Laying windowpane: techniques and recipes...

[Deinonychus]

Hey! So what was once a seemingly completely forbidden topic here on Bluelight – laying blotter – seems to have recently become a legitimate topic of discussion in the name of harm reduction. With the advent of n-benzyl PEAs, many people are attempting to lay their own blotter. Previously, the argument against discussing the laying of blotter was focused on the likely hood that an individual asking questions on the subject would likely be trying to lay the blotter as a distribution medium for acid, and as we don't discuss how to and how not to sell drugs, the subject was consequently off limits.

However, unlike acid, poorly-laid blotter that contains NBOMes adsorbed (with a D) onto the internal fibers of the blotter paper can quite possibly kill you, and so harm reduction seems to have reluctantly trumped the other factors to the moderators weighing the subject. The topic is important because laying blotter well is anything but easy, with the vagaries of how liquid is distributed throughout a saturated piece of paper being not easily understood.

Seemingly common-sense methods that come to mind will almost always result in totally uneven coverage, leading to certain parts of the blotter holding much more compound than others. If the blotters from a less-concentrated area are mixed with those from the more concentrated area things become even more dangerous, as somebody may take a single, underdosed piece, conclude all the pieces are weaksauce, and take several extra blotters to try to get the full effect, one or more of which may be from the overly dosed areas of the sheet, leading to health complications and possibly death.

My thinking on this subject is that laying down gelatin windowpane may be the ideal alternative to blotter for the home-experimenter / DIY fanatic who wishes to lay doses as thin, easily concealed media. I admit I am not an expert on the subject, and so I can't say with any accuracy whether there are issues with windowpane that mirror those with blotter.

My thoughts are that it may provide a way to avoid the difficulties inherent to liquid distribution in saturated paper, while retaining the benefits of liquid measurement. If this is the case then a set amount of liquid containing a set amount of compound could be made into windowpane sheets, and whatever the resulting 2-dimensional area ends up being could be easily subdivided so as to produce accurately calibrated doses of the active component.

So I'm posting this thread to discuss the subject of windowpane: what sorts of complications and problems exist, what the best and most effective techniques are for laying windowpane, how the ingredients in the liquid mixture prior to gelling affect the end product, what recipes are good, etc. If anybody has experience with this subject their input would be great, and anybody who would be down to engage in a little bit of practical experimentation on the subject is welcome as well. I for one would be willing to try out some recipes and post my results if the interest in the subject is great enough.

With all that in mind, let's keep this clean: I believe that if the scope of this thread is limited to practical techniques and considerations regarding windowpane gelatin sheets it will likely be allowed to stay open. So in the interest of not antagonizing the mods, keep your drug distribution stories and dealer advice to yourself please!

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I'll start things off with a recipe I have been informed about. It uses measurements of mass, with a total of 250 grams of water being used to 3 grams of agar and 1/2 a packet of gelatin. Using the density of water we then arrive at a volume of 250 ml for the listed quantities of agar and gelatin. Unfortunately the gelatin packets you buy in a store are not all sized the same as far as how much gelatin they contain. I recall an episode of America's Test Kitchen (yeah, public radio and PBS junkie here for sure) where the quantity of gelatin in a packet was found to vary by as much as a tablespoon, if I recall correctly. So specifying a half packet is not very helpful in determining how much to use.

The technique is to lightly grease a rectangular baking dish like you would use for a casserole with some sort of oil, so as to allow the finished, dried sheet to be easily released from the bottom of the dish. The mixture of warm water, agar, gelatin, and active compound is then poured into the dish in such a way as to have only a very thin layer of this solution, so that when dried it will be a thin sheet. Alternately to pouring, a spoon or needleless syringe may be used to put in the proper amount of solution. The dish is then set aside to dry.

My commentary on the subject is thus: it may well serve to make up the full 250 ml batch, and use several dishes to use up all the solution, rather than trying to subdivide the recipe, because if you are using a milligram balance to measure out your NBOMe, the things aren't perfectly accurate and you may end up with as much as five milligrams too much or too little. By making 250 ml of a 1 mg/ml solution, you are using enough drug that a five milligram difference will not be hugely significant.

Think of it this way: at 250 mg and 250 ml, a difference of 5 mg will result in anywhere from 245 to 255 mg in that 250 ml of solvent. If 245, then you'll actually have 980 mics per milliliter, and if 255, you'll have 1020 mics per milliliter. Whereas if you only made up 30 ml of 1 mg/ml solution, that 5 milligram I accuracy would result in either 833 mics/ml for 25 mg in 30 ml or 1166 mics/ml for 35 mg. So as you can see the inaccuracy in the balance is rendered less significant the more compound is used.

Also, I wonder what the effects of using a portion of another solvent in place of 100% water would be. I wouldn't recommend using anything that may be nasty for the human body, like methanol, as the potential for blinding wood alcohol to get stuck in the end result gel sheet is too scary, so ethanol is probably best, or possibly acetone as I've seen a thread in ADD that seems to indicate that it is not toxic (but don't take my word for it, you don't want to take the risk if you're not 100% sure, right? Right.)

So lets get to discussing windowpane then, how to lay it, what's the recipe, etc etc. I'd be willing like I mentioned to try out a recipe or three (without including any product, as its just for practice and to proove or disproove a method or recipe) to see how they work if there's enough interest in the subject. So yeah, have at it, discuss, etc!

 

[infantannihilator]

Hmm..

My impression of how this is properly done is to use a solution of isopropyl alcohol and whatever your substance is.

