy to take on 4 new strains at once and perfect each one in no time all at the same time. I am a bit OCD and a nerd so i like to focus on one thing completely to perfect it.

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This may sound redneck af but: Hair iron, wax paper, hard surface + textbook.
Works a charm for its technological level

PARCHMENT NOT WAX PAPER, FOR THE GOOD OF YOUR LUNGS! MY BAD!

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You do whatever works :slight_smile: For sure. Its all rosin and its all delicious! :slight_smile:

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