Enjoy your New Years eve tonight! Happy New Year Everyone!
Cheers to 2020!
Month: December 2019
Printing Partners Wanted – SouthEast US / Canada
Are you a 3D printing service looking to find something to profit with? Or are you a 3D printing hobbyist that has a really good printer, knows how to maintain their printer, and wants to make some extra money?
Cannagar Tools is looking for printing partners to help fulfill orders. In the US, we need spot coverage during holidays and upticks in business volume.
This means we would forward you the overage when we are running at production limit. You would receiving our overflow during holidays and other times when the owner of Cannagar Tools plans time off. For the US based partner, this would not be full time production work.
In Canada, we are looking for a partner willing to take over Canadian operations – production / shipping, sales optional. First Class to Canada can be slow, and larger orders via Priority Mail can be very expensive to ship. This can discourage some customers from placing orders. Cannagar Tools would like to have a partner based in Canada who can produce our products and ship them, to help us better conquer the Canadian market.
You are also free to promote and drive sales, but that is not expected of you at all.
Requirements :
1) Must have a printer with large enough build volume to fulfill orders. (10 x 10 is a minimum requirement for the print bed size for making our cigar presses, and a minimum of 8 inch build height. Some of our pre roll loaders are 12 x 12 x 10, you would not be expected to process these orders unless your printer can handle it, and they are extremely long print jobs, you can opt out of these if desired)
2) Be willing to treat this as a manufacturing venture whose final item price is lower than typical 3D print services. This is NOT a 3d print service. This is product manufacturing. If you are attached to pricing items in the realm of standard for printing/prototyping services, we aren’t even in the same universe.
3) Cannagar Tools pro series cigar molds are priced starting at $49, or $99 each, and take 12 and 20 hours to print, respectively. The XL size takes almost 30 hours, and is priced at $129. The tools are made from PLA, Carbon PLA or Hemp PLA, all PLA based, no other plastics allowed. Bulk pricing drops these prices even more for bulk orders, and the unit price can go as low as $34 each for a 12 hour print. Cost of materials for processing can be reduced to wholesale rates, wholesale partners exist for our plastic supply, and other supplies will be provided at cost by Cannagar Tools. Expectation has been set here – this venture will not bring in as much as a generic print service jobs, but we aren’t making prototypes and one-offs. We are fulling small to large orders direct, for individual and business customers worldwide.
The arrangement is rather simple. Payment comes to the Cannagar Tools website, we forward the payment to you, keeping our percentage, and you process the order – print, pack, and ship it.
The start up cost is around $500 – which secures your start up plastics and some accessories required for fulfilling orders. A certain standard must be maintained for output & quality control, product presentation, and kit accessories are needed to fulfill orders. Accessories for processing orders include white shipping boxes + cigar cutters + rolling mats + dab sticks, foam brushes (all the accessories seen in the starter kits and on the craft tools page)
If you are interested, please reach out through the contact portal of this website, and Ill get back to you asap so we can discuss details.
Pro Tip – How to Offer Free Shipping
Cannagar Tools started offering free shipping this year on all orders over $100. Without a particular shipping service, this new level of service couldn’t be offered.
Cannagar Tools is not paid to recommend this service but it has been so good for this business that I want to pass it along for others who want to ship heavy items for less than the standard rates.
Whats my secret? Pirate Ship. www.pirateship.com
This service doesn’t save much on First Class or Priority Mail packages less than 3 lbs, but when you start going over 3 lbs, the savings is huge. It turns out – most of my orders which exceed $100, also exceed 3 lbs, so it works perfectly for Cannagar Tools. Average savings for heavy priority mail items is over 20-30% off the normal post office rates. A package that would cost $14 going across the country is more like $9-10 with Pirate Ship.
It’s better than Ship Station, better than Shipping Easy, all the other shipping services cost a monthly rate on top of their savings. Pirate ship does not. No membership cost, no monthly dues, and when you call for support – they speak in pirate slang and dont break character.
All in all, a very quirky and excellent service that I hope is available for many years to come. Highly recommended!
Email Notification Problems Fixed
Ever since the new website was launched back in July, the notification emails with order update status have been a hit or miss. Some people have messaged and indicated they haven’t received email. Others have no problem receiving messages. Has been hard to troubleshoot in my spare time.
Customers can always sign into their account and view order status and tracking, but, I am proud to announce, I have finally solved the problem with outgoing emails, so all notifications should be sent as expected going forward.
It is of course still possible for emails to sometimes end up in your junk folder, but this particular problem is now fixed.
Thank you for understanding!
Tonight in Portland, Cannagar Wars 3!
8PM. Saturday December 7th.
If you are near Portland Oregon, this is a great opportunity to sample some of the best cannagars in the Pacific Northwest!
Featuring Hamilton Cannagars, Oregon Cannagar Company, Keif 420, Mr Big Keto, Melt Cannagar!
