How to cap your own supplements (and save $)

Method 1: Without Cap Em Quick (takes less time off the bat, but overall slower than using an encapsulation machine):

I made a pretty simple guide anyone could follow to encapsulate a raw material. Of course you need a scale. Anyone can do this.

If you want to do cap em quick follow this guide: http://nootropics.ip...hp?showtopic=29

A good place to get an excellent cheap scale is here:

Cheapest here:

http://www.rightonsc...om/web/120z.htm

http://balance.balances.com/scales/853

All you need is empty capsules and a scale, and gloves, or *clean* hands.

To encapsulate yourself (without Cap Em Quick) ; follow this guide:

1. Transfer material into re-sealable airtight container (in this example we are using ALCAR):

Cilck here for a visual description

2. Take out an empty capsule:

Cilck here for a visual description

3. Grasp a capsule, preparing to detach connection:

Cilck here for a visual description

4. Split capsule:

Cilck here for a visual description

5. Fill larger side of capsule from container:

Click here for a visual description

6. Prepare to re-seal both sides of capsule:

Click here for a visual description

7. Re-seal capsule:

Click here for a visual description

00 Size capsules weight about 0.1 gram. Using the scale I linked to above (a $20 scale that will last you with a lifetime warranty, A 0.9g weight of an 00 capsule would mean you have 800mg RLAMCT25 -- which is equal to 200mg elemental R-alpha-lipoic acid.


Peace out.

Edited by nootropikamil, 02 September 2006 - 07:33 PM.

I filled 50 00-size capsules with RLA-MCT25 in a cap 'em quik, and they came out to about 615mg each after thorough tamping (~150mg RLA). I think its that ghetto scale you are using. [tung] I'd recommend a more precise scale that can measure in units no larger than 10mg, like this one:

http://balance.balances.com/scales/183

Click HERE to rent this advertising spot for BRAIN HEALTH to support LongeCity (this will replace the google ad above).

And if you want to take a bigger dose than what normally fits in a capsule you can fill both parts of the cap instead of only the large one. This way I can fit 900mg of my nootropic stack instead of 600mg in a 0 cap.

When I use the cap'm quick for filling herbs it smears the whole capsule which makes the capsule stinky and sticky thus making it almost horrible to swallow. Therefore I tend to wash it before consuming. If somebody comes up with an effective solution I and others would be pleased a lot.

Yeah, it may "look" ghetto; but it's quite practical, and saves tons of money.

Here are the weights I got for commonly used sizes of capsules. I weighed 1000 caps, in most cases, subtracted the weight of the bag they were in or estimated and divided by 1000 to come up with the totals. It may be off by 1% or so but will give you a fairly good idea of what each cap weighs.

#3...53mg
#1...80mg
0....115mg
00...129mg
000.195mg

To find the finished weight, weigh a quantity of at least 50 caps, divide by 50, or whatever number you are using, and subtract the weight of the capsule. I find that 00 caps usually hold around 400 to 600mg if well tamped. Trying to do it without a tamper means you may get much less in each cap. Doing it one by one means taking all day to do it. A cap-m-quick is needed plus tamper or one of the other machines. Doing it by hand really sucks.

I have a scale accurate to 1mg, and 00 capsules weigh 122-124mg on mine. I would assume then that the weights you calculated for other sizes are also correct or nearly so.

Funk wrote:

" I have a scale accurate to 1mg, and 00 capsules weigh 122-124mg on mine. I would assume then that the weights you calculated for other sizes are also correct or nearly so."

Yeah, considering I just estimated by eye the weight of the bag, being a couple percent off isn't bad. Then again, it may be closer than that because different brands of capsules may vary by that much. Some may weigh slightly more than the figures I gave. Not that a couple miligrams are going to make a difference to the average home capper.

A nifty trick you can use when trying to cap up stuff that is taken in small quantities is to dilute it with a known weight of adulterant. The adulterant can be ordinary flour or something helpful like inositol, gaba or what have you. Lets say you want to cap up DHEA at 25 mg each. You will not find a capsule small enough for your purposes let alone a machine to cap it with. If you know the density of your adulterant, you can calculate directly but if not, simply cap up some with just the admixture to see how much fits in a cap. You can then uncap them and reuse the capsules. Lets say you have 00 caps and the adulterant fits 450 mg to a cap. Mix a gram of DHEA to 16 gm of adulterant and you will have aproximately 25 mg per cap when you cap it up. You can figure it exactly, I'm just tossing out figures to give you the idea. Mix thoroughly, you don't want pockets of unmixed DHEA. If you want only 1 or 2 mg and your scale reads down to only 100 mg, it's still easy. Assuming you have a weighed packet of the substance you want to mix (resveratrol for example) Do the same calculations and end up with however much you want in each cap.

To mix powders, you can put them in a mortar and pestal or just put them in a plastic bag and crush them by pressing on the bag and shaking. A see through bag lets you know how the mixture is coming along. With different colored powders, idebenone for example, you can see by the even color of the end result how well mixed they are. Powders that don't clump too much are easier to mix and cap. Clumpy ones need more mixing and tamping

I happened to think that I didn't give a very good explanation of how you figure the amounts to mix when making up caps with less than full amounts of something. I was talking to Funk who I assume knows all this stuff already but others reading this may wonder about the steps I skipped over. Lets take the example of wanting to put 25mg of DHEA into 00 caps. Fill the caps with your base filler powder, could be flour, vit C or an amino acid etc. Weigh and figure how much in each cap as explained before. Dump out the contents and reuse caps. You only have to do that once and you will know how much each cap holds of flour, inositol or whatever. Don't snap shut the caps if you are going to dump them out. Lets assume you used 20gm to fill 50 caps. Now if we multiply 25mg x 50 caps we get 1.25gm of DHEA to fill each cap with 25mg plus filler. Weigh out 19gm filler (20gm - about a gram of dhea) and weigh 1.25 gram of DHEA and mix the two. When thoroughly mixed, cap it up and you have 25mg of DHEA in each cap along with the filler.

