I made quite a few mistakes.
However this was my first press ever, I was in a hurry and I was not being careful in any way.
Errors I made:
I cut the PTFE paper too small so goo got on the plates. Not too much but enough, It was hard to photo the rosin on the plates as the camera flash kept bleaching it out. I used an alcohol wipe to clean it all off.
I used too much pressure, too quickly and blew the filter bag out.
The rosin was very brittle, when collecting I could see small bits pinging off all over the place. I think I got most of it but some specks got away.
Now on to the good bits:
The starting material was home grown Gorilla Glue #4 by fast buds (not the DHG genetics). It had been cured for about 7-8 months and was stored roughly around 62%. The RH went up when I popped the jar open.
"Dabpress iBudtek dp-pm3015r Cylinder Pre-press Mould Made of Anodized Aluminium' was used to create the puck"
The puck fit perfectly into 'Dabpress iBudtek dp-bt160ns Stitched Extraction Filter Bag - 160 Micron Bags.
Damn scales powered down just as taking pic but it was reading 3.60g
I set the temp on the PID's to 200 and pressed at about 5000PSI. I wasn't particularly smooth about applying the pressure so I'm not surprised by the blowout:
Despite the blowout the squish actually looks ok
You can see I didn't use enough PTFE, Rosin flowed out on the left and so I lost some to the plates. This is all down to my technique, which is n00b level right now.
You can see the indentations in the PTFE sheet in this pic.
Blob of goo, this was quite brittle stuff actually, it did not flow that much and collecting it was fairly easy but the thinner bits were breaking up and pinging around a bit.
Well, considering I went at this like a brute with zero experience and lost some rosin to the plates I'd say this is ok for my first ever run.
The puck was still gleaming as well so I suspect going slower and applying the pressure with more care would allow me to improve significantly on yields.
I have kept the puck and will do something like an ETH extraction when I have enough chips. Getting the chip out of the filter bag seems like trouble and a lot of the resin was on the bag so I'm keeping the filer bags on the chips.
This pic was supposed to show the Rosin still on the plates but I lost patience trying to work an angle where you could actually see the mess I made.
There is a bit of rosin on the front lip but there was also more further back.
I think the 'Dabpress dp-hr10t35v 10-Ton Hydraulic Cylinder Rosin Press' is a great Rosin Extraction device and I look forward to learning how to properly use it.
Right I'm now off to try my first ever dab, wish me luck.
Rosineer from FC forum:
Ten percent off a blown bag, rosin on the plates, rushed press? I think you did just fine. You will be getting killer yields in no time. Thanks for posting your experience. I will be buying one of these with my Christmas bonus, and plug and play results like these make my confidence high that I will get good results.
Could someone comment on how long it takes to do a 7 g squish with this press. I would like to be able to press a few ounces during a press day, because I will be helping other patients make their meds with my rig, and I don't want it to take all day. I am keeping the presses to 7 g for yield and quality sake, as I have heard the smaller squishes are actually better. I know that Psycho helped me out a while ago, but that was before this unit existed on the market. To add context I will be helping local collectives press, so I am not just doing this for my own use. I want something smaller, because I live in a town home, but still need more throughput than a average user. Thanks Psycho and Roger for doing all this. Great people all!
That looks better than my first squish on my 3x5" dhgate plates with my 12-ton HF. I had no idea how much pressure I was applying so just cranked 'er down , ripped the paper all to hell in my circumstance. Learned a lot though.
I did a post a page back that had some "guesses" at puck PSI based on the pre-press mold used, it shouldn't give you any blowouts, 1500 PSI is a nice baseline. While I'm not confident my guesses are 100% accurate, by Monday Roger will have the info on the cylinder so we'll know true PSI on the puck then.
For a 1.75" cylinder shaped puck from using 30mm pre-press mold, 2.4 sq/in at 1500 PSI you need 3600 pounds of pressure.
1593 PSI on gauge = 14.5 x 112 = 1633kg = 1.8 tons = 3600 pounds
I also have the pump PSI's guesses for 2x4" rectangle pucks for our pm4007s pre-press, and the pm40r (upcoming re-release). Once I have the 45mm mold I'll do one up for that too.
I've gone up to 2000-2300 PSI, it gets to be a bit much at a certain point so I'd suggest to play around with different amounts of force (3.5g is a good sample size)
If you're using the 30mm pre-press mold and putting the load right in the center of those 3x3" plates, it should flatten out and have about 2/3" plates still all around it, if you load it about 1/3" in from the edge of the plates (front or back depending if you're doing drip tech), it should squish out right about to the edge of the plates to help facilitate the flow outward. For anything more than 7g I'd definitely suggest an upgrade but you can always go the hash/sift route first to postpone an upgrade, and make more potent and clean rosin. I'd hate to see you upgrade so soon, we are always trying to save rosineers money.
I'd say its more based on how much surface area you're pressing. I use the same amount of time for 3.5-7g using the 30mm pre-press mold, I generally start my press timer once I start to see actual PSI happening which is when the puck's smashed down to about 1/3-1/2". I generally am somewhat mid speed in compressing the puck so it has some time to preheat a bit. So I am around 2-4 minutes with 3 being the general goal at 200F on the PID. I will reduce the pressing time with higher temperatures, some of my material has so much terpenes in it I have been squishing it hotter to try and get a different consistency than sap/syrup.
If you need to be pressing 1-3 ounce a day at most I would say 3x3 3-ton or 3x5 6-ton units are sufficient. If you want a gauge, the hr10t35v is the best choice with the gauge integrated into the strongway pump. With that you'd have enough pressure to do 21-28g buds at a time, or 28g hash/sift.
If you wanna keep your load size down under 7g then I dunno if anything more than the 3x3 plate size is needed and the bj3t33 will squish 7g in a shot all day long. The downside is the cost of filters pressing smaller loads.