We’d all love to trim weed faster. It can take 4 to 8+ hours to trim a pound of weed by hand, and a lot of conventional bud trimmers force you to sacrifice quality and quantity in exchange for speed. So the real question is how to trim weed more quickly while still maintaining a flawless presentation and preserving the integrity of your crop when every percent counts.
How to Trim Weed in Less Time
If you’re still trimming by hand with pruning shears, the most effective way to increase your speed and efficiency is to incorporate machinery into your trimming process. Conventional bladed bud trimmers can turn a multi-hour operation into a quick-moving process where pounds of cannabis are trimmed in minutes, not hours.
The problem, of course, is quality control. Machine trimming has deservedly garnered a reputation for being messy and imprecise—so much so that the term “hand-trimmed” has become a popular marketing angle in the cannabis industry. If a product is trimmed by hand, it’s perceived as being higher quality. But it is possible to machine-trim without sacrificing quality. The key is to use a bladeless trimming method accompanied with the use of co2.
The Problem With Bladed Trimming
Since 1997, processors have used bladed trimming machines to speed up their operations. Although the machines have gotten a lot more sophisticated over the past quarter-century, the blades are still creating headaches for cannabis cultivators.
Bladed trimming is fast, but it’s not an efficient way to achieve whole-bodied trim and flawless buds. You also have to deal with higher attrition rates accompanied with less retention of A-to-B bud ratios after the bladed machine has had its way with the delicate inflorescence/buds.
Trimmer blades will slice through everything in their path, leaving behind a trail of chlorophyll and plant particulate throughout the highly valued sugar leaves (an important byproduct of trimming). Your presentation and cannabinoid content both suffer as a result. The buds will remain mostly intact if you’re using a quality trimmer (though some damage is likely to occur), but the trim is going to get shredded. This is a problem, as there’s a lot you can do with your trim.
Machine-Trimming Weed Without Blades
It is possible to achieve the speed of a trimming machine with the precision of hand-trimming. The solution is Cryo-Trim®. This state-of-the-art technology uses liquid CO2 to trim and separate both wet and dry cannabis flowers. The liquid CO2 flash-freezes the cannabis, which is then gently rotated inside of a tumbler to separate the sugar leaves and fan leaves from the buds with minimal bruising of trichomes. This process trims with the rise and fall of the flower without shaping or contouring the bud, all while maintaining the integrity of the flowers but also being gentle on the tips. Under scrutiny, it’s hard to believe that a pair of scissors or blades hadn’t touched the buds after seeing the result of a Resinator trim.
The Original Resinator is the only machine on the market that supports the proprietary Cryo-Trim® process. Suitable for everyone from boutique cultivators to large commercial operations, the Resinator is capable of trimming up to 40 pounds of cannabis per hour, and it comes equipped plug-and-play with everything needed to get the job done (except for the liquid CO2, which is sold separately and readily available at your local gas supplier). It includes a cylindrical chamber for flash-freezing your untrimmed buds and a series of nylon mesh screens to cradle and filter the cannabis flower.
Not only do the Resinator OG and Resinator XL allow you to match the speed of bladed trimmers, but quite often you can exceed those speeds, all without sacrificing quality. Even the best trimmers can take two minutes or more to process a pound of wet trim, and dry trim can take considerably longer in some cases. With the Resinator, you can start trimming wet (live) and dry cannabis at a speed of one pound per minute. And best of all, the Resinator does it with none of the downsides of bladed trimming. Just note that a wet Cryo-Trim requires the use of a freeze dryer in the Crop to Cure process.
Other Benefits of the Cryo-Trim® Process
When you use the Original Resinator, you’re not just saving a lot of time. There are other important benefits as well.
- Cost savings. The Resinator saves you up to 85+% of trim labor. When your process requires less labor, you save money. You want to keep your production costs as low as possible, as affordable cannabis is a top priority for a majority of consumers.
- A higher quality product. Because the process is so clean, you lose less than 1% of your total cannabinoid content when trimming buds with the Resinator. No other bud trimmer on the market comes close. You can refer to our COAs for more information.
- A cleaner presentation. No slicing means that all of your leaves and buds remain perfectly intact. You could establish a whole new revenue stream just selling high-quality, whole-bodied trim to cannabis processors—Resinator trim is highly sought-after. Your flowers will look better on the shelf too.
- Less maintenance. One big problem with bladed trimmers is that the blades need to be maintained. They require constant sharpening and occasional replacement, and the machines need to be oiled as well. With the Resinator, you don’t have to worry about any of that.
- Easy cleaning. Thanks to the cylindrical tumbler shape, the Resinator is super easy to clean and maintain—no difficult nooks and crannies to reach. Just a little bit of elbow grease and some isopropyl rubbing alcohol (or more preferably a quick spray with a power washer) makes for a rapid refresh of your equipment. By contrast, some of the large bladed trimmers require serious disassembly to clean properly.
Aside from the patented Cryo-Trim® technology, the Resinator also offers another key benefit: The ability to produce your own extracts. The Resinator isn’t just a trimmer. It’s an all-in-one trimmer and solvent-free extraction product. So once you’ve finished trimming cannabis buds, you can easily transform it into kief or bubble hash using the same machine. The extraction process is just as simple as the trimming process.
Don’t Just Trim Buds Fast—Trim Them Smart
When looking for tips on how to trim weed faster, remember that speed isn’t the only factor in play. You might have the fastest trimmer in the world, but it won’t mean much if it gives you a clump of cannabis soup. You’ll know you’ve hit the jackpot when you strike the ideal balance between speed, precision, and versatility. That’s where the Resinator excels for both wet trimming and dry trimming.
So don’t fall for the outdated hype that hand-trimmed is automatically best. When you have the right technology at your fingertips, you can match or even exceed hand-trimmed quality in just a fraction of the time. You’ll be amazed by how your newly trimmed buds look, feel, and taste.
