Home | Community | Message Board

MushroomMan Mycology
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Myyco.com Isolated Cubensis Liquid Culture For Sale   North Spore Injection Grain Bag, North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   OlympusMyco.com No Unicorns Here—Just Quality Bags That Work, We’re Not Chasing Unicorns—We’re Building Quality (Olympus Myco Grow Bags)

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
Some of these posts are very old and might contain outdated information. You may wish to search for newer posts instead.
OfflineWatchtower
Stranger

Registered: 09/16/09
Posts: 47
Last seen: 12 years, 3 months
Watchtower's self-healing repairable LC/grain lids
    #15756299 - 02/03/12 02:55 PM (12 years, 11 months ago)

They're not terribly original, but they've been extremely reliable (<5% failure rate) for me for a few years now. Works well for LC and grains, repairable and cheap.

I used a lid with a single hole (went lid/tyvek/ring) for a while, with an injection port on the tyvek, over the hole. Easy to make and simple, but it had a few issues. The tyvek gets crushed between the ring and lid and wrinkles when you tighten it down, gets damaged and compressed, and starts to look pretty worn out after a half dozen rounds in the PC, which led to my success rate hovering around 80% with that design, in a dusty/dirty old house. Decent, but I hated knowing I'd have to clean out a handful of nasty/dangerous jars each time. Not fun. So, I took inspiration from a few lid teks here, and made these.



Starting off with a jar lid (this one is from a half-pint), drill 2 holes in the top. Forstner bits are highly recommended, no cleanup needed. I use a 3/8" bit for both, 1/4" could work in a pinch, but gives less area for the injection port and less uses per port.







A little trick for working with RTV/silicone, plastic bags peel easily from cured rtv/sil and gives you a very smooth and consistent finish and port thickness. Take a piece of a bag (I cut 1" squares, but whatever you can work with), hold one over the hole on the opposite side with your finger, and squeeze rtv/sil through the hole. Keep squeezing and put a blob on the top, followed by another piece of plastic. The plastic lets you shape the rtv/sil cleanly and accurately without getting your fingers covered in it. I aim for about 1/4" to 3/8" thickness of rtv/sil for the injection port, or 1/8" per side, over the full area of the hole, as well as a ~1/8" 'lip' of silicone around the hole for the port, on both sides, enough to keep it from popping out but easy enough to peel/split off to replace once you've put 20 or so 16g holes into it. Set aside to dry, the plastic slows it considerably (2 days to remove the plastic, 3 days till injection-ready).






Tyvek is from a painting suit, cut into ~1" circles. This leaves about 1/4" around the hole for rtv/sil. Apply rtv/sil with a toothpick or similar, not too thick, though the excess gets squeezed out anyway. Pop down a piece of tyvek, pressing lightly from center outwards, and tapping it down (sliding your finger just moves the tyvek around) until it's fully sealed. Put some more rtv/sil over this piece, and another piece of tyvek, pressing to make sure it's sealed with no air gaps. The silicone gets pushed into the tyvek's pores when it seals, so it's easy to see what's good and what isn't. Apply extra silicone with that toothpick to make sure it's evenly sealed, wipe off excess. IMPORTANT: Try not to get any silicone over the hole itself. If the tyvek slides over and gets covered in silicone, it's airtight and useless for GE. Keep it clean, use another toothpick or something to pick off any squeezed-out silicone on the inside. Set aside till dry, overnight is fine.

Done! I used 2 layers of tyvek just for an extra safety margin since the drop in flow doesn't matter for GE, and to ensure that if one side gets splashed, contam resistance isn't totally compromised. The ports last for 12-20 injections before I run out of space, call me paranoid but I peel the silicone off (it peels with a fingernail) and make a new one, but it's down to your needle gauge and personal preference as to how long you wanna keep using them. Using them with LC, the offset port lets you tilt the jar to suck up mycelium, and as long as you don't fill them more than 3/4 full, run a very low risk of getting wet. Don't quite quote me on this, but I don't think I've ever had a contam'd LC with these lids, out of over a hundred so far.

It's a like sticking down filter disks and professional injection ports, but at even lower cost (maybe 10 cents per lid?) and with (thus far) effectively the same success rate. Worn-out or dirty tyvek is just peeled off and replaced, same as the injection ports. Easy to see and easy to catch any wear and tear/holes before they ruin your lc/spawn.

Well shit that ended up an essay and a half, if you've gotten this far I hope it's been worthwhile! :smile:

Edited by Watchtower (02/03/12 03:00 PM)

Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Myyco.com Isolated Cubensis Liquid Culture For Sale   North Spore Injection Grain Bag, North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   OlympusMyco.com No Unicorns Here—Just Quality Bags That Work, We’re Not Chasing Unicorns—We’re Building Quality (Olympus Myco Grow Bags)


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* PC is out for repair ,rye grain colonized now what nw2shroom 1,618 7 04/26/02 09:26 PM
by nw2shroom
* WET GRAINS! Anonymous 5,250 9 10/21/03 05:52 AM
by shirley knott
* Has anyone here had success casing rye grain? EPerson100 34,227 13 02/11/17 06:47 PM
by CubeSteakPoo
* Awesome rye grain h2o2 tek dimitri211 12,032 1 08/17/01 08:28 PM
by jonnyshaggs420
* What produces stronger, healthier mycelium? BRF or Rye Grain Gthirteens 2,411 9 01/15/03 06:54 AM
by FanaTEK
* Seeds, Grains, and more ExtravagantDream 5,204 8 12/15/12 11:28 PM
by Mycopath666
* best type of grain? skyler 1,228 8 06/15/01 07:41 AM
by Una
* Finished Grain jars, having a few questions... wikedanjel 1,783 2 01/17/03 05:27 AM
by debianlinux

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Shroomism, george castanza, RogerRabbit, veggie, mushboy, fahtster, LogicaL Chaos, 13shrooms, hamloaf, cronicr, Stipe-n Cap, Pastywhyte, bodhisatta, Tormato, Land Trout, A.k.a
618 topic views. 22 members, 90 guests and 78 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2025 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.02 seconds spending 0.007 seconds on 11 queries.