Making Hash

Why should you want to make hash?

You may prefer the cleaner buz from smoking it rather than smoking some stinky leaves. (I do)
Easier to conceal You may not feel comfortable storing a large volume of bud and leaves for long periods when you can release and keep the active ingredients in a fraction of the space.
Street cred - Not everyone has their own strains of Hash for sale - impress your stoner mates
Save/make money - What do you do with your male plants and the female leaves you would normally chuck away? - now you can extract all the THC from them - and yes, it is worth doing! - Even the small thichomes on the males can be recovered and it is just as good hash as on the females - just less of it.
Longer life - Ever had mold problems with your store buds and grass? Just keeping the hash solves that problem. The oily block produced has a long shelf life - just keep it wrapped in polythene and it with last for ever.
Look after you health. Just because you enjoy a smoke now and then doesn't mean you have to take risks. Do you think it does you any good smoking those leaves and buds - They contain over 200 products which you are smoking as a by-product - that give you no high at all - they just taste shit. This is ignoring any fertilizers and chemicals used to enhance the plants growth.

There are a few techniques for making hash.

o If you have a few fields of cannabis growing, you can just move from plant to plant, grasping the lower stem and by sliding your hand up to the top, some of the resin will stick to your hands. When your hand is nice and sticky, scrape off the resin with a razor blade, and continue until the whole field is complete. This method if you have plenty of plants but the yield is not too good, but the final product can be pressed into some nice block. This is the method that many peasant farmers use in the third world.

o The chemical method. By using a series of solvents and distillation technique - beyond the scope of this article - you can separate the THC from the plants. This method does require executing by trained lab technicians as the mixture of solvents and heating, will cause an explosive environment and should not be tried at home. Also the solvents and chemicals used may be hard to get hold of in industrial quantities without alerting the authorities.

o Cold water extraction system. This is an economical and safe method that can be done at home without any tell tale chemicals or equipment being used. The method is the same as used by aromatherapy practitioners for releasing their essential oils from their smelly plants!

Details of a proven system can be found here with full instructions

Their are a few documents around suggesting you can use coffee filters to filter off the THC, but the yield is very low ( The filters are not the right size to trap the THC laden thrichomes) and you will just be wasting your precious herb, anding with an unusable (or unsaleable) product.

The Xxxtractor bag system detailed here has been designed for the purpose and comes in a range of sizes to suit the hobbiest and the commecial producer.

Often 75% of the plant matter can be recovered as pure THC laden trichomes, with a comercial value and compactness to make it a 'must to have' solution to the problem