Blue Dream Dab Job, Part 2: Making Something Out of Nothing

Before heading back home after meeting our new possible boss, we stopped at a few stores to get everything we would need to finish the job.  We lived in the middle of nowhere, so it was best to get things like the special coffee filters we use and parchment paper while still in the nearest major city. We headed back to the farm, ready to get started on the job.  He sent us off with several pounds of trim to process and gave us just a few days to do it before we were supposed to meet again. 

At this time,we were still living in our tent on the property with Rebel Dog.  For the most part, we were using a car port tent on the property as a place to make dabs.  The smoke room was almost always occupied with smokers, who tended to get pretty upset if you told them to leave and not smoke, regardless of the reason.  Almost immediately we ended up working in this tent, as it was the most empty hassle free place on that property, save for the empty sheep barn next door, that later became our living quarters.

That tent wasn't ideal in any way.  For one thing, it had holes in the roof and it was outside, just set up on the wet Oregon ground.  It was there as a halfway point for their stuff, as they were in the process of moving into the property.  We had a table set up in the middle and we made dabs as that, using milk crates to hold the pan above the heat gun as we worked.  At a certain point, the whole floor of this tent was littered with butane caps.  

When we got Rebel, we were actually in this tent, in the process of making dabs when he showed up.  I had to leave to go deal with Hippy and her ridiculous puppy prices.  We had Rebel for a good 20 minutes before John really had the chance to say hi to him.  Rebel immediately took to the bright red butane caps scattered across the floor, chasing them around like his sister had been doing for weeks.  By the end of it, both dogs had a huge soft spot for the bouncy, noisy plastic caps. 

When making dabs, ideally you want a clean, dust free and sterile environment, far away from any sort of flame. Our dab producing conditions were less than ideal literally the entire time, even when they were at their best.  At one point, we were pressured to blow dabs in the smoke room after the wood stove had been installed, something we absolutely were not willing to do.  While we later had to blow in our living quarters where there was a wood stove, we dealt with a lot of cold times having shut off the stove before ever starting our process.  

So our conditions sucked, realistically speaking.  We were happy we had the job but stressed at the fact that we really didn't have a good place to make them.  We knew the guy intended to have them tested for potency and impurities, so having a clean contaminant free environment was important to us from the beginning, even more so than it generally is.  We weren't interested in fucking up literally the only break we got while in Oregon in terms of jobs.

As we started to process the material, we were delighted at the quality of dabs but worried about yield.  We discussed average yield rates we were familiar with and this guy's trim total seemed to be falling just short of the lower end of what's expected.  We were pretty worried about this the whole time, as we knew that the yield percentage would make or break whether or not we kept this job.  The guy was clearly east coast, not west coast enough to keep us on because he feels bad about our position.  He gave us a shot, and that's better than what a lot of people would have done in his position.

We did our best to increase yields, with little result. What changes helped, we kept to get the most we could out of the product.  We even took to heating the cans at a point, to help increase the pressure within them for better extraction. We did everything we could and basically got the bare minimum.  This isn't really something we could control at a certain point; if there's not more to extract we can't extract it.  

The quality of the trimmings was a bit overstated by the guy.  He made it sound like there was a lot of bud material due to mold, but we really didn't find any more buds than we would in general trimmings. We quickly found that this was his first year at growing, his attempt to get rich on the Oregon weed market. So he honestly didn't know what a lot of bud material was in terms of trim.  It also explained his barely average yields, he was using a nutrient system, following it like a recipe without any thought of his own needed.  

We worked on finishing the job and if I remember correctly, there was some lateness involved.  We either didn't finish in time, or our ride was no longer able to take us.  We ended up rescheduling to meet once again, at the same place we did before.

We got his cut of the yield prepared, John shaped it into a bar hoping the gold bar would appeal to the east coaster.  We traveled back to that home depot parking lot, where he was once again waiting with his hummer.  We gave him his cut and explained the yield situation.  While he seemed disappointed, he was prepared to give us more trim and butane, for another round.  We explained that when trimmings are kept in bags, the heavier material sinks to the bottom.  This generally causes a phenomenon where the yield seems to increase as you work through the bag, because all of the good stuff has sunk to the bottom.

Armed with more trim and butane, we set off back to the farm again.  We weren't sure the job would extend beyond that day, but it did.  We got another several pounds as well as the butane we needed to process things.  It seemed that things were going to work out, temporarily speaking at least, so long as we still had a place to process things.  As time wore on, this task got more difficult to achieve, but more on that later. For now, it was time to go home, do some dabs and celebrate that we still had a job...for the time being. 

All photos and content in this post are mine and original.  The story is true to the best of my memory.