Help With Making Shatter Carts - Future4200

Hey guys I’m new to this site but I’ve done my research on a ton of other sites so I am pretty familiar with the process. I have a problem with finalizing how to make my carts and which ratios to use.

Currently, I’m using a magnetic hot plate to decarb and stir the shatter. My hot plate doesn’t say the degrees on it so I’m putting a meat thermometer in the jar to tell me what the temperature is at as it’s decarbing. From the video I watched, the shatter is supposed to be decarbed at 145 C for 30-45 minutes. Then I’m supposed to put the hot beaker with the shatter inside on the scale (doesn’t heat continuously change the weight on the scale?), zero it, and add a certain amount of terpenes and mix. After I mix I pull it out with my syringe and fill the carts. Once filled, flip the carts upside down for an hour.

Now I have a couple of questions about the process that I can’t find a clear answer for on any forum. I’m trying to work with samples to figure out the right ratios but my first three samples didn’t work out too well. These are the ratios I used for my first three samples.

1st batch: For 0.9 g shatter, 10% MCT oil (0.09 mL), 1% terpenes (0.01 mL) + added 7 drops of MTC 2nd batch: For 0.9 g shatter, 8.88% MCT oil (0.08 mL), 2.22% terpenes (0.02 mL) + added 6 drops of MTC 3rd batch: For 0.9 g shatter, 7.77% MCT oil (0.07 mL), 3.33% terpenes (0.03 mL) The added drops are because my hands weren’t steady enough to easily do one drop at a time and more dropped by accident I also estimated that 1 drop from the syringe = 0.01 mL

I did 0.9g of shatter to account for the terps and MCT that would result in a 1g cartridge. If I shouldn’t do this please correct me. The 3rd batch came out the best but the flavor of the shatter was overpowering the terpene flavor by a large margin. I don’t know if this was because of the % of MCT oil, the % of terpenes or because I didn’t cover the beaker when it was decarbing.

These were my biggest problems when making the first 3 samples:

1. I couldn’t weigh out 0.03 g of terpenes (3.33%) to put into the 0.9 g of decarbed shatter because the scale for some reason would register 0.09 g as the lowest. I was using the syringe to pull out the terpene from the bottle.
2. When I would put the hot beaker on top of the scale it was impossible to zero because the heat kept changing the weight. This made it impossible to weigh out the terpenes by dropping 0.03 g in there instead. How should I do this?
3. The 3rd batch leaked through the mouth hole and burnt one of my friends. I don’t know whether to attribute this to me overfilling the cart, the terpene % or the MCT oil %
4. I was cooking all three batches on the hot plate at the same time so I couldn’t cover any of them up. I noticed that the shatter in my 3rd batch did the best because I put it in a shot glass that had a small surface area so it wasn’t spread thin. The other two however were in the beakers with a thin glass layer and those burnt a lot quicker and stuck to the beakers. I believe I lost a lot of shatter due to evaporation too. My 1st and 2nd batch came out to around 0.5 g each whereas my 3rd batch came out to the full 1g I wanted. Would the evaporation stop if I covered the beaker with a a bigger beaker over top?
5. What’s the ideal temperature to decarb the shatter on the hot plate if 145C is wrong?
6. Is it possible to put the stir bar inside the shatter as it’s decarbing? I know this won’t work with a 1 g sample since it’s too small but would it work when I’m doing something like 20 grams? I don’t want the stir bar to have a bunch of shatter stick to it thus resulting in a loss of a shatter that I can’t extract.

I want to thank anybody that provides helpful advice in advance as I’ve been trying to figure this process out for the past 3 months.