First you must determine the amount of iso the amount of blotter you want to lay can hold. My impression of how to go about this would be to find a dish relatively close to the same size as your blotter sheet (or in my case I was going to machine a pocket in a piece of stainless steel). Fill the dish/pocket with a known amount of iso, put your blotter in until its fully saturated and then take it out, allowing it to drip, and placing it on your drying rack. Then measure the amount of liquid remaining in the dish and subtract and you know how much your blotter holds.

From there you take that known amount of iso and mix in your substance. Now an even mix here is key.. simply swirling it around a bit isn't really going to cut it. If you dont have access to a lab stirrer, Ive read that a sonic toothbush tied to the side of your vial/beaker/container and left on for some time will adequately mix. I think its this stage more than anything that will lead to inconsistencies in the blotter at the end.

Pour your solution in your dish, add your blotter, let it all absord and then remove it, there should be very little if any iso left in the dish, and allow it to dry naturally laying flat on some sort of mesh. I wouldn't bother using any sort of fans, or letting the blotter hang from a line or anything to minimize "travel" as much as possible.. I think that using any sort of solution involving water or other substances that do not easily evaporate and which take considerable amount of time could lead to leaching, whereby solution from still wet areas leach into the drier areas. I believe the faster the blotter can dry out on its own, the less chance of such a thing happening. Eliminating fans or other sources to aid in the evaporation also eliminates the chance of substance being pushed into other areas and so on. The same goes for allowing it to dry flat.

In your example regarding 250ml in a 1mg/ml solution, I assume you want to lay 250 blotters, or perhaps 500. Well, at even 500 blotters, I would imagine this would be quite a considerable amount of fluid for a 1/4x1/4" blotter to absorb. I concede that you can cut your blotters to any size you wish, this is true, but I imagine they would have to be quite large. The only way around this is to saturate, let dry, and then re-saturate again.. but in my opinion this only leads to a lot more problems with even distribution.

Also I know people tend to dismiss the 'lay each blotter individually' technique, but if you're laying a personal amount, of say 50 tabs at 1mg each.. I would honestly just tear each tab up into their individual tabs, create a dilute solution of however much iso your individual tab can absord, minus a bit, lets say for hypothetical sake, 5mg/ml so each tab gets .2ml, or 20 units of solution dropped onto it. If our scale at 50mg is off by as much as 5mg (which imo is an extreme, though for HR purposes valid) that means that each blotter could end up with +/-.1mg. Now in the case of NBOMe this can be quite a lot indeed.. However if you drop .2ml on each on individually using an insulin syringe then they should all be the same, there is no worry about leaching or uneven distribution.

Now the amount of solvent you use is irrelevant to minimizing error, it is the amount of solute that matters. If you have 250mg and want to lay 1mg tabs, then your +/-5mg error is divided by 250 (.02mg). If you have 50mg, 5 is divided by 50 (.1mg).. So in a sense, the more blotter you lay, the more you can minimize error from the scale. So you can make your solution as dilute as you need it to be, provided you can measure solution down to such necessary accuracy, which you should be able to find means of doing, even without any sort of lab grade equipment. Eg. In my example of 50 tabs at a 5mg/ml solution, even if I had to measure my iso out with an insulin syringe 10 times, it could be done, and could be done with pretty darn good accuracy.

I firmly believe that you should lay the blotter once and there should be next to zero remaining liquid.. relaying will only introduce inconsistencies. I admit that I have never laid any blotter, and that these words are only the results of what I have come to believe would be the best method through my own research and time spent thinking about it, however I concede that they may not be the best, and I look forward to talking about ways to approach the topic.

 

[Deinonychus]

^^ I'm actually trying to find a way to avoid the vagueries of laying blotter altogether by using stuff like gelatin, xanthan gum, and agar to form a gel out of a homogenous liquid measurement type solution, using commonly available household objects that are easily at hand for the amateur experimenters that are the type to try and find a cool method of dosing / storage for their drugs. When using fancy machinery like the people who supply the vendors of all the NBOMe blotter going around do, an isotropic distribution is possible, but when amateurs try and lay it the complications are just massively numerous and really difficult to resolve.

One of the interesting things about windowpane specifically for NBOMes is that they are a hell of a lot more stable than acid. This is relevant because you wouldn't have to worry about the goods decomposing if your gelatin/agar/solvent mixture is a wee bit too hot.

The kinds of things that I don't know about though are legion. For example, one of the issues – probably THE main issue with blotter – is the imperfect distribution of the chemical throughout the sheet this can stem from any number of different things, like certain areas being more saturated than other or certain areas drying faster than others, drawing solution and thus solute into regions of greater concentration through capillary action.

And so I don't know whether these issues of uneven distribution would plague amateur attempts to lay windowpane. For example, how does the possibility of the solution becoming supersaturated as it dries factor into the process, causing precipitation of a compound? How about the potential for the formation of crystals as the amount of solvent decreases towards the 'dried' gel state (dried in quotations because a gel is like a mineral hydrate, it by definition includes water, the water is just bound up with the solids to form a gel)? What about differential drying, where part of the sheet gels before the rest of it? Are there inherent issues with even distribution as a result of the physical nature of a gel? Who knows! I sure as hell don't, and I don't want to advocate that people do X as an alternative to Y without knowing whether difficult issues exist for method X just as they do for Y.

