The M-Files Investigates Homemade Vaporizers

[Matt Mernagh]

Memo – Findings On Homemade Vaporizers Disturbing

Getting gunned on ganja then making stoner utensils is a natural talent for some potheads. They can assemble several different pieces of random household items to create a killer smoking device.

Not The M-Files.

Getting stoned and making stuff is not our scene. Even creating a

fruit pipe

with a Granny Smith apple and a purchased fruit kit is a cannabis challenge. Thankfully with our impressive reefer Rolodex there’s always someone around who has attempted a pothead project with success.

Except for a few smugglers and three honey oil friends.

These are professional potheads, who made honey oil all the time, but ‘blew up in the lab’ one day when the temperature went a little too hot. Resulting in serious burns, home fires and in one friend’s case hospitalization. Prohibition ensures that some hastily created household marijuana extraction devices do actually kill.

So be extremely careful with what you use to create or extract your toke. Some items when heated release potent toxins.


So please do not try this at home.

The dangers of homemade vaporizers include, but are not limited too.

1)INHALING GLASS!
2)Setting Your Self On FIRE!
3)Not Getting Stoned!

All three (especially the third point) should be reason not to try. Weed vaporizers are affordable for any budget. There’s little need to make one. Many homemade vaporizers are futile at even the basics of cannabis extracting. Simply burning your bud. Which is not what we’re looking for.

However, the M-Files first weed vaporizer experience did come from a homemade job. We understand the allure.

Our friend Nick Nuggets followed the instructions he found on a local bulletin board system (BBS). He built a vaporizer using a soldering iron, pickle jar, rubber tubing and tinfoil. The soldering iron never extracted at a precise temperature of 400F.

Keeping the unit upright and temperature consistent to get a good hit became such a chore that the novelty wore off in a few hours. Nuggets, like many marijuana McGyvers, got more of a kick out of making the device than actually using it.

Temperature is key to successful vaporization.

The M-Files’s personal preference for sativa marijuana strains is 396F and 409F for indica marijuana types. For show we’ll kick it to 420F to create a hardy smoky weed vapor. Plenty of folks want a, ‘If you don’t cough. You don’t get off.’ hit that only comes from 420F.

The Stove Top Vaporization Technique appears to control temperature well and the method sounds like plenty of fun. It’s akin to doing hot knives on a stove.

Required equipment.
1)Glass stove top or hot plate
2)Cooking Thermometer (Not sicky one you put under your tongue)
3)Sheet of tinfoil
4)Sawed off bottom of a pop bottle
5)Marijuana

Cut the bottom off a plastic soda bottle. Tear a sheet of tinfoil larger than a stove burner. Warm the stove burner to 400F or thereabouts. Use thermometer to measure temperature by placing it on the burner.

Grind your cannabis!

Put ground cannabis on your tinfoil sheet. Place sawed off pop bottle on top of the ground grass with bottle cap on. When temperature reaches 400F on stove top burner, slide (on glass stove tops this is very easy to perform) the tinfoil complete with toke and soda bottle onto the burner.

When you begin to see vapor, uncap the soda bottle and inhale. Repeat as needed. Remain mindful at all times of the temperature reaching above 420F, the upper range of tolerable vaporization.

Our lighter burns cannabis at proximately 800 – 1000F so be very mindful that your cannabis may catch fire if you leave it on the stove burner too long. And the plastic pop bottle is also a danger of melting. Don’t forget to turn off the stove when you’re high.

The Light Bulb homemade vaporizer shown in Master Bong's instructional video is much more complex than the Stove Top Method. But it’s an amazing Master Bong video, but involves a nasty vaporization method. Given the possibility of inhaling small particles of glass or worst some sort of light bulb poison.

Seventy searches involving the keyword homemade vaporizer are made daily.

Remember do not try this at home.

[overgrowray]

interesting. but not really informational

[therealstuff]

I really think this article is a big improvement from the last one so congrats matt! I enjoy the practicality of this article and have constructed many homemade smoking devices myself so I can appreciate your work much more. Maybe going into detail about the nasty vaporization method of using a lightbulb vaporizer would’ve been a good idea and quite fascinating instead of briefly mentioning it at the end of your article. Possibly mentioning why and how the glass particles and “lightbulb poison” (soft white spray) can affect users and what they can do to protect themselves. Such as use salt to remove the coating or to simply buy clear bulbs. Also mentioning the temperatures at which different types of canabinoids vaporize and the quality of vapor you inhale would be valuable information in an article such as this.

