Making Natural Saps and Resins Purer and Easier to Handle
The natural world is full of resins and other sticky, viscous, plant-produced substances. Plants produce saps and resins for a variety of purposes, from sending nutrition to their extremities to sealing up wounds produced by foragers and the forces of nature. Because these resins and saps are often so essential to plant life, they also frequently contain compounds that are interesting or useful to human beings.
Unfortunately, they tend to be difficult to harvest and work with. While plants are invariably equipped to handle the resins and other sticky substances that are so critical to their well-being, humans are normally much less so. As anyone who has become overly intimate with a pine tree during warmer weather might be able to confirm, sticky resins can be as messy and difficult to clean as they are important to plants.
In fact, though, there are often good ways of extracting such resins and making them easier for humans to work with. One of the most common and effective such strategies is to seek to combine a resin with a fat to form a chemical compound known as an oleoresin. Compared to a plain resin, an oleoresin tends to be much simpler to handle and work with, and can often be used directly in ways that raw plant material cannot.
Because this process of refinement is so useful for so many different applications, there are plenty of support tools available for doing so. For the particular style of refinement known as "dabs," for example, there are dab tools offered by companies like dabtools.net that can make the process easy to carry out.
Typically, this will mean acquiring a few distinct dab tools. Part of the process of resin extraction normally involves using a solvent to extract the desired compounds from the plant. After this has been accomplished, the solvent is then normally either boiled off or heated until it forms a vapor.
For this latter step, a special extraction tube or glass dome will often be used to catch the resin in its fat-bound form. The processed resin can then be used with dab rigs or other appropriate means of directly manipulating resinous, purified materials.
Even if saps and resins can be forbidding to work with in their natural forms, then, there are often good ways of concentrating them and making them easier to handle. Such simple processes can turn even the most ornery of natural resins into substances whose inherent benefits can be enjoyed easily and with little trouble.
