Harvesting very soon, couple questions.

Well its looking like Im probably harvesting this weekend. Would have liked to wait one more week, but due to somewhat sketchy circumstances I will probably be pulling them down a week early (though they look amazing and very very close to ready).

A friend of mine dropped off his trimming machine for me. Its a spinpro one with the rotary handle on the top. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA18fWbxqSo Vid here shows it in action.

Im wondering if anyone has any experience with this machine. Specifically im wondering too if I would need to hang the plants for a couple days before trim them. Or if I could just go straight into the machine and let it all dry on some screens. Do I need to let em hang or no?!?!

They should be able to dry in a suitable condition. Ill be using my shed. I have a bud I chopped 4 days back and it seems to be drying nicely, and not too quick.

I realize the trimming machine may end up losing some crystal content in the process, but Im not overly stressed about it as my buddy typically drops off large balls of hash for me anyways.

I dunno ... thoughts?

I've actually been looking at getting one of these myself. From what I've seen you put it in wet then dry on screens when finished. I see a lot of offbrand ones that look very simliar. Any one have any comments on those?

Well I went ahead and cropped out 5 of my plants last weekend and used the spin-pro to trim. I must say I was very impressed. Its almost like magic lol, you pop in your buds minus the fan leaves couple turns of the wheel, and alakhazam, nice trimmed up bud. It didnt seem to damage the buds and there wasnt a noticeable amount of crystal loss from what I saw. Worked really really well on even a few of the smaller buds. Its not as good as a hand-job (pun intended) but it was extremely easy to touch up a few of the buds as I off loaded them. All in all, great machine did a very acceptable job and is extremely fast. Trimmed whats looking like it will turn out to be roughly 14-18 onzes (dry) in about 4 hours.

The only issue is drying of course. Im used to hanging my buds like pretty much everyone else does. Drying on screens is a bit different, found the buds drying a bit on the outside too fast. I ended up sweating them out a couple times (placing entire screen into large bag) for just a few hours to suck some of the moisture out of the middle of the buds. I pulled them down on Saturday morning and they just went into jars today, so probably a bit quicker then it should be. All in all though looking like it turned out very well. Buds nice and tight, lots of sugar.

I must say im very pleased with the harvest in all. Really happy to pull in a 1b off of the first 5. Was a lot of work bringing them in everynight for 2 months ... happy it all seemed to work out so far.