Clean your butane oil, or, a thought I had while driving :)

[Inuit]

Hey All,

Had a thought while driving last night.

I've made BHO a couple times, but prefer oil made with everclear as its food grade. Not stating which is better, just what I prefer and why.

Now, we all can agree that butane provides a somewhat purer product than ethanol oil, even when the ethanol is done in a rapid wash. For the record I prefer to wash kif with everlcear over buds, as the product cleaner than with buds, but thats just me :)

So, I got to thinking, why not get the best of both worlds.

Make BHO in the standard fashion, but before it becomes so thick it traps the butane, add some everclear to thin it out. I checked the miscibility of both solvents and thats not a problem. Butane evaporates @ -5C and ethanol at 76C. So, that should mean that all the butane will be purged before the ethanol can begin to evaporate, theoretically anyway.

Any ideas or insights would be appreciated. I plan on trying it next weekend when finals are finished.

Be safe

I

 

[Inuit]

It should be noted that it would then take quite a bit longer to evaporate to dryness than butane, but since its all everclear, no harm can come from sampling a little early :)

Be safe

I

 

[Inuit]

Damn, almost 100 views and I'm still talking to myself. All you die hard BHO junkies afraid to step outta line :)

A

 

[PureSugar]

Damn, almost 100 views and I'm still talking to myself. All you die hard BHO junkies afraid to step outta line :)

A

I don't understand how this would make the oil cleaner?

 

[YoungDizZle]

I don't understand how this would make the oil cleaner?

ya it seems kind of point less to me since all the tane and all the everklear are going to evaporate why waste the time. dont seem like adding it will help out at all.

 

[Inuit]

OK, let me clarify a little bit.

Lots of people think there is still butane in the oil, and are strongly against it. Whether there is/isn't is a topic for another thread.

Lets assume, for this discussion, that butane is left in the oil, or you're concerned it might be.

Doing a standard purge, butane bubbles will often continue to reappear throughout the purge, which is the whole reason for it. Once the oil reaches a certain thickness/viscosity, it will trap the butane inside to an extent.

Due to their difference in evaporation points, the butane would HAVE to evaporate prior to the everclear. That is how the chemistry works.

After adding the everclear, hold it at a raised temp, say 50C for a while, this is not hot enough to evaporate everclear, but more than hot enough to evaporate the butane. The everclear would keep the oil thin enough that the butane could all escape freely.

Doing this in a glass beaker would allow you figure when the butane was gone. This can be figured by watching for when the volume of everclear had reached its original volume.

Example.

1. Run x# butane tubes into beaker with 250ml etoh(ethanol) inside initially.

2. Take your etoh/butane/oil mix, place on hotplate outside. Hotplate should be previously calibrated using etoh to 50C, or some other temp lower than 76C. Possibly use a magnetically stirred hotplate if you have access to one to agitate the mixture.

3. Allow to sit until volume reaches ~250ml(or whatever volume etoh you started with). At this point, all the butane should be gone, theoretically...

4. Remove mixture, and recalibrate hotplate for 80C using Etoh. A water bath can be used if desired as well. Etoh evaps @ 76C, so thats min to get what you want. The THC/CBC/CBN/etc begin to degrade at 100C, so keep well clear of that. At this point you can pour it into a cleaned glass dish to increase surface area and speed evap time.

Let it dry out and bam, BHO potency with a high potential for zero bho residue.

I

 

[YoungDizZle]

very cool like the idea. have u done it? got pics? and how is final product copaired to just BHO and just QWiso or is diff all together

 

[Inuit]

I haven't done it yet, but probably will give it a shot.

Qwiso uses iso, a petroleum derived product, not for human consumption. Everclear is food grade. I've never used iso for that reason....have used everclear many times on buds and kif, and it makes the most potent extract I've ever tried stateside or in the dam.

I

 

[YoungDizZle]

I haven't done it yet, but probably will give it a shot.

Qwiso uses iso, a petroleum derived product, not for human consumption. Everclear is food grade. I've never used iso for that reason....have used everclear many times on buds and kif, and it makes the most potent extract I've ever tried stateside or in the dam.

I

yes i know iso no good for consumption, i also have used everclear in my younger days like ten years ago it was all goooeeey and i never did it again i should run a batch with all my new knowledge.

 

[Inuit]

Yeah, give it a run with some killer :) Its great. Here's how I do it.

I have made many types of extract over time. BHO only a couple times years ago, as I could always taste it it seems, or I was just paranoid. Bubble, kif, etc. The most potent cannabis extract I've ever had was home made oil using everclear. I will outline the process. Its pretty standard, and the results are steller!

1. Obtain small glass dish and kitchen sieve that will nest within the dish.

2. Fill dish ~3/4 with everclear or other high proof liquor.

3. 1-2 handfulls at a time, add the plant material to the strainer, then dip in alcohol and agitate lightly for 10-15 second. If you set up two dishes originally, you can then repeat in dish #2 for an additional 30s and see what happens, but I haven't done it yet.

