my options are limited! and I'm on a time frame! I can't spend 300 on a press, I mean if I absolutely have to I will! but I'm trying to get this done for 100$ or less!
I just need to get the cycle over with, by next harvest the boss man is shopping for a press for like 4-5 grand! so I'm not worried about next harvest, but this one I just need a decent product, I don't care to lose a few grams! just need a good zip or two from these 2 pounds! and a decent quality! next harvest we Will have the new press!
I use extractohol and or Kleen extract. They're food grade solvents so you don't have to worry about remaining solvents. You could use everclear also, but it's more expensive. Not sure how much you need for 2 lbs. I would guess about 3 gallons, but could be more. I wrote this for someone a while back. It makes killer bho type stuff, without the butane, stable at room temps, almost shatter.. Hope it helps.
Before you start, freeze everything for at least 24 hours. The weed (break it up first. I have even used a coffee grinder with great results. Just don't grind it too fine), coffee filters, strainer, jars, etc.
Dump the ground cannabis into a stainless steel pot.
Then set a fan up beside the stove, blowing over the top of the stove. Keep this blowing throughout the entire procedure to prevent fumes from accumulating.
Then pour the solvent over the ground cannabis until it's about 1/2 inch above the top of the cannabis. Agitate it with a wooden spoon constantly for exactly 1 minute.
Then dump the agitated mixture into a screen strainer so the liquid goes into a separate stainless steel pot. Press the cannabis against the screen strainer with the wooden spoon in order to "squeeze" the solvent out of the cannabis.
Then, using the same cannabis in the screen strainer, dump it back into the original stainless steel pot and do the whole thing over again with a NEW/FRESH batch of cold solvent.
Agitate it for another minute and dump it into the screen strainer adding this second extraction to the second pot filled with green/black solvent from the first extraction.
Then grab 10 or 15 glass cups and jars (the more you have, the faster the process). Use #4 unbleached cone-shaped coffee filters. Take a coffee filter and put one inside each cup/jar so it goes about halfway (or less) down into the cup/jar, then fold the edges of the coffee filter around the outside rim of the cup/jar. You don't need to put a rubber band around it to hold it in place. They stay put by themselves very easily.
Take preferably something glass with a spout and dip it into the extracted solvent to fill it, and pour the extracted solvent into each of the coffee filters until they are filled up. Then let the solvent filter through into the the bottoms of the cups/jars.
When each coffee filter gets very close to empty, gently pull it out, and squeeze the remainder into the cup/jar it was in and put the coffee filter into a zip-lock bag (you will collect all the coffee filters to do a final extraction on them in the end). Then dump the filtered material into a Pyrex container. Each time a coffee filter empties, do not fill the same coffee filter up with more alcohol. Instead, insert a new coffee filter into the cup/jar, and fill that one up. If you try to use the same one, it will take FOREVER because they get so much sticky gunk collected in the bottom of them.
Once you've filtered all of the extracted solvent through coffee filters, and poured it into the Pyrex container, take the coffee filters you collected in the zip-lock bag, put them into the original stainless steel pot, and pour new solvent over them, and agitate for a minute or so. Dump this into some coffee filters to filter through, then add it to the Pyrex container.
For the final step, it's best to use a Pyrex pie plate. Pour the liquid into the pie plate on the stove stop with it set on about "2" (around 100-110*F) NEVER ON A GAS STOVE!!! With that little bit of heat, and the fan blowing over the top of it, it will evaporate fairly quickly. As the solvent evaporates, keep adding more from the larger Pyrex container. When the solvent is almost gone, turn off the burner and let the fan evaporate the rest.
When it looks like you pretty much have only oil left, you are done unless you want it orally active. If so, you need to decarboxilate it. If not, you can scrape it with a razor blade and put it in silicon containers. You could also heat it up so it gets less viscous and put it in syringes, but at room temp it will be hard in syringes so you'll have to gently heat them with hot water to be able to plunge it out.
If I don't plan on eating it and only smoking it, at this point I will put it in those small cylindrical silicone containers and freeze it takung little bits out at a time to load the vape.
Otherwise, I decarboxilate it. You can
Preheat the oven to 250*F and put your pie plate in it for 40 minutes to decarboxylate.
Then let it cool some (but not too much because it will get too hard). Put an oven mit or something under on side of the pie plate so it's tilted. Then take a razor blade and scoop the oil down toward the bottom area. Then suck all the oil up with oral syringes (you MUST have caps for the syringes...use 5 ml or 10 ml syringes), put caps on the syringes, and that's it. When I get down to the last of the oil and it is too hard to suck it up with the syringe, I take a syringe without the cap on it, pull the plunger out, and scoop up oil with the razor blade and put it in the open back end of the syringe. Keep scraping the Pyrex pie dish until you get all the oil from it into that syringe. Then put the plunger in the syringe (careful not the plunge the oil out the front), and put the cap on it.
Another very useful tip, but it's a bit complicated to explain. Find a jar (a dark glass large supplement jar is best to keep the light out, but not vital). Put all the syringes into that jar pointed end facing the bottom of the jar. You can get a lot of them into a jar...more than you'd think. Then, store the jar upside down. This way, the oil will gradually flow toward the plunger, and when you take the syringes out, you can push the plunger and squirt out all of the excess air inside the syringe.
Finally, you can use rubbing alcohol and paper towels to clean the sticky oil off of ANYTHING.