Sponsors : Cannagar Tools, Professional Blunt Rollers, Iconic Blunts, and Purple Leaf Bath.
Clean Leaves – A Commercial Challenge
One of the things that has surprised me – how hard it can be to get clean leaves and use them in a state licensed business.
And what I mean is ……. for the ideal cannagar, you want leaves that have not come in contact with pesticides or other sprays, especially the common types used to prevent mites, stop rot, kill bugs, etc. Not all growers who want to make cannagars can provide such leaves. It’s difficult to predict how a chemical presence in a leaf will effect organic decomposition during curing. I have seen some odd decomposition that seemed to be directly attributable to pesticide use. And who wants to inhale pesticides? No one. The problem – the foliage takes the brunt of all sprays.
I was helping someone who turned out to be using Eagle 20 (and NO ONE should use that stuff), their leaves started to look like Predator skin from the Schwarzenegger movie – mottled, spotted, yellow/green/brown/black. Looked fine for a week after plucking, then nose dived, unexpectedly. They had several large batches completely fail and go bad, and after switching to something new, the problem stopped. And they kept switching. New problems happened.
I prefer taking leaves during flower – both because the leaves are typically lighter, and because growers will often stop spraying once the buds begin to form. However, flower is when the leaves usually start to become less abundant, and when many growers will start pulling foliage off.
I’ve had several clients whose rooms for selecting leaves would change schedules often, switch brands without notice, foliar nutrient overload where the nutrients burn leaves, mega-lolipopping (trimming everything off), etc. All surprises during the middle of cannagar production. Expect the unexpected with a large operation.
Smaller niche growers with attention to detail and a solid plan, you can really take the cannagar market. Not only will you have the edge and the story, like a craft brew, but the overall attention to your product and ability to control it is going to win. Believe me. Even if you arent pulling in money now, keep going. If you love what you are doing, keep perfecting your art.
The big growers can afford to do what it takes, so its oxymoronic in a way. With all the resources, the amount of people interfacing can make the entire process burdened and harder to manage.
Boutique craft growers whose main focus in top shelf will to be the gardens that can really put everything together on site and knock out a quality cannagar – and the key will be marketing it right.
If you have a business that wants to make cannagars, and you have no access to clean leaves – it was a real pain for the few producer processors I have worked with to transfer leaves from other grows. Paperwork, driving, the leaves had to be transported in the same secure van as the rest of the deliveries, which was a cost added to the leaves, and time, etc etc etc. If you are going 100% by the laws. It really doesn’t seem like it needs to be that difficult. Maybe it’s just a Washington thing.
I wanted to get hemp leaves last year for a client that was having trouble getting clean leaves. Hemp seemed like a perfect idea, abundant and I could get possibly get insane amounts of leaves, but …..it’s not allowed. Cannabis producer processors cannot accept or sell any hemp product, and vice versa, and the most strict will want to account for where the leaves came from. Ok. So just tell people that the leaves came from <X> hemp farm. They cant. It’s against the regulations. . It was amusing. I get it, hemp and cannabis – for flower + extract – they have to totally be separate markets. Leaves too apparently. lol.
Growing leaves at home is easy to grow without pesticides – the challenge is that anything you grow at home cannot be used in a retail product. So, my leaves remain for my personals, and my own event service rolling, but I cant bring them to any consulting client for use with anything destined for a retail shelf.
People get weird about those rules man.
How hard is it to get leaves onto retail cannagars where you live?
Leaf Browning Experiments
The leaves I used for this were cured for about 5 months or so – picked back in July, and placed in books to flatten and dry them.
I got the idea to alternate between dry and about 70% humidity, 5 days dry, two days wet, and ive done this for about the last 2 months. I think if I extend that a little bit, ill have reached the tobacco brown cannabis leaf I want to try.
Why do I want this? This breaks down the chlorophyll without using solvents or waiting for the flower / flush period. There are other ways too, but everyone is kind of developing their process in a bubble somewhat, secretive about each process. With this one, any shade of leaf can be browned, and the results are something like : yellow / light green leaves will become tan. Darker green leaves become brown. Purple leaves become dark brown, like a “Maduro” in premium cigar world.
Fun to see this developing in the industry, everyone approaching these processes from new angles. I’ve only smoked one of these puppies so far, so its going to take a bit more testing to see if I am onto the formula I will use for my own brand. I need to get them thoroughly brown, and not as splotchy.
But, that one was a winner. No bitter encroachment of chlorophyll as I smoked it down during an entire day by myself. And really not much noticeable intrusion to the flavor of the flower concentrate either.
Burning the leaf by itself had a sweet musky aroma, almost incense like. Definitely much less the burning leaf smell of a chlorophyll saturated leaf.
Onward, Upward, Cannatorcedores!