Solvent-based methods of making dabs use a solvent like butane or propane to strip away everything but the trichomes, leaving behind what we know as a dab. As butane and propane are highly volatile substances, flammable, heavier than air, and require expensive industrial equipment to work with on a large scale by professionally licensed facilities, trying to do this in your home is worst case scenario a suicide attempt. Best case scenario, it is “sketch as hell” and very complicated.Solvent-less methods, by comparison, are a no-brainer. The most popular solvent-less method with the highest quality yield is pressing rosin. The way you do this is with a rosin press.
What is rosin press?
Dry herb contains trichomes, or resinous glands, which you can see with your naked eye. They’re what make the herb appear “dank,” or moist, and they contain all of the plant matter’s cannabinoids. When compressed under heat and pressure, they loosen and ooze out of the herb in the form of a concentrate, becoming rosin.“Rosin” is a pretty general term that can really be used to describe a sap that is squeezed from any starting material using heat and pressure. If you play the cello or violin, you might recognize this term as what you rubbed on your bow to create friction. In the dab world, “rosin” is is essentially what oozes out when you “juice” dry herb from compressing it with a significant amount of heat and pressure. The cool thing about it is that it can be manipulated into any sub-texture of dab— like shatter, budder, or wax.
These parameters can vary depending on the material you’re pressing. If you’ve got a terpene-rich strain of flower, you’ll want to start with a lower temp, because the terpenes themselves act as a natural solvent. If there are fewer terpenes, a higher temp and pressure can help accelerate the process of extraction.This does not necessarily mean that higher temps lead to larger yields. Oftentimes, it is actually more advantageous to err on the lower end of the temperature spectrum, as a higher temp can burn off the nuanced terpene flavor shelves— much the same way higher temps can do when burning finished dabs in a nail.
Types of pure pressure rosin press
Unfortunately, because of how physics works, you can’t just pull thousands of pounds of pressure out of thin air. If you can, the aliens haven’t told us how yet. So, the different types of rosin press machine differ mainly based on how they are powered.
Manual - Manual rosin presses typically have a hand crank or twist, which you operate with your hands continuously. They used to be primarily advantageous for their portability and size, but given that compact desktop units have gotten smaller and more affordable without such cumbersome operation, such advantages aren’t as much of a factor anymore.
Hydraulic - Hydraulic presses are very common and utilize hydraulic ram pressure via a fluid hand or foot pump. This generates and incredible amount of force— such that these are some of the most powerful types of presses. It does still require you exert yourself, which is not ideal.
Pneumatic - Once you get to a pneumatic press, you’ve finally broken free from presses that have to be physically operated by a human being. These can be operated by simply pressing a button, but they require an air compressor. Thus, they are incredibly noisy and loud. Pneumatic presses are usually reserved for commercial application.

Electric - The electric rosin press canada is the perfect innovation of rosin press technology that finally took all of these elements and brought them to the consumer market perfectly. Without the need for manual operation, it functions with the simple press of a button, all while stripping away noisy compressors and boiling the components down to a relatively lightweight desktop size.