Instructions

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Instructions

Items Needed:.

A bucket the same size of your Bubble Bag kit
(ie. 5 gallon / 20 litre kit = 5 gallon / 20 litre bucket).
Large wooden spoon
Electric cake mixer (the kind with two beaters)
Water
Ice (enough to fill the bucket, as it will melt during mixing)
Tea towel or wash cloth
metal spoon (to remove the final product from the screen)

Caution
Pick out any stems or branches in the leaf material as they could potentially damage the bags.

Step One:
Place each bag (one at a time) into the bucket, starting with the 25 micron bag and ending with the 220 micron bag.

Step Two:
Fill the bucket 2/3 full with cold water.

Step Three:
Add plant matter to 220 micron bag. Many people find that frozen plant matters gives them better results.

Step Four:
Add ice cubes to the 220 micron bag until the bag is 90% full.

Step Five:
Mix material in the 220 micron bag with the wooden spoon, until the plant matter, water and ice cubes are fully mixed. Then mix this mixture with the electric cake mixer for 20 minutes. Continually add more ice as it melts to keep the mixture as cold as possible. Be careful when using the electric cake mixer, use only in the centre of the bag. Try not to hit the side walls or bottom mesh material of the bag. Excessive wear on the sidewalls and bottom mesh will greatly decrease your bags life span.

Step Six:
After mixing let bucket with bags and mixture sit for 20 minutes.

Step Seven:
Slowly pull the 220 micron bag out, let the water drain from the bag you pull out into the bag below it. The leaf material that remains behind in the 220 micron bag is basically waste and can be thrown away, although some people still use it for cooking or wil run it through the Bubble Bags a second and third time to get every bit of resin possible.

Step Eight
Slowly pull the 190 micron bag out, let the water drain from the second bag into the 170 micron bag.

Caution
Pull each bag slowly and make sure they drain completely. Although Bubble Bags are made of high quality materials and are of high quality construction, pulling a bag quickly will add increased stress to the bags stitching, decreasing the bags life span. Each bag will take slightly longer to drain, however it is not important to let the bags drain slowly otherwise you will be spending all day, letting the bags drain, drip by drip. The trick to making the bags drain in seconds is you want to gather the top of the bag into your hands, lift it out of the bucket and give it several *very quick* up and down jerking motions and the entire bag will drain in seconds,

Step Nine:
Lay out the tea towel or face cloth, open up the 25 micron pressing screen onto the tea towel

Using the dull edge of a metal spoon. gently scrape the final product off the screen and dump it out onto the pressing screen. Never use a knife as you may cut the screen material.

Turn the bag that you just scraped inside out and rinse off the screen in the water that is still in the bucket. This way you won't waste any of the resin that was left behind, stuck in the holes of the screen, instead it will be rinsed off and collected in the next bag.

Step Ten:
Fold the pressing screen and tea towel in half, thus sandwiching the resin in-between them. Gently, but firmly press this "sandwich" with the palm of your head, a rolling pin, book or other heavy object. The remaining moisture will be squished out through the pressing screen and be asorbed into the towel. This final product is now ready for use. See the helpful hints below on how to store your resin for the long term.

Step Eleven:
Repeat steps Eight and Nine for each bag until you have completed the filtration process for all bags.

Helpful Hints for getting the most out of your Bubble Bags...

Cold is they key to why the system works, the colder the better, so if you can, freeze your leaf before hand, use very cold water and always make sure there is plenty of ice and a constant supply of chunky ice in the mixture as you are mixing.

Mixing with a electric cake beater will yield better results than mixing by hand with say a big wooden spoon, but either will work. You can always run the same batch of leaf more than once to see if you can get more out of it.

The whole process should take under an hour. Mix for 20 mins, let sit for 20 mins, then pull the bags out one by one.

IMPORTANT - If you are using the 20 gallon bags, be sure to install some sort of tap or spigot at the bottom of your mixing container, so that you don't have to lift the whole giant bag out while it is filled with water, which is a lot of weight and not only is it hard to do and bad for your back, but all that water weight could rip your bag.

If you do not intend to use all of the final product right away and want to keep it around, you need to dry it all the way out so it does not mold. To do this, take each grade of final product and put it onto a piece of thick cardboard, chop it up as finely as possible and let it sit for 24 hours. The cardboard will draw the remaining water out of the final product and you will have a very dry final product that can be stored in a glass jar for many years.

If you find the final product too hard and chunky after drying, what you can do is turn it into a powder using an electric coffee grinder. It can then stay a powder, otherwise using heat and pressure you can turn it into a nice putty like substance.

If your first batch does not turn out, or does not yield as much results as you expected, do not worry, for some people there is a learning curve and you have to do a batch or two, in order to understand how to do it right. YOu can always rerun the same plant material.