Thread: My industrial strength hash oil extractor!

Hi, I've been interested in making some hash & hash oil since I've found out how relatively easy to make it is. I've been fortunate enough to been able to find commercial grade bud for $50 per half-ounce. It's really dry (which is good since you get your weight's worth) and crumbly so trichomes are just falling off of it. Granted, they're not the most potent and uber plentiful trichomes but it definitely seems worth it for the money.

I don't know how much the honey bee extractor's go for but I figure I've pretty much got a solid piece of equipment I built. It was only about $15 at Home Depot too. It's completely built on brass, and I know a lot of people don't like to use metal extractors due to the risk of of static explosions. I think there's a very minimal risk involved though. I haven't actually tried it yet (waiting to find high quality butane), but it looks like it should work just fine. I figure you could even put a valve on it to let the butane brew into the bud before flushing it out. I don't think you would need to worry about pressurized explosions due to it being a hell of a lot thicker than the metal or even plastic bottles butane comes in.

So here's what I have used. All of this can be bought at Home Depot (sans the pipe screen). They are in yellow topped bags (color coordinated for other pieces they can connect to).
1/2" x 6" brass pipe nipple (A-845)
1/2" FIP x 1/4" FIP pipe reducing coupling (A-813)
1/2" FIP pipe cap (A-819)
A large sized brass pipe screen (mine is either 1/2-3/4" diameter)

WARNING: These products contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. (Plumber: California law requires that this warning be given to the consumer.)

Now you'll still need to drill a hole for the butane nozzle to fit into the cap. There's an excellent starting point to drill into inside the cap where the lathe was stuck into the metal. I plan on super gluing a piece of wire onto the inside of the cap across the hole to allow the butane nozzle to get depressed when inserted.

I will further update this when I actually try it out and scrub down or torch off the residual machine oils. I also plan on recording it and putting it onto youtube so people who have no idea how to extract hash oil can have a complete guide from equipment to procedure.

Thanks for looking.

PS. The second photo is from a piece of tin foil I sprayed some Bernzomatic brand butane onto (also purchased from Home Depot for about $2.50). If you look hard enough you can see some contaminants left behind after evaporating. My suggestion is therefore to not use Bernzomatic brand butane fluid.

Originally Posted by FreeThePot

Now you'll still need to drill a hole for the butane nozzle to fit into the cap. There's an excellent starting point to drill into inside the cap where the lathe was stuck into the metal. I plan on super gluing a piece of wire onto the inside of the cap across the hole to allow the butane nozzle to get depressed when inserted..

Very cool. May I make a suggestion?
Assuming the cap is thick enough, do a countersunk type hole. Drill the through-hole using a bit smaller than the butane nozzle will seat into.
Drill a SECOND hole, using the CORRECT diameter bit, on the outside only so that you have created a small depression into which the nozzle may seat.
Nice tutorial.

Thanks for the suggestion, stinkyattic. Definitely a good idea. The cap is pretty solid. I bought a bit today specifically for drilling through the brass because I don't want to dull out that size bit from my set.

If I was countersinking inside the cap I'm sure I'd have no problem with the lathe point being there. Unfortunately there's nothing on the other (outer) side so countersinking it will make it twice as thin. I'll give a try on countersinking the way you suggested, stinkyattic. First I'll drill the smaller size through the inside using the lather point as a guide. Then flip it over and use the new hole as a starting point and gently take off some metal. Worse that could happen is I drill right through, but then I'm back were I started with a super glued piece of wire to depress the nozzle.

that bud looks pretty good for 50 and half 0

So I tried out my method. Got mixed results.

I didn't end up having quite as nice bud as before. It ended up being from some brick. Pretty low quality obviously. I used 1/4 oz and ended up with between .3 - .5 gram. Closer to about .35 gram. Scale didn't really like registering something that light.

StinkyAttic's idea worked perfect. I heated the quarter to about 225 degrees F for about 3:30 minutes in the oven. Then I ground it up in a metal grinder. It came out almost like a fine dust. I think drying it out in the oven really helped a bit since it came out really brittle. I was afraid that the bud would be either too fine and clog up so the butane wouldn't be able to drip through or that a lot would come through the pipe screen. It went right on through fine though and ended up bringing the ground up bud closer together (was up to the top and then was down to about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way up.) I think the only stuff that came through the screen were some trichomes.

I had two 3.06 oz cans. I used the first one with my metal extractor and then used the other by taking the (same) bud and bundling it up in cotton fabric. I put it in a glass bottle and put in the butane. I wasn't sure if the pressure would crack the bottle and I heard it hissing out after I put the top on so I only let it sit for a few minutes. Then I poured it into my drying dish with first batch of extract. Due to using two different methods twice I don't know which yielded better results.

Using a razor I scraped up as much oil as I could. Hash oil has got to be the stickiest stuff on earth. I had to leave a lot behind and cleaning the collection dish out was a chore. I went through Goo Gone, dish soap, and Gojo trying to clean it all out. I still don't think I got all of it. There was a reasonable amount that got discarded.

