Introduction and questions

Hi all, i have been growing my own outdoor flowers for 15 years now. Not much, about 3 lbs, for me and a few friends. I vaporize flowers daily.

I am looking for a new project and thought I would give hash a go.

I made some Quick wash ethanol extracts a few years ago, but reclaiming the ethanol (super expensive to allow it to evaporate) is too much hassle and the whole process is too much work. I do have a day job It was fun and educational and the product was potent. Just too time consuming for what I got back.

Anyhow, I am thinking to order a Pollinator 150 gram machine and do frozen dry sift in the deep freezer.

I have this years harvest dried, cured, and vacuum sealed at 62% Rh in cool and dark place.
Do you recommend drying it more aggressively before freezing it for processing into hash?

After I get the skuff/kief scraped up and stored, do you recommend further curing of it before pressing into hash?

I have an old RCBS reloading press for ammo that I am thinking to refurbish into a hash press. How much heat and for how long to make a good product?

I am thinking to make a hash form from cut iron tubing and flat iron disks that insert inside. Shooting for a 3 gram disk of stable and strong product that can be stored for extended periods or sold easily.

I am reading and searching through threads here looking for advice, hard to sift through all the chit chat and get to the technical information I am craving.

Thanks for the input, let me know if I am missing some critical and obvious step and/or logic in this process.

Welcome! I hope you find what you seek.

When I get the raw material ready to tumble I like it really dry and cold, then it depends how long you tumble it for, some like just a few seconds I tumble it for max 3 minutes for the number 1, I empty out the powder then tumble it for 10 to 20 minutes which I use for ethanol extraction or a #2 rosin product which comes out on the dark side but it tastes like killer old time hash. The #1 I either clean up the powder with a 77euro or 195 us lpi screen, there is a few threads on how to clean up the powder, I then press it with cellophane paper and a travel Iron, doesn’t take much pressure if the powder is mostly resin heads. My tumbler has a 110 american or a 43 metric lpi screen stretched tight around the inner drum. I never use water to make bubble because you lose some of the terpenes, dry sift for me is the only way to work with tumbled cannabis. I hope this helps, I have been doing this for 40 years and have never been disappointed and I get as much useable powder, never tumble it so long that you green powder...

thank you for chiming in. if i can pick your brain a bit, it will save me many hours of trial/error and wasted materials.

when you say really dry and cold, what rh% and temps are you shooting for ideally? do you freeze the material in advance?

how do you prepare the material before tumbling?
do you trim/manicure your buds?
pull the fan leaves and then dry them/cure them with sugar leaves and toss them into the tumbler?

i made ice water hash before, but it was tasteless. i like the terpenes and other flavors to remain in my hash.

It gets really dry where I live right now it is 20%rh I tumble when the room is freezing so the material is frozen, if I am going to use buds I take the fan leaves off and through them away, and then I take 1/4 inch hardware cloth and run the buds through it so there is more surface area for the resin to fall off of and put that in the tumbler. If it’s good trim I just dry it out to the rh in my room which in the winter is 10-15% and 32* or colder...

much different ambient than where i live and work!!
coldest/dryest day of the year is about 50F/70%RH. (botrytis is my enemy!)


is the hardware cloth just to break up the nugs? are you saying you don't tumble anything bigger than a 1/4"?

The hardware cloth is just to break up the buds, so yes I don’t tumble larger pieces. You are going to have to get the material way drier than 50-70 rh it has to be dry and freezing to get the resin to fall off.

that sounds fairly straight forward.
i may give the QWET another try with the #2 sift.

do you bother curing your buds or kief?

Of course it gets cured, harvest is sept-oct and it doesn’t get cold until dec-jan-feb so its the natural way the cannabis gets cured over a few months until it gets cold...