Gelling is a complex process that even materials scientists don't fully understand, and common sense would tell me that achieving a homogenous distribution of a compound within a gelling liquid solution would be easier and more likely than when the complicating factors of saturated paper are involved. But then again common sense methods are what get people in trouble with blotter in the first place, so relying solely on common sense is probably not the best idea. Some combination of theoretical knowledge and practical technique will be necessary for the process of creating gel windowpane to be a useful alternative to blotters.

 

[Kapitan]

Great post! I've been wondering about using agar to make windowpane ever since I spent half of a summer making agar plates. I've never come across anything distributed in this form, though. I wonder if it would be sticky.

Also, what is the gelatin for? Is there some advantage to this mixture over pure agar?

Perhaps I'll do a "dry run" to see what the consistency of this stuff is.

 

[infantannihilator]

^^ I'm actually trying to find a way to avoid the vagueries of laying blotter altogether by using stuff like gelatin, xanthan gum, and agar to form a gel out of a homogenous liquid measurement type solution, using commonly available household objects that are easily at hand for the amateur experimenters that are the type to try and find a cool method of dosing / storage for their drugs. When using fancy machinery like the people who supply the vendors of all the NBOMe blotter going around do, an isotropic distribution is possible, but when amateurs try and lay it the complications are just massively numerous and really difficult to resolve.

The kinds of things that I don't know about though are legion. For example, one of the issues – probably THE main issue with blotter – is the imperfect distribution of the chemical throughout the sheet this can stem from any number of different things, like certain areas being more saturated than other or certain areas drying faster than others, drawing solution and thus solute into regions of greater concentration through capillary action.

And so I don't know whether these issues of uneven distribution would plague amateur attempts to lay windowpane. For example, how does the possibility of the solution becoming supersaturated as it dries factor into the process, causing precipitation of a compound? How about the potential for the formation of crystals as the amount of solvent decreases towards the 'dried' gel state (dried in quotations because a gel is like a mineral hydrate, it by definition includes water, the water is just bound up with the solids to form a gel)? What about differential drying, where part of the sheet gels before the rest of it? Are there inherent issues with even distribution as a result of the physical nature of a gel? Who knows! I sure as hell don't, and I don't want to advocate that people do X as an alternative to Y without knowing whether difficult issues exist for method X just as they do for Y.

Ah! I fully understand now, you'll have to forgive me, I somewhat skimmed over your post and posted how I assumed blotter would be posted. I now get what you mean by the term windowpane.

I like the idea, but a few things spring into mind:

First of all baking dishes do not come with perfectly square edges, and usually the walls arent perfectly vertical either. Assuming your pan is perfectly level, (the bottom of the pan, not its edges) and you can assume an even thickness of the gel, what do you do about the edges, whereby the corners may be rounded? I would assume you could just leave the corners off and just assume them to be weaker tabs which you may daringly add to a dose at another time.

But this brings up another issue, how do you go about evenly cutting up your new perfectly flat and even gel? It is here where I can see issues arising and your perfect distribution and error minimization going out the window as you attempt to cut perfectly equal tabs from what is ultimately going to be a malleable material. How do you ensure you can even get it out of the dish without say, breaking it into pieces? How long will such a material last?

A quick look around the net shows people using the light fixture cover to create little hex pieces of gel.. but I would imagine youd have to find out how many you have and so on.. eugh.. sounds so drastically far away from any sort of method of even distribution, and in the end knowing how much each 'tab' contains.

I like the idea but I think it introduces its own separate set of problems that could lead to an uneven distribution. You obviously have to take some necessary steps to ensure you can control all of these potential variables. On that note however, laying blotter the conventional way imposes its own set of problems, so rather than making things easier you're just shifting around the specifics of the steps necessary I believe. There is also the chance that you introduce more variability into the process to complicate things for the layman than simply laying blotter the old fashioned way.

I am unaware of how fancy machinery must go about the process, but it cannot be much different, albeit a little more fancy since well, machinery is doing it, but the basics must remain the same. A large scale industrial dough mixer operates on the same principal as your grandmother mixing her own dough, just mechanized. People have been laying blotter evenly for decades, there isn't a magic secret to it, we can logically deduce how it is done with such relative precision, and I don't personally believe any sort of mechanization can lead to an inherent better distribution than can be attained doing it all manually.

I'll look more into the concept of laying windowpane, but these are just some things that spring into mind.

 

[Deinonychus]

It's worth mentioning that on another forum I found a reference to making 5-MeO-DMT windowpanes, which was supposedly quite successful. The recipe was again by mass (why?) and it was a 1:2:1 ratio of gelatin to water to glycerin.

I don't know why the first recipe uses a mixture of agar and gelatin. I know agar is sometimes used as a vegetarian gelatin substitute, but I don't know for sure how its gelling properties compare to those of gelatin. I guess this could be answered by taking an amount of agar, a corresponding amount (are they equipotent by weight/mass as far as gelling ability?) of gelatin, and putting each in its own portion of water, as per the directions for each gelling agent and then waiting to see how the end results compare.

If agar could be used solely by itself I'm sure the vegetarians here would appreciate it. I'm vegetarian myself but I don't have a grand mal seizure if a drug is in a gel and I don't know if the gel was made with or without gelatin, same as I don't care if people eat a big steaming plate of animal in front of me. It's just not a huge deal / end of the world in either case. But I know a lot of vegetarians are nazis about this kind of shit so maybe trying to use an all-agar recipe would be better.

