All you need is a hair straightener and the desire to not kill everyone around you with fire.
Dabs are great because they're potent as all hell. Some extracts can reach up to 90 percent THC, a stacked figure which eliminates the possibility of your punk ass walking away from a dab encounter on this astral plane. Because of their potency and purity (they're as close to pure THC as humanly possible), they offer more bang for your buck than marijuana in its natural state, and therefore, they're in very high demand today (puns, weee).
Problem is, if dabs aren't made with the utmost safety protocols in place, the THC extraction process can be explosive and life-threatening. This is because traditionally, dabs have been made using the highly flammable chemical solvent butane, which tends to sink and pool to the floor so that even the tiniest spark in the room can ignite an inferno of hellish proportions.
A quick Google search for "butane THC" will confirm this, as hundreds of incident reports populate the page describing dab lab explosions, near-fatal burns, and in many cases, death. According to our internet query, few days go by in this here country without another (reported) butane incident, and according to Buzzfeed, the number of BHO-related fires in 2014 was in the hundreds, “up from dozens,” the year before.
Of course in places like Colorado were dab cookery is legal, state-licensed manufacturers produce these products safely with proper training and equipment. But outside our square walls, butane dab production remains in the "bath-tub gin" phase in which tainted products made with makeshift equipment by untrained "extraction artists" often hit the streets, costing users a pretty penny and a pretty case of hacking up chemical sludge.
Clearly, this is a problem, but it's not a problem without a solution, boys and girls!
Enter Rosin Tech, the latest technique for making highly concentrated dabs by simply applying measured heat and pressure to a weed bud using a nothing more than a hair straightener. Looks like sorority chicks had it right all along.
Motherboard reports:
This DIY method only really began taking off among hashish connoisseurs a few months ago, yet there's already a commercial market for what aficionados call Rosin Tech—including industrial-sized production setups—and a growing sense among foresighted weedheads that these chemical-free, explosion-free, quick-and-easy concentrates will soon come to dominate the market.
It started when Instagram extraction guru @soilgrown "squished the bud seen around the world" after accidentally stumbling upon the technique while pressing some hash at home. Now he's the widely acknowledged founding father of a large and growing movement.
"I was sitting in my garage pressing out some half melt [lower quality] hash to dab, when I accidentally over pressed, separating the oil from the contaminant,” said @soilgrown, who prefers to remain anonymous, but says he’s been involved in the cannabis industry since 2007 and specializes in solventless extraction methods. “Without even thinking about it, I rolled it all back together into a ball and repressed it. Months later, however, that experience inspired me to place a ball of hash inside a hair straightener and press as hard as I could. The oil again separated from the contaminant, but this time I collected the oil and dabbed it, finding it changed from a 3 star melt to a 6 star melt”—based on a standardized measure of the potency and purity of various cannabis concentrates—”so I quickly shared my finding with the world.”
So, how do you make this hair straightener shit? We're going to direct you to a very well-respected tutorial that's chock full of pretty pictures for the intel. All you need is a hair straightener, parchment paper, an oven mitt and some high quality devil's grass.
If you do it right and your sister doesn't need her hair straightener like right this second, you can yield 15 percent THC or more when pressing top-quality buds. If you're pressing hash, expect a yield of 70 percent or more. This is a potency that's comparable to butane dab production, but with a cleaner, fuller flavor profile, since Rosin doesn't need to be purged of solvents.
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