What if you don't have a good scale? You need a fairly accurate scale to do this though not a lab grade scale like Funk has. A cheapo scale with accuracy of .25 to .5 gm can be used. Instead of weighing out one batch, weigh out 5 batches. Using the above example, 5 x 20 = 100gm filler for 5 x 50 caps. 5 x 1.25gm = 6.25gm DHEA. Since 100gm filler fills all the caps, subtract the 6.25 gm DHEA and you use about 94 gm filler and 6.25gm DHEA. If your scale is off by up to .5gm, that's not accurate enough to weigh 1.25gm but weighing out 6gm means the margin of error will be less than 10% which should be acceptable. Fill your 250 caps or just fill 50 and save the rest of the powder for later.

I have a used mettler scale that I haven't set up yet. I don't know when I'll get to it or if the scale works properly. I don't really need it but found one cheap. It reads down to a fraction of a milligram, I think they claim 10 microgram accuracy but you seldom get as much as they claim. It's quite a trick to set up those accurate scales. Any little thing can throw them off. A decent postal scale should work for mixing and capping your own supplements. I use a triple beam for general stuff.

I thought I would bump this topic; cost effectiveness is always an issue.

Looking at production processes, how can be garanteed that bulk supplements do have equal quality control compared to final packed medicine.

Part of the cost effectiveness of bulk products is bypassing the packing costs, but what about possible bypassing of essential quality control by tapping a product (to) early from the production process?

Bump

I did not see your post...sorry.

You can start by asking the company to provide you with some evidence that they use a bottler that is FDA registered. The EXACT same procedure is used to bottle capsules as is used to bottle a powder. If it's not, then that is a problem. As far as I know, the FDA has received prior notification for sale of most nootropics, but laws may be interpreted differently state to state and also based on the interpretation of the FDA field agent. However, there is a lot of liability associated with sales of these products as DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS -- it does not mean a product is safe just because FDA did not reject a prior notification.

[quote name='http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~shlevy/dietsuppqualitysafetyefficacy.htm']Consumer Reports (May 2004) and the “Dirty Dozen” unsafe herbs still readily available

·      “CONSUMER REPORTS has identified a dozen (supplements) that … are too dangerous to be on the market.  Yet they are.”  Introductory paragraph in red ink.

·        Factors contributing to unsafe supplements on the market.

·        “ ‘The standards for demonstrating a supplement is hazardous are so high that it can take the FDA years to build a case,’ said Bruce Silverglade, legal director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington D.C., consumer advocacy group”(pg. 12).

·        “The FDA’s supplement division is understaffed and underfunded, with about 60 people and a budget of only 10 million “dollars)…” (pp. 12-13).

·        “…Overwhelming opposition from Congress and industry forced it to back down” when the FDA first tried to regulate ephedra in 1997 (pg. 13).

·        The public assumes a greater degree of government regulation than exists – in a 2002 Harris Poll of 1010 adults, 59% of respondents believed that supplements must be approved by a government agency before they can be sold to the public, 68% thought the government requires warning labels on supplements with regard to potential dangers, and 55% thought that supplement manufacturers could not make safety claims without solid scientific support.
[/quote]

Companies that have been in business for thirty years, such as Jarrow sell powdered products...so I don't know how one can suspect the powdered products to be processed any different than an encapsulated product.


IP6 Powder
http://www.jarrow.co...7d82f79137b7f#;

resurrecting this old thread...

My question to xanadu, funk or whomever is when making a blended product. Such as xanadu's DHEA product (say you are mixing a DHEA, Creatine and Inositol product with the objective being to get 25 mg of DHEA per capsule) What is your confidence level that the final product is blended completely and you won't get some capsules with 25 mg of DHEA some with 100 mg and some with only 5 mg. Do you think the plastic bag, mortar and pestle, glass jar shaken or whatever home blending method will create a mixture with uniform consistency... as in each scoop or capsule or whatever measure will have the same percentage of ingredients relative to each other? What about if you say blend 10 different powders together (obviously doing the math correctly with regards to total weight of mixture, weight of each component in the mixture, amount of capsules etc.). Again will the mixture be uniform?

Edit: Moderators and Others... I originally resurrected this thread to ask this question because it came closest to discussing what I was driving at, but after posting I thought about it and felt the topic would get more exposure if I made a new thread in "Supplements" directly targeting this "blended mixture" issue so please see this topic in supplements http://www.imminst.o...showtopic=19834

Edited by edward, 10 January 2008 - 07:29 PM.

If you want to do cap em quick follow this guide: http://nootropics.ip...hp?showtopic=29

Does anyone know where I could see this or a replacement guide?

It is not "alive", nor is it in the web.archive.org archive...

Thanks

Click HERE to rent this advertising spot for BRAIN HEALTH to support LongeCity (this will replace the google ad above).

If you want to do cap em quick follow this guide: http://nootropics.ip...hp?showtopic=29

Does anyone know where I could see this or a replacement guide?

It is not "alive", nor is it in the web.archive.org archive...

Thanks

Bumped to second this. After doing a search this still seemed like the most relevant thread on the subject, but with that link dead it's incomplete.

Edited by Raza, 22 May 2012 - 04:31 PM.