In this second recipe, I notice the use of glycerin. I know that glycerin is usable as both a thickening agent and a lubricating agent (how this can be the case I don't have a clue), and there was an emphasis on the fact that both the gelatin used in this second recipe and glycerin were both needed. The dude claimed that this gelatin/water/glycerin combination and the specific 1:2:1 ratio is actually the recipe used by at least one industrial producer of gel-something, dunno what (is Beltane for OTC medications, or empty capsules, or breath mint gels, etc). I can't speak as to the veracity of that statement but its certainly an interesting possibility.

 

[Solipsis]

I use agar for mycology (petri dishes for isolation or cloning), that 3 g per 250 ml water would be more than 1% which is sufficient for gelling (the threshold is about 0.5% IIRC). No idea if mixing gelatine and agar helps, but my gut tells me that the substances are either too similar to matter or if it does matter having only one type would be the best for making gel structures just like you want to crystallize salts when pure and not mixed (though there are exceptions).

Both gelatin and agar can make for flabby products and I wonder if glycerin or something like PEG change that (I'd say experiment - without the drugs in it of course), and if you let it dry out completely it might get brittle. So an even 'sheet' would be problematic, something pane shapes can help because if they break they tend to break along the thin edges.

It would be messed up if you needed to keep these geltabs in a humidor, right?

 

[B9]

I just need someone to post about the various ways of producing microdots & I'll break into an excited sweat.

In short - it's safer to use liquid measurement, even if it is ridiculously dilute, & then individually evaporate off each dose until it can be realistically transferred to the desired medium. This shouldn't cause too much disruption to the life of the average user. I realise of course that to make ones own windowpane might have some egotistical benefits, perhaps financial also, but in the grand scheme of HR unless your very well versed in these methods I'd stick with IPA (isopropyl alcohol) + known weight of drug, do a simple calculation & draw off the required amount for a dose - safe as fuck safe as it gets anyway

Also this windowpane method when practiced without the drugs in it can't really be tested as to how successful it's been can it ? Unless you measure the overall thickness with a laser or some such device

 

[infantannihilator]

It's worth mentioning that on another forum I found a reference to making 5-MeO-DMT windowpanes, which was supposedly quite successful. The recipe was again by mass (why?) and it was a 1:2:1 ratio of gelatin to water to glycerin.

I had a eureka moment in bed last night in regards to this question.

In my previous post I mentioned how I came across a website where people were using the inside of a fluorescent light fixture diffuser to spread their gel to create little hexagonal 'tabs.' The insides are concave and hold a bit of gel in the particular shape.

you could also, provided you didnt mind larger tabs, use the more old school square grid type:

Now if you're using the first one, you're not really going to be able to determine the volume each 'pocket' holds, but you can determine the weight of the gel that is held.. and knowing this weight you can use it to know how much substance you'll want to use so that each tab contains a certain amount. On the other hand, if you know your weights before hand, then its simply a matter of weighing the completed tab and doing a little math to figure out the amount of substance each tab contains.

In this regard this method dose seem very intriguing.

 

[Deinonychus]

Oh that's funny, I was trying to figure out what the hell people were talking about with fluorescent lights, now that makes a lot more sense!

Curiously I once got 'ion suspension gels' from a vendor. They were dosed with DOC and they were honest to god gel-caps, as in OTC pharmaceutical gel caps, where an outer membrane holds liquid inside. They were tiny too, like maybe three millimeters along the long axis, elliptical in shape. I was always flabbergasted at the level of know-how necessary to make your own honest to god gel caps...

I'll get to some other comments once I get in front of a computer, iPhone typing is not my idea of fun.

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Okay, first IA:

Ah! I fully understand now, you'll have to forgive me, I somewhat skimmed over your post and posted how I assumed blotter would be posted. I now get what you mean by the term windowpane.

I like the idea, but a few things spring into mind:

First of all baking dishes do not come with perfectly square edges, and usually the walls arent perfectly vertical either. Assuming your pan is perfectly level, (the bottom of the pan, not its edges) and you can assume an even thickness of the gel, what do you do about the edges, whereby the corners may be rounded? I would assume you could just leave the corners off and just assume them to be weaker tabs which you may daringly add to a dose at another time.

It's all good! I did figure there would end up being some leftover scraps. To me the more damning possibility is that the dish wouldn't have a flat base. I don't think I've ever seen a Pyrex-ish dish that had a flat bottom. So something else would likely have to be used. Perhaps a baking sheet? Like one of this metal baking trays with the rim all the way around it? That would be dope because you could put that much more liquid in it, you wouldn't have to worry about doing sequential batches, which complicates things, an example of a complication being that the main mixture that hasn't yet been laid could cool down too much and begin to gel itself.

But this brings up another issue, how do you go about evenly cutting up your new perfectly flat and even gel? It is here where I can see issues arising and your perfect distribution and error minimization going out the window as you attempt to cut perfectly equal tabs from what is ultimately going to be a malleable material. How do you ensure you can even get it out of the dish without say, breaking it into pieces? How long will such a material last?

If I were trying to cut even doses I would probably use some sort of a template. Like compute the area of the whole sheet, determine how many milligrams would be in the sheet (dependent on how much you pour into the drying receptacle) and then compute how big or small in area a single dose would be. Then use a straightedge and pencil to draw out the template on a sheet of paper, and use that to trace lines, followe by cutting them out using one of those rotary cutters they sell in crafts shops (basically an ultrasharp pizza cutting wheel) held against the edge of a straight-rule to prevent wandering off the line.