Little blurp from wikipedia
Few vaporizer studies/reviews have really addressed the quality of the vapor extracted and delivered. Most studies/reviews have tended to focus on the mode of usage of the vaporizers and not the quality of the vapor extracted and delivered. When one considers that there are at least 60 pharmacologically-active compounds in cannabis and that the aromatic terpenoids begin to vaporize at 126 °C, but the more bio-active cannabidiol (CBD), Cannabinol (CBN), and delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) do not vaporize until near their respective flash points: CBD 206.3 °C^[6], CBN 212.7 °C^[7], THC 149.3 °C^[8] then it becomes apparent that the only way to get a full spectrum vapor inhalation is to extract and deliver rapidly from a small sample at a time. Because most commercial vaporizers are slow in extraction and delivery, the vapor inhaled is first aromatic, but only minimally active; and then as the apparent temperature rises, the vapor becomes increasingly bio-active, but minimally aromatic as most of the aromatics already released.


Like Overgrowray said ^^ it needs more meat and less sunshine.
Cheers, I’m looking forward to your next article!>>

[xllx_Rob_xllx]

decent article Matt.. what you're explaining sounds like what we call "knife hits" or "hot knives" around this area but yeah.. do what cha gotta do

[NFloyd2357]

yeah... hot knife hits, and light bulb vapes. Light bulb vapes are actually very safe and extremely easy to make. All you do is gut an incandescent, (clear, not white) and swish around some water in there for safety. There you go, basically done, other than making any kind of makeshift mouthpiece, which can be done using the cap of a 2L soda bottle

[Duplicity]

I think he covered the spectrum of homemade vaporizers. There are not many things in a common household that get to a certain temperature, display that temp, maintain the temp without fluctuating at the same time are safe and usuable in a smoking or vaporizing situation.

The article was definitely an improvment on the second one. This one read much smoother. I knew you had it in you! I look forward to the next article. Any hints on what the M-Files is going to investigate over the next 2 weeks?

[VaporHead]

Interesting choice of topics! They definitely all have room for investigation. I would like to see some more data, explicit investigation, perhaps testimonials... interviews and quotes of experts and such! That would make the articles all the more interesting. Thanks for a biweekly read!

[Matt Mernagh]

thanks! great feedback. im constantly testing the temp on my digit volcano. its true if you start at lower temp you're going to get the flavor. you can increase as you go. my personal choice is 409F. at Vapor Central we're constantly testing them. my choice is the Digit or Herbal Aire.

next up i'm going to check in with Chad and learn all about Vapor Poo oil. he's an expert at taking the crap from volcano and making oil out of it. i'll snap some photos while we make it.

shoot an email to some vaporization companies and ask them some questions.

have a wonderful day

matt

[gonemadwithmary]

Very nice, man. Such an improvement from the last article you did lol. As far as grammar 'n all that kinda shit goes, I mean.

I'll be keepin' an eye out for the next one.

[oldskoolgrower]

About 20 years ago I made one using a car ciagarette lighter, a rheostat, the appropriate transformer, and a wall plug. The hardest part was calibrating the temp but it worked great. Then again back then there weren't a ton of commercially available vapes.

[Matt Mernagh]

oh for sure back in the day 20 years ago making your own ganja gear like a vaporizer was a very intense cool thing b/c of the lack of weed vaporizers on the market. now there's too many. my argument. same with making a bong or a bucket bong. with plenty of great toker toys available the idea of making ganja goodies to play with is starting to really fall by the wayside.

[oldskoolgrower]

Yes, but in a way that's a shame. Back in the day we made some pretty well crafted homemade smoking utensils. It's becoming a lost art.

[calp]

Nice little article...

Home mades are definetly becoming a lost art though

[Bleezie_King]

lol

inhaling glass and getting caught on fire don't sound all bad

but wasting weed and not getting stoned?!?

now THAT is a consequence of unfathomable proportions!!!

[Matt Mernagh]

100% it's a lost art. bucket bongs are still really popular at parties. but with this supposed stoner advance technology for toking less people are tinkering. that said, plenty of the younger potheads (im in the middle age group) make oil out of vapor poo, make bubble bag hash, and enjoy their glassware immensely. the oil and bubble is the smallest of returns for the labor, but there's something really enjoyable about it.