4. After rinsing set herb aside, and repeat with fresh herb until herb is exhausted. Depending on the volume of herb needed to wash, get fresh alcohol once the achohol gets a nice golden color to it.

5. Combine all alcohol fractions.

6. Filter. I use filter paper, buchner funnel, and vac pum. Takes me about 1 min to filter several bottles worth

7. Evaporate alcohol, preferably outside, but indoors is doable BUT ONLY WITH EVERCLEAR and fans. Its still probably not safe though. Flash point for ethanol is 55f, butanes is -76f, so its alot safer than butane but I still wouldn't recommend it.

8. Enjoy!

This shit rocks your world. Tiny drops will knock a grown man down....hey, that sounds good, I think I'll try some now.

A less expensive way to do this is use dry sieve kif and just rinse it a couple tims with everclear.

Be safe

I

 

[Blaze]

I've seen a few people do the butane extraction with an alcohol wash after, it does work. The finished product had much better flavor than the original butane extract and was lighter in color. Cleaner smoke too - it did not give me a physical reaction like BHO almost always does.

Though after trying something similar to Inuits recipe I'm not sure if doing the butane extract first is worth while. The everclear method makes some damn fine stuff.

 

[ShorelineTex]

I don't think this will get rid of butane the way you think it will. Everclear is still 5% water, and you can still dissolve 6.1mg of butane in 100ml of water at 20 degrees celcius. I can't find a solubility curve for butane in water at different temperatures, so I don't know how that would effect the solubility at the different temps you have in each step, but the water is definitely going to be the last thing to leave during the drying phase, and will still likely have trace butane in it all the way to dryness.

If you're just using butane with no everclear, and the bud/kiff/whatever is completely dry, there's no water to keep dissolved butane around, imho...

 

[Inuit]

Hey Shoreline, thanks for the input. I hadn't considered the extra water. I'll check into that misc. table for water and butane. Maybe we can find a working temp where the combination can be purged/avoided.

Blaze - thanks for popping in and sharing your experiences.

I

 

[20north]

i think this is a great idea because i thought it was required to heat the butane hash in the first palce before you could even vaporize it.... as in heat over or In a slow cooker for a while slowly adding water... it really does make it taste clean when you eat it... i dont know if this is wrong but i heat the oil till it stops tasting like anything when eaten

 

[seventhchild]

but the water is definitely going to be the last thing to leave during the drying phase.....

thats right, after the everclear has evaporated [you can smell that it's gone] you'll see a watery liquid floating on top of your oil.I set the dish in ice water to harden the oil .i then pour off the water than reheat until all remaining drops are gone. actually i don't do any of this anymore.....BHO ROCKS MY WORLD NOW :mad0233:

 

[916boones916]

i recently made BHO and i think there may be some impurities in it due to use of improper materials and i wanted to get as much butane out as possible. i was thinking of doing an iso wash and recollection the crystals.

 

[Graywolf]

Here are some thoughts on how you might do that!

 

[squiggly]

This is precisely the methodology that I use/support (methodology, not method).

To begin I'll say I'm a chem grad student, so these notes all come from that perspective and are not necessarily application-based.

I personally reflux with hexanes to get my crude product, but let's just assume I've used butane and allowed it to evaporate off--leaving me with crude, butane infused, oil.

(This skips the water washing step of my hexanes extraction, which I'll be detailing in a few weeks once I've got my new lab set up).

I'd mix hot ethanol, in your case everclear, with the crude product and stir vigorously (I do this in a sep funnel w/ burping under a fume hood to reduce solvent fumes). This will dissolve the oil, reducing its viscosity and releasing what are called inclusion impurities (impurities trapped in a bubble for oil/crystal structure for solid). The boiling points in this case are a huge help and the rest of your butane should be released if you are stirring well. Evaporate/distill the ethanol off and you're left with butane free oil.

Here is my concern with your method:

Everclear, while being safe to drink, is not necessarily safe to smoke/vaporize. Pyrolysis is not one of the tests everclear must undergo to get FDA approval (at least no insomuch as we're worried about the effects of someone repeatedly smoking it, tests may have been done to ensure it doesn't create some chemical-weapon grade gas :P ).

After an hour a vigorous searching, I can't seem to find what binders/additives are in everclear--despite knowing that they exist. These binders are the main area of concern for several reasons:

--They may participate in side reactions with crude oil products
--They may pyrolyze to dangerous substances
--They may yield pyrolysis products which react with other vaporized/pyrolyzed crude oil products.
--They may form azeotropes with various crude oil products either preventing them from being evaporated off, in the opposite direction they may lower yield.

These are a few concerns, and there are even more for one simple reason: We don't know what the hell exactly is in that stuff. All we know is that its' been deemed safe to drink. However, when doing chemistry, you MUST know what's going in to know what will come out.

My recommendation is that you use something called food grade ethanol. This can be had from any number of chemical suppliers (local is best as shipping is a pain). At the very worst you should do some careful distillation of everclear and try to determine its purity/see if the binders/adulterants can be removed.

You may, in your effort to keep it all-natural, be doing more harm than good. The unfortunate truth is that we just don't know.

