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Do not add dry dextrin and wet the meal with water unless you want to slow it down a lot. Instead, pre-dissolve the dextrin into a 10% solution (it’ll take a while and hot water to do so) and then add about 20% by weight of this to your meal and knead it in (start around 15% and creep up on it – exact amount usually depends on how thirsty your charcoal is). The dextrin has already won the tug of war for the water and is fully activated so it simply films over everything and the nitrate will be hardpressed to steal much water back from the dextrin as evidenced by how little the meal cools down for doing this as compared to when you add dry dextrin and wet with water. You’ll wind up with about 2% dextrin solids in the granulate which is plenty – dries hard as rocks. Granulate and spread it out thinly on a single sheet of newspaper on a drying screen in a warm place with some air movement and it’ll be dry and usable usually in 3-4 hours. It will be noticeably hotter/faster than stuff made by milling in the dextrin to the meal and wetting with water. For probably 10-15 minutes, the dextrin isn’t fully activated and during that time, a lot of nitrate you spent a lot of time milling really finely dissolves and when it dries it does so as much larger particles than what you milled it to, making the lift slower. Amazing how just changing a technique, keeping everything else the same can make a very noticeable difference. And its not just me talking. A few friends have tried this method and concur fully with my findings and won’t make lift any other way into the future. OK, its not as fast as if you used a non-aqueous binder method but water and (nitrate, sulfur, charcoal) is pretty cheap where solvent is damned expensive and without some kind of recovery system, that expensive solvent is simply making its way into the atmosphere along with your hard earned cash you used to buy it. Spend a buck to make a pound of BP and let $2-3 worth of solvent evaporate into the air for having bound with a non-aqueous binder? Not me! Even if you have to use 20% more lift for binding with a dextrin solution, 20 cents for that extra lift as an example vs. maybe $2-3 worth of solvent is a big difference! Gene