As for getting it out of the baking tray, I would say oil the tray well before you put anything into it, and practice your recipe beforehand to ensure that the sheet is pliable, but not super floppy. It just needs to be hydrated/glycerined enough relative to the amount of agar/gelatin/both that it cannot snap due to bending. Or if you do make it on the harder, stiffer side, make sure that the radius beyond which it breaks (the size of a circle as defined by the arc of bending windowpane, where if the radius gets any tighter and thus the circle smaller it breaks) is small enough that you can get the sheet out intact provided that you're gentle.

This is also going to be affected by how deep – and thus how thick the resulting windowpane – you make the liquid when you first pour it into the metal baking tray, and also by how big you end up with cutting the individual doses. If the stuff is too stiff and the individual doses are big (say, an inch square), you could snap them by accident when they're being handled. And so I would definitely try to err on the side of too floppy instead of too stiff.

A quick look around the net shows people using the light fixture cover to create little hex pieces of gel.. but I would imagine youd have to find out how many you have and so on.. eugh.. sounds so drastically far away from any sort of method of even distribution, and in the end knowing how much each 'tab' contains.

I like the idea but I think it introduces its own separate set of problems that could lead to an uneven distribution. You obviously have to take some necessary steps to ensure you can control all of these potential variables. On that note however, laying blotter the conventional way imposes its own set of problems, so rather than making things easier you're just shifting around the specifics of the steps necessary I believe. There is also the chance that you introduce more variability into the process to complicate things for the layman than simply laying blotter the old fashioned way.

Yeah definitely. There are a number of potential gotchas here, and they're in every aspect of the idea, ie everything from the ideal recipe being unknown, making the solution so that it ends up being not too floppy to literally fall to pieces like shredded tissue paper but also not so stuff as to break, properly subdividing the area and making the doses be a uniform size and dose, etc. the issues are potentially endless.

But, I think that some of these issues can be easily solved via practice and the experimentation of modifying a single variable at a time. Is it worth the time and effort to figure out? I guess that depends on the person. But I know for sure that if I had to choose between taking somebody's homemade blotter and somebody's homemade windowpane, I would choose the windowpane hands down, because there are just certain things in laying blotter that are virtually impossible to perfect, giving uneven distribution of drug throughout the sheet.

I am unaware of how fancy machinery must go about the process, but it cannot be much different, albeit a little more fancy since well, machinery is doing it, but the basics must remain the same. A large scale industrial dough mixer operates on the same principal as your grandmother mixing her own dough, just mechanized. People have been laying blotter evenly for decades, there isn't a magic secret to it, we can logically deduce how it is done with such relative precision, and I don't personally believe any sort of mechanization can lead to an inherent better distribution than can be attained doing it all manually.

I think that the machinery – as far as making windowpane-type stuff like those breath mint film squares, but super definitely for laying blotter – have two advantages.

First, they are machines, so once the technique is perfected (almost, no such thing as truly perfect) the thing will do the same motions and functions time and again, barring some sort of error in the control software or a broken part in the hardware. And machinery can also be designed to very precise – but more importantly very specific – tolerances. So supposing that the ideal way to lay blotter involved misting the paper with a very specific amount of solution, not only would the machine have precise control to not over- or under-mist, it can also be designed so that the misting aperture is the exact perfect shape, and the dispersal mechanism is the ideal from the perspective of designing exactly the fluid mechanical flow that you want.

The second thing is that industrial machinery is typically backed up by some sort of company or firm, whether that be a legitimate business concern or some form of underworld organization. This means that they'll have access to patents, to the accumulated knowledge of the ages provided they will pay for it, and they will have paid employees who are likely to have some sort of experience or theoretical expertise on the subject of making windowpane or blotter. So this isn't really a benefit that is extracted or realized directly through mechanization, but it is an associated advantage that sort of comes with the territory, comes along for the ride.

 

[infantannihilator]

I always assumed you could inject a gelcap with a minimal amount of fluid and it would not leak out if you use a sufficiently small enough needle. This is just an assumption though.. could be horribly wrong lol!

 

[Deinonychus]

^^ Hah drug-curious minds think alike, I've had the same thought before, in fact I was just pondering it after posting that about the 'ion suspension gels'...

Keeping moving, now to Solipsis:

I use agar for mycology (petri dishes for isolation or cloning), that 3 g per 250 ml water would be more than 1% which is sufficient for gelling (the threshold is about 0.5% IIRC). No idea if mixing gelatine and agar helps, but my gut tells me that the substances are either too similar to matter or if it does matter having only one type would be the best for making gel structures just like you want to crystallize salts when pure and not mixed (though there are exceptions).

It is indeed probably best to stick to a single gelling agent unless there is some specific benefit that can be realized from combining multiple such agents, both because it reduces the supplies that would necessarily need to be purchased and because it would possibly simplify the gelling process, due to having only a single agent with its specific properties instead of two with different properties and thus different reactions to things like the cooling process. It's interesting that you mention the agar plates. What is the consistency of the agar plate gel if you don't mind my asking? And how much agar is used for how much water? Knowing these kinda of things may simplify the process of determining the ideal ratio of agar to water, since if the agar plates are still squishy that would establish a lower limit for the necessary amount of agar.

Both gelatin and agar can make for flabby products and I wonder if glycerin or something like PEG change that (I'd say experiment - without the drugs in it of course), and if you let it dry out completely it might get brittle. So an even 'sheet' would be problematic, something pane shapes can help because if they break they tend to break along the thin edges.

The inclusion of glycerin in that second recipe is looking more and more important. Perhaps there's some truth to the claim that the 1:2:1 gelatin:water:glycerin recipe is derived from a commercial firm of some sort. I hadn't thought of PEG, that may be worth looking into. I wonder which of the two, glycerin or PEG, is cheapest and easiest to source... No matter what it is probably going to be the case that some sort of plasticizer or another will need to be used in order to ensure flexibility.

