Oil Burner

Intro

The oil burner (aka crack pipe) catches the eye of every Dimitri newbie, who wonders why everyone else is using far more complex, harder-to-obtain, and vastly more expensive kit. Surely, what worked for McKenna, must surely be good enough for us?  Errrmm, no.

I first heard about the oil burner from an Adeptus Psychonautica video.  At the time, I was exclusively using "The Machine", but with concerns about its vape efficiency, and hoped the oil burned would be an improvement.  And maybe it was in some ways, but sadly, I found it even harder to obtain even the slightest shred of consistency, plus vapour harshness varied between extremely difficult to totally impossible to hold in.

I put serious effort into achieving success from the oil burner and below I'll describe how I achieved the best, or more accurately, the least worst results.  But it wasn't long before I returned to "The Machine". Feel free to try out the oil burner, although I definitely don't recommend them and strongly suggest a high degree of expectation management.

My Most Successful Technique

I found it almost impossible to obtain controlled heat from any kind of lighter.  Things became easier when I started using a home made alcohol burner, which was basically a small jar with a ~1mm hole pierced through the centre of the lid.  A short piece of string was threaded through the lid as a wick, and some methylated spirit or similar poured into the jar.  This seemed to burn with a much cooler flame although could probably represent a serious fire risk if improperly handled.

Using this as a heat source, the procedure was...

• From empty, load around 30mg of crystal Dimitri into the bulb of the pipe

• Place the mouthpiece of the pip into your mouth and, very slowly & gently apply heat to the bulb from the burner. 

• At first you will need to hold the bulb directly above and almost touching the flame,but keeping the bulb gently "rocking" about 45° either side of vertical.  But keep the heat gentle and increase the distance from bulb to flame if needed

• After a while, you'll see the crystal melt into a liquid.  Now keep the gentle heat going with the rocking, but start performing very short test tokes (one second or less), just to monitor how much, if any vapour is being given off

• Eventually, when you reach the point that a short test yields visible vapour, that's the time you can perform a proper toke.  By now, there sould be some heat stored in the glass, so we won't be totally dependent on the flame, but perform a 4 second toke, trying to keep the vapour production consistent with the flame source.

• If the vapour feels too hot, increase the toke rate next time.  You can also experiement around with the duration.

Pros

• It kinda works, depending on your definition of "works"

• Can provide the full range of tripping intensity, albeit seemingly with almost lucky dip predictability

• Very cheap and easy to obtain

• At last, you'll be made fully aware of why we're not all using oil burners

Cons

• Wickedly harsh vapour

• Very steep learning curve to get the best from it

• Hopelessly unpredictable trip intensity

• Requires an open flame as a heat source, almost impossible to toke lying down

• Inconvenient in use - needs pre-warming, open flame etc

• Awkward to place down after vaping