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Alright everyone! Welcome back to Cody's lab! So this plant right here is gum weed.
The plant has a very sticky sap, which is high in oils.
This helps it preserve moisture and so it can grow in desert conditions.
What's more is it seems to prefer barren soils and my bees love it.
See if we can put this to use shall we?
So today, I want to try extracting the essential oil from gum weed.
I haven't seen gum weed essential oil in stores before,
and I think there's quite a bit in here, so I'd like to give it a shot.
So, the first thing I need to do to get the oils out, is to cut it up into little pieces.
So here's the vessel. I'm gonna be filling with the gum weed. 547 grams empty.
I'm just gonna stuff this full
and weigh it again to see how much weight in flour we have.
[Gloves sticking together]
Okay, so I got the flask cleaned up set on the scale see how much is in there.
So that's 1157 subtract by the 547 tare weight
That's 610 grams of the gum weed.
There's my hot plate you can see I've got the flass sitting on top of it.
So now I need to add in some water.
Just enough to cover the bottom so as to produce steam
Because, what I'm gonna be doing is a steam distillation on this.
So now it's time for the Clevenger apparatus,
I'll put a link down in the description of a video that NurdRage did on these.
In fact, that's where I found out about this and let's just stick it on here and use it.
The ideas the steam goes up in here goes up into a condenser
and the liquid drips down into this and the heavier water will get
siphoned off and the lighter oil will collect. The water of course will get reused multiple times.
Now the oil should accumulate right there. I should just be able to plug this in.
You can see the water going through.
All right, that's it. Just turn this on and start the heating.
Smells like flowers. Yeah, it is indeed functioning.
See the waters dripping down and the excess gets siphoned off, but the oil is staying behind.
There's a little bit of oil being captured right now.
Awesome, so it's working.
I think this is done the last few times I've checked on it. It doesn't look like there's any more oil.
Let's see. Its collected a little bit. I'm kind of disappointed that it wasn't more.
But this really isn't that big of a sample think about it
and also this isn't a very long condensation column so it might have just boiled off into the air.
But lets turn it off and let it cool.
So everything's cooled off. The oil is settled. Let's pull off the water now.
[Water pouring]
Okay
I've got a little glass bottle to put the actual oil in. There we go.
There is our oil.
Here we are I've labeled it gum weed oil. You see there,
and I measured it out to about 1.3 milliliters, so 600-something grams.
1.3 milliliters so that comes out to about 0.2 percent by weight oil.
At least what I was able to extract here. Also, it was the wet weight of the plant.
It does smell like gum weed.
It's not nearly as strong as like the actual flower though.
It's a lot weaker than I thought it would be.
You think it would be stronger because this is the concentrated essence of the plant,
but apparently the oil doesn't really contribute to the smell of the plant very much.
It kind of smells almost a little bit like kerosene.
So let's taste it.
Here.
So, kind of sunflowery.
But pretty bitter.
Okay really bitter.
So I don't think this will be good for, uh...
I don't think this will be good for like adding to soaps or perfume anytime soon, but let's go see if it burns.
All right, you can see I've got a spoon set up there.
I'm just gonna drizzle some of the oil out onto it.
All right, and I'm just gonna blast with a blowtorch real quick, yeah it burns all right.
Not bad.
I bet you could use this as a fuel.
[Chuckle]
Wow, that's pretty good. It burns.
So it is an oil but it is quite a bit lighter than say diesel so it just kind of like,
from what I can see it's kind of like a mix between diesel and gasoline.
So it's not quite as volatile as gasoline, but it's better than diesel.
So it does burn. [Chuckle] About like jet fuel too, and I was able to make that from some plants that grow in our backyard.
Y'know, I was thinking maybe you could have acres and acres of the stuff growing,
you'd never have to water it just disturb the ground and throw down seed every now and then.
Put in bales. Big steam distillation systems.
Take off the oil and then the plant matter left over just put that on the Sun for it to dry out
and then use that as fuel to run your boilers to produce the steam.
And
I think that on a larger scale you could extract quite a bit more oil out of this plant this.
This is really just a proof of concept.
So actually last minute update.
One of my patrons actually sent me an article showing that uh,
turns out the military was already looking into using gum weed as a potential source of fuel for their planes.
Cause of course, I wouldn't be the first person to think of it. Anyway, hope you enjoyed I'll see you next time.
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