It would be messed up if you needed to keep these geltabs in a humidor, right?

Hah I don't know why but that mental image totally cracked me up! Picturing some snooty 60 year old alpha male executive with one of those walk-in humidors (surely made of illegally-harvested exotic Indonesian hardwoods) stacked full from floor to ceiling with Cuban cigars and windowpane acid...

 

[Deinonychus]

And finally B9:

I just need someone to post about the various ways of producing microdots & I'll break into an excited sweat.

I have always been totally fascinated by pressed pills, and specifically how totally hard it is to make a proper pill when it seems to one's common sense that it should be easy. One only has to examine the pressed MDMA and MDA pills known as 'mints' that are originating in the Chicago area to understand how hard it can be. The mint-man or mint-woman is supplying the third largest metropolitan area in the country, and the surrounding few states to one extent or another, and yet he or she either can't get ahold of a proper pressing machine or has decided not to try to stay off of the authorities radar as much as possible, and the mints are thus pressed with what I imagine is probably a one-off DIY press. The resulting minds are really easy to accidentally break apart into pieces, and they're visibly irregular in shape, color, texture, and internal structure (which seems to be somewhat granular).

In accordance with my fascination with pressed pills, I've experimented many times with various recipes and mixtures of inert fillers and binders and different ghetto homemade pressing gadgets for no other reason besides having lots of fun! One of the most peculiar pills was made from a combination of xylitol, mannitol, white flour, xanthan gum, gelatin, and agar, and was made using a metal dowel and a piece of plumbing pipe. The peculiarity was that it had precisely the physical characteristics of a pencil eraser! It had the exact combination of springiness and firmly holding its shape, and I tested it out on a sheet of legal paper and it didn't do a half had job! Due to the thin plumbing pipe / dowel combination, it even had the proper shape and diameter for a pencil eraser! Hah imagine: this is the wave of the future for surreptitiously bringing drugs into a venue or looking as if you have no drugs were you searched on the street... Really, officer, I just like drawing a hell of a lot!

But in all seriousness I'd love to see a post on that subject myself!

In short - it's safer to use liquid measurement, even if it is ridiculously dilute, & then individually evaporate off each dose until it can be realistically transferred to the desired medium. This shouldn't cause too much disruption to the life of the average user. I realise of course that to make ones own windowpane might have some egotistical benefits, perhaps financial also, but in the grand scheme of HR unless your very well versed in these methods I'd stick with IPA (isopropyl alcohol) + known weight of drug, do a simple calculation & draw off the required amount for a dose - safe as fuck safe as it gets anyway

And you're entirely correct here, liquid measurement is the way to go. I don't think the evaporation is even necessary unless you're really that throbbingly hard down below for insufflation, just keep it as liquid for the dual purposes of storage and easy measurement and dosing. The problem it seems is that humans just can't stop themselves from fiddling with stuff, choosing to do foolish things when there are alternatives that are perfectly good ideas. And so it goes, people try to make blotter, eff it up, and kill themselves. So if somebody just cannot restrain themselves from making flat, easily concealed things to use as sublingual drug delivery mechanisms, then perhaps we can find a way to make the process of windowpane creation safe and simple in a way that blotter can never be due to the vagueries of saturated paper sheets.

Your mention of evaporating single doses though does being to mind a new idea. If upon fully examining and studying the subject it turns out that it is too difficult to make sheets of windowpane in such a way as to be able to measure out doses in an accurate way, windowpane could still be a viable option if people were to simply drop little puddles of the drug/gelling agent/plasticizer/water solution onto the greased baking sheet and let them gel up. The resulting windowpane would be irregularly-shaped, circular-ish but definitely not square, but the amount of drug would be very accurately known due to having measured the amount you're putting in a given puddle before letting it gel.

Also this windowpane method when practiced without the drugs in it can't really be tested as to how successful it's been can it ? Unless you measure the overall thickness with a laser or some such device

Not sure I follow this entirely.. Do you mean that it'll be hard to know the amount of drug in a given piece? I wasn't worrying so much about the thickness, since as long as you know the total volume and the sheet that you're drying the gel on has a flat bottom and its on a level surface, you should be able to use simple methods of dividing up the area of the sheet into equally sized portions to figure out the proper size for a dose. The overall area of the sheet, or thickness, or area / thickness of a single piece of that sheet shouldn't matter so long as you know the volume that went in, the drying surface is level, and there aren't any unforeseen issues (like supersaturated solution precipitating drugs out) as far as I know.

EDIT: Oh shit, I misread the thread, and double posted as a result! Feel free to merge this post with the one above if you wish mods.

 

[my3rdeye]

I just need someone to post about the various ways of producing microdots & I'll break into an excited sweat.

You probably need a pill pressing machine. That's just a guess, the ones in the 80s were amazingly well made didn't crumble. They were also consistently dosed too.
Windowpane is the one type of acid I never tried, I hopes dots and gels make a comeback.

 

[Deinonychus]

^^ Yeah, Im the opposite, never have got a dot but I did once actually get windowpane. Some fool flavored it with mint, and the first time I ever took acid it was liquid and yeah, mint-flavored, and I cannot describe to you how viscerally I FUCKING HATE MINT!

Hah it was worth the shitty plant flavors though, that liquid was intense! The windowpane was pretty respectably dosed too if I recall...