 

[Graywolf]

This is precisely the methodology that I use/support (methodology, not method).

To begin I'll say I'm a chem grad student, so these notes all come from that perspective and are not necessarily application-based.

I personally reflux with hexanes to get my crude product, but let's just assume I've used butane and allowed it to evaporate off--leaving me with crude, butane infused, oil.

(This skips the water washing step of my hexanes extraction, which I'll be detailing in a few weeks once I've got my new lab set up).

I'd mix hot ethanol, in your case everclear, with the crude product and stir vigorously (I do this in a sep funnel w/ burping under a fume hood to reduce solvent fumes). This will dissolve the oil, reducing its viscosity and releasing what are called inclusion impurities (impurities trapped in a bubble for oil/crystal structure for solid). The boiling points in this case are a huge help and the rest of your butane should be released if you are stirring well. Evaporate/distill the ethanol off and you're left with butane free oil.

Here is my concern with your method:

Everclear, while being safe to drink, is not necessarily safe to smoke/vaporize. Pyrolysis is not one of the tests everclear must undergo to get FDA approval (at least no insomuch as we're worried about the effects of someone repeatedly smoking it, tests may have been done to ensure it doesn't create some chemical-weapon grade gas :P ).

After an hour a vigorous searching, I can't seem to find what binders/additives are in everclear--despite knowing that they exist. These binders are the main area of concern for several reasons:

--They may participate in side reactions with crude oil products
--They may pyrolyze to dangerous substances
--They may yield pyrolysis products which react with other vaporized/pyrolyzed crude oil products.
--They may form azeotropes with various crude oil products either preventing them from being evaporated off, in the opposite direction they may lower yield.

These are a few concerns, and there are even more for one simple reason: We don't know what the hell exactly is in that stuff. All we know is that its' been deemed safe to drink. However, when doing chemistry, you MUST know what's going in to know what will come out.

My recommendation is that you use something called food grade ethanol. This can be had from any number of chemical suppliers (local is best as shipping is a pain). At the very worst you should do some careful distillation of everclear and try to determine its purity/see if the binders/adulterants can be removed.

You may, in your effort to keep it all-natural, be doing more harm than good. The unfortunate truth is that we just don't know.

Let me respond that I am a long retired manufacturing engineer, and I last took a chemistry class in the 60's. Most of what I remember are the parts that I actually used developing new industrial processes, so forgive me if I am a little dense on some of the fine points.

Might I ask, what binders/adulterants are you referring to?

I can't envision where any binders come into play in the actual production of azeotropic 190 proof from a beer mash or sugar wash, and all of the adulterates that I am aware of, are primarily distilled water and trace distilled volatile and flammable cogeners.

What residue do you expect to remain after pyrolysis?

I haven't been concerned, as I remove any alcohol from all of my extractions besides alcohol tinctures, to levels at least below human sensory odor perception of ~100 ppm, or any detectable sweet alcohol taste when vaporized.

That means that if present, any trace azeotropic cogeners in the original alcohol has been reduced by a similar amount and are therefore in parts per billionth.

Are there some that I am unaware of?

 

[squiggly]

The easiest reply is the most honest one which is that I do not know.

I do know that I've been warned against using things like everclear in extractions by people much more qualified to warn someone about such things. I'm simply passing on the concern they had for me at the time. This includes my organic professor, as well as some amateur (if you can call them that) chemists at sciencemadness.

In terms of health safety/pyrolysis products--I didn't meant to postulate that these are concrete possibilities insomuch as they need to be avoided in a specific way. I was only conjecturing that without the full story, the workings of chemistry can be pretty complex. It's really very important to know EXACTLY what you have, and perhaps more importantly what you don't have--especially if you're going to be smoking it which is inherently unhealthy. Fire can break bonds, so my suggestion is that we should know what bonds exists to be broken in something before we smoke it.

If you're really interested, I'd ask you to check the specific gravity of everclear as I suspect this would be very telling. I don't have the required apparatus/don't want to build one. Just going to take my professor at his word for the moment :)

Edit:

It is my understanding that there are additives which control rate of evaporation/vapor pressure. Despite them not being necessary, I wouldn't be surprised to find that preservatives are also added.

The most precise information I can find is that everclear is "relatively low" in congeners--which of course isn't very precise at all. These can include: acetaldehydes, ketones, and higher alcohols.

If you want a bit of a scare, acetone can be pyrolyzed to ketene (although the temperature required is a bit high--it is not outside of the range of a Bic lighter)--and this is some nasty, nasty stuff. If you don't like benzene, you certainly won't like this.

if ketene is present in ethanol, even more side reactions--and side reactions of side reactions--can occur. This is the nature of organic synthesis. Trace amounts or not, it may only take one molecule that doesn't belong to cause cancer--I don't mean to be overly dramatic, as there are likely similar problems with chemical supply all over the world, but this is definitely something to think about.

Relatively low could mean ppb scale, but I'm not sure. I am merely coming from a place of "the right tool for the job". This tool might work, but it's a rusty hand-powered version of the correct one in my opinion.