In the end it worked surprisingly well. I did get hash oil after all. My extractor seemed to work pretty well. I just don't know how much, if any, machine oils I extracted from the pipe in the process though. Some machine oils are made from organic fats so I imagine the butane would pull any remaining from the initial cleaning. The biggest part that needs improvement is the collection though. I ended up leaving it on the razor blade and sticking it into a piece of styrofoam and then into an old medicine bottle. I think in the future if I'm able to find 190 proof ethyl alcohol (Everclear for example) I'll extract directly into that. I would like to use grain alcohol as a stabilizer that would also dilute the hash oil. Only problem is in my state it's unavailable and so far I haven't been able to find a definite list of states where it is available online. I think a 200ml bottle of Everclear and an ounce of bud would work OK for applying to papers. If anyone out there wants to try this I would empty the Everclear (or whatever high proof alcohol you have available) out first and set it aside. Then take a quarter oz each time and extract directly into the bottle making sure to only use enough butane to fill the bottle. Let it evaporate. The hash oil will be at the bottom. Continue going on until you've extracted oil from each quarter of the entire ounce. Then add in your alcohol again and hash oil should dissolve and mix together with the alcohol allowing you to apply it to papers with an eye dropper.

Scraping honey oil from anything is really an awful thing... i use a similar method for making hash oil and i let the solvent with the THC to evaporate in a small wine glass with spherical bottom. As the glass is small enough (some 3 inches of diameter), i get a layer of hash oil that is thick enough, and so easier to scrape.
Also, a thing that helps a LOT to scrape every tiny bit of hash oil from the glass is adding water to it. Water makes the hash oil FAR less sticky. When the hash oil formes a thin but hard layer on the glass, i put some warm (about 40C 104F) water into it, then scrape all the hash oil i can. I use a thick needle to scrape it. After it, i throw away this warm water and add cool water. It makes the remaining hash oil layer harder, but as it is already very scraped from the previous scraping, it is easier to scrape its remains from the glass.
Doing this way im able to scrape ALL hash oil i get, without no waste.
So, good luck, and good scraping!

So am i right in understanding that apparently FreeThePot got more stoned of that .35 of hash oil than he would of if he had smoked the 7g of weed?

You can only burn something so many times before its all gone?


this will be the thing that makes me decide if im going to be making it or not

Well... if i take the amount of weed i would roll one joint and make hash oil with it, it lasts about one week of daily use... and the level of highness i get smoking the hash oil is higher than if i had smoked the entire joint... the only difference is that the high is a bit shorter... but still is VERY worth... smoking weed with joints, bongs, anything that burn it is VERY wasteful... thats why i only smoke hash oil... doing so i can smoke one entire year with about 2oz of weed...

but what im saying is..
how can i explain this lol
erm...
if i made hash oil with a 8th..nd got a 3mm ball. put that ball into my bong im pretty sure i wouldt be able to rip it more than 10-15 times?
so i dont really see how it can last

im not arguing with you lol im just trying to explain what i dont understand
im very intrested =D

Well... if 1/8=3.5g, im almost sure you will get a ball of hash oil greater than 3mm... maybe 5-6mm or even more... and when we smoke hash oil we put only the amount we need... like... for me a ball with 2-3mm is enough for a average high... if i put the entire ball in the bong, would be impossible to smoke several times from it, as you rightly said.
BTW i think smoking it in a bong (or a pipe) would be a bit wasteful, unless you were very careful to avoid the hash catch fire, and only vaporized it.

Well... right now i just finished to scrape the hash oil i made... and remembering the previous times i did it, i see that my estimate in the post above (5-6mm) was too low indeed. This time i used about 1/8 of weed and got a ball with 9mm of diameter. Which is the usual amount i get when i use 1/8.

Maybe it's just my oil but I noticed it's pretty harsh when most of it's vaporized off. The first time I used the oil it actually caught on fire and had a small blue capped flame (this was of course after torching it because I had pretty much already killed what was there). I guess I still had some butane in there or the turpenoids in the hash oil ignited. Whatever it was harsh as hell! So I just use a little water pipe I have. It's like a micro bong; bigger than a bubbler and in true water piper form but they couldn't possibly make it any smaller. So I pack a little bit of bud in and run a drop of oil onto the rim of the bowl. The heat from the burning bud keeps the oil vaporizing. May seem a little wasteful but it works pretty good.

Thanks for the heads up on getting back all that oil, Coelho!

Originally Posted by iTokethings

So am i right in understanding that apparently FreeThePot got more stoned of that .35 of hash oil than he would of if he had smoked the 7g of weed?

You can only burn something so many times before its all gone?


this will be the thing that makes me decide if im going to be making it or not

No, no. The idea of the extraction is to remove as much of the cannabinoids (turpenoids) as possible from the plant material to produce a concentrated form. Hash oil is just easier to use than bud. Technically the raw bud would be more potent - if you could activate all the cannibinoids at once. The butane is very unlikely to extract all the cannabinoids but when comparing volume for volume the oil is far more potent than the bud. In fact, I rolled the post-extraction bud and it did in fact still get me high (although it was considerably weak, but not a bad smoke). If you're on a bud budget I would be wary of trying to extract hash oil until some more green (of either kind) is available.