 

[Deinonychus]

Waaaugh! Dinosaur noises! Dino noises with a far-too-large claw! Surely somebody else much have some interest in this technique, don't let the thread due so soon!

I had an idea while answering a PM from slo mo. I was discussing sodium alginate as used to make 'caviar' out of any given solution, using calcium chloride, as alginate solidifies into a seemingly impermeable membrane at the right concentrations, so dropping little drops of a solution containing alginate into a bowl of water containing dissolved calcium chloride (or another salt, the calcium is the important part) leaves you with little caviar eggs of whatever the alginate solution was. Fancy restaurants use this to make what looks like salmon eggs actually be filled with, say, fruit juices, or liquid essence of bacon, of whatever the fuck gets the chef hard.

So you could make little caviar balls, each a half or quarter milligram in volume, our of a solution containing alginate and drug at a concentration appropriate for the drug. So for 2C-E, a milligram per half or quarter milliliter, so a single caviar egg has a milligram and you'd eat fifteen or whatever, but 2C-C might be five milligrams per half or quarter milliliter, so you'd only have to eat 16 eggs to get a dose of 80 mg, which is my sweet spot.

But I realized this has bearing on windowpane. What if you made your gelling solution win alginate instead of gelatin or agar? Put it in the baking tray as specified earlier in the thread, and make sure that the solution sitting in the tray was as near to impossible shallow as possible. Then *mist the whole tray with a solution of calcium chloride in a spray bottle*! It would all gel at once, no muss no fuss with gelatin setting up, assuming the ideais sound, and assuming you can get the solution in the tray to be so shallow that the 'outer layer' of the solution that gels due to the alginate meeting calcium cations is in fact the entire layer of liquid.

Dunno how thin/shallow it would have to be, but seems an interesting idea worth pursuing! Comments? Don't be shy! Sustain this thread's life force with quality posts, eh?

 

[infantannihilator]

No worries friend, I won't let this thread die, just yet

It's all good! I did figure there would end up being some leftover scraps. To me the more damning possibility is that the dish wouldn't have a flat base. I don't think I've ever seen a Pyrex-ish dish that had a flat bottom. So something else would likely have to be used. Perhaps a baking sheet? Like one of this metal baking trays with the rim all the way around it? That would be dope because you could put that much more liquid in it, you wouldn't have to worry about doing sequential batches, which complicates things, an example of a complication being that the main mixture that hasn't yet been laid could cool down too much and begin to gel itself.

Yes, that is more than a damning possibility, it is almost entirely a guarantee. Even metal baking trays are likely to have some bow or warp to them, however I would consider them to be more uniform than glass, though those nice pyrex ones are made out of a molds to my knowledge, so they should be fairly flat. Nevertheless, it would be important to ensure flatness. Im not sure why you assume you think the metal tray would allow you to put more liquid in them? I must be missing something because I can only imagine the same problems would present themselves, its merely a container for the material to gel in?

If I were trying to cut even doses I would probably use some sort of a template. Like compute the area of the whole sheet, determine how many milligrams would be in the sheet (dependent on how much you pour into the drying receptacle) and then compute how big or small in area a single dose would be. Then use a straightedge and pencil to draw out the template on a sheet of paper, and use that to trace lines, followe by cutting them out using one of those rotary cutters they sell in crafts shops (basically an ultrasharp pizza cutting wheel) held against the edge of a straight-rule to prevent wandering off the line.

This is how I had assumed you would go about it, but this activity involves a potential enormous amount of user error, and of handling of your material. Even being meticulously careful you'll find that your grid is never going to be perfect. Now, imagine your computer squares aren't even divisions of your ruler, eg. not 1/4x1/4" squares, but you find you must make squares that are 15/32x29/64" in order to be able to evenly divide your rectangle of material. That would be quite challenging to evenly lay out, especially considering a pencil line itself can be 1/32 or more. Then consider the fact that you have to trace over this line - tracing imparts more error. Using an edge to maintain straightness with your cutter means you have to lay the edge onto your windowpane itself, and then youd be attempting to lay your edge along a pencil line as seen through your windowpane. I believe even with the utmost care and meticulous attention paid that you would find yourself with a level of unevenness. It may not be large, but it could very easily be large enough to throw that .02mg factor well off. I will almost be willing to bet that, if you took a piece of paper, and evenly divided it, marked out your lines and then attempted to cut the paper into strips (not squares yet) youd find that there is a pretty good error in the width of your strips, pretty much at most the width of your pencil line.

This is why I actually really like the idea of the light diffuser or other mold ideas for creating your windowpane. I think that would be the absolute best method for creating your windowpane with a very high degree of accuracy. With a little creativity and searching Im sure there are numerous other examples of things you could use to do this.

However, the issue of "extras" still arises, be it the uneven edges of your pan made windowpane, or not entirely filled portions of your molds.. it seems to me something that is pretty much unavoidable - but by measuring everything by weight, I suppose you could just keep these extras for yourself and weight them out that way, then again, this is all for yourself anyway

I think that the machinery – as far as making windowpane-type stuff like those breath mint film squares, but super definitely for laying blotter – have two advantages.

First, they are machines, so once the technique is perfected (almost, no such thing as truly perfect) the thing will do the same motions and functions time and again, barring some sort of error in the control software or a broken part in the hardware. And machinery can also be designed to very precise – but more importantly very specific – tolerances. So supposing that the ideal way to lay blotter involved misting the paper with a very specific amount of solution, not only would the machine have precise control to not over- or under-mist, it can also be designed so that the misting aperture is the exact perfect shape, and the dispersal mechanism is the ideal from the perspective of designing exactly the fluid mechanical flow that you want.

