It is unfortunate, but after taking such great lengths to grow the material it is often JUST before it is used that it ends up getting adulterated in service to haste.
Use glass, stainless steel, or aluminum and you will have no issues whatsoever.
What we are dealing with here is a chemical soup. It is not possible to know what's going to happen ahead of time, and without EXTENSIVE and prohibitively expensive testing it's not possible to know what, if any, adulteration may have occurred.
While we know that a non-polar solvent will cause the stuff to swell we don't know what as non-polar solvent with a mix of 100 other chemicals will do to it, and we're not able to reliably predict such a thing.
As has always been my mantra with processing, we must avoid side reactions and unpredictable reaction conditions like the plague. When it comes to this process that means using nothing but:
1. Plant material.
2. Solvent.
3. Inert materials (like glass)
If you use anything else you are begging for side reactions to take place. Similarly, because of the nature of the extract--what might be safe for one strain could be unsafe for another one. That's why it is best to stick with what we know which amounts to.
1. The solvent is inert (without activation by UV light or some other high energy source)
2. The compounds dissolve into the solvent.
Beyond that, we should be looking to do absolutely NO chemistry, because any further chemistry we do will be wholly unpredictable. As the gentleman in the above email alluded, this is not the proper use of such products. Though the company sought to make their product safer for this use, that doesn't mean they've made it safe. His apprehension about this is tangible, and so should mine be.
This is just the wrong way to do it guys. It's not worth the 5-20 minutes it saves you. Likewise, there is no other chemical laden material you should be using either. There is a reason chemistry tools are mostly made of glass, and this is it.
As an engineer Graywolf will be familiar with the notion of a "six sigma process". At the end of the day one of the better ways to get there, without getting too technical, is to remove as many superfluous and confounding factors as possible while still maintaining the highest quality. Each additional step, item, material, etc.--introduces a new possible source of error. In the light of chemical engineering this is absolutely unacceptable when dealing with a crude extract. If you had a more pure product we'd be in a very different place with this, but because of the nature of what we're doing (and what you want to use these pads for) this is a goal that will never be attained.