The second thing is that industrial machinery is typically backed up by some sort of company or firm, whether that be a legitimate business concern or some form of underworld organization. This means that they'll have access to patents, to the accumulated knowledge of the ages provided they will pay for it, and they will have paid employees who are likely to have some sort of experience or theoretical expertise on the subject of making windowpane or blotter. So this isn't really a benefit that is extracted or realized directly through mechanization, but it is an associated advantage that sort of comes with the territory, comes along for the ride.

I've thought about this quite a bit, and I really don't believe any sort of machinery is necessary for laying blotter, nor that it could do so any better than a human being. With your example of misting (I realize you say supposing it were an ideal way, not that it is) yes a computer controlled machine would be able to mist specific quantities of liquid to a high degree of accuracy, however I truly do not think misting would be the best way. You cannot control an even distribution with misting, you would literally have to mist off the edges of your blotter.. there are just so many problems introduced by this. Overlap of mist from different nozzles and so on.. yes a machine would be able to control the amount that comes out of each nozzle, but it can't really after it leaves.

Your second point in this regard has some merit, but I cannot think of any legitimate uses for laying blotter or windowpane, and I cannot imagine any company large enough to have the funds to keep a legal team (necessary for patent type stuff) and a staff of engineers on board to involve themselves in such operations. In regards to machinery in general, yes, this is very true.

Now, this is off the topic of windowpane but I feel its worth making a case for. I first proposed a method of laying blotter earlier in this thread, and I truly believe this to be the ideal method of doing so and that it is so simple, that any form of mechanization is truly unnecessary and if anything only creates more potential errors. All you need to know is how much IPA your sheet of blotter will absorb - which is easily determined - and to then apply your measured amount of substance to your measured amount of IPA, saturate your blotter, and then lay it to dry flat. I cannot think of any method that will allow you to lay a blotter anymore effectively while minimizing the amount of error in such a way. At worst your blotter is weaker than you intended it to be due to it not absorbing all of the solution. I think the worries about leaching from one area to another are grossly exaggerated and as long as you keep the blotters flat and allow them to dry out naturally this will be absolutely minimized - even the example of misting would potentially suffer from such fate.

Now consider this: a 7.5x7.5" square sheet of blotter paper holds 900 1/4x1/4" tabs. This would allow you to do your saturation in an 8x8" baking pan, which have approximately 1" of depth. Now, I don't have a figure for blotter paper thickness, and I imagine it varies, but lets just say its 1/16" thick, this would allow you to easily lay 10 sheets at once, resulting in 9000 tabs laid in the span of a few minutes. 9000. Do this 10 times and you've laid 90000. This could all be done in under an hour provided you had already done the preparation necessary such as figuring out the amount of absorption and mixed your solution. The ease, and the speed at which this can be done totally eliminates any need for any form of mechanization in my opinion, and it is my belief that this is purely the reason that blotters are the most popular means of distribution; its simple, and its cheap. All you need is some iso, a scale, a dish, sheets of blotter and drying racks. This seems incredibly much more simple than the much more complicated chemistry and methods necessary for making windowpane, and infinitely simpler than making microdots where youd need a pill presser and other such machinery to ensure even mixture. This level of ease and simplicity inherently helps to reduce errors dramatically.

That all said, I still like the idea of windowpane, I think it would be very interesting to figure out a means of doing it accurately and repeatably just for the sake of doing so. I don't mean to discourage but when I take into consideration how easy it is to lay blotter, I think that the use of things like windowpane and microdots (pressed pills) were more or less brought about not because they were easier to control doses, or easier to make, but because they made themselves stand out as a product.. it wasn't just regular old blotter, this stuff is special man.. purely marketing gimmick.

 

[Anon0631]

I just need someone to post about the various ways of producing microdots & I'll break into an excited sweat.

Ok. I've been toing and froing about posting info on this but I've decided that open-source, public domain is the way to go. This is the way to produce an NBOMe microdot. I personally recommend well laid blotter because the dose and substance can be printed on it's surface, preventing it getting passed off as something else down the line. However microdots do have the advantage that they can be crushed and snorted in addition to the usual buccal route. Also they are 100% homogenous providing they are laid with care.

First take a 3mm thick sheet of Perspex and drill a grid of holes as closely spaced as you can with a sharp 3mm HSS drill bit. Then mix a paste of 10g calcium lactate to 10ml distilled H2O. It should be about the texture of cream cheese once mixed well. Use a palette knife to scrape the paste across the surface of the Perspex so that it fills the holes. Make sure you really work it in so there are no air gaps or half filled holes. Discard the unused paste and scrape any excess from the surface of the sheet.

After drying for 24 hours, poke the un-dosed microdots out of the mold and spread out to dry for a further 24 hours. Now weigh all of them. This is how much calcium lactate you need to mix with your nbome. Lets say its 3g in this example.

Now mix 3ml of distilled H2O in a small sealable vial with the required amount of NBOMe (count the number of holes and multiply by the desired per-tablet dose) and 5x the weight of HPβCD. Fasten the lid and attach it to a sex toy, electric toothbrush or other vibrating thing with elastic bands. Let it shake for an hour and then mix the solution with your pre-weighed calcium lactate and (optionally) a few drops of food colouring.

Mix the paste well and scrape across the (clean) Perspex sheet working into the holes. There should be no excess.

Once dry poke the microdots out and store them in a baggie.