The Capsule Machine | Fills Size "00" Capsules

The Capsule Machine

Introducing ‘The Capsule Machine’ by capsule connection! Ever wanted to make your own capsules in small batches? This is your answer! Quick and easy to use, and makes just 24 capsules at a time, of both powders and oil based liquids.

Powder Capsules

For powders, the capsules are filled to capacity, and then the top and bottom half of the capsules are connected together by the capsule machine. Hitting the right fill weight can be tricky since you are at the mercy of the fill weight of the 00 capsule. A 00 capsule holds around 400-750 mg of material, so this is quite the range. If your ingredient doesn't hit the required fill weight, you will need to use a filler which we talk about in more detail in the "working with fillers" section down below. 

Softgel Capsules

The capsule machine is also fantastic for encapsulating oil based products. Oil based products do not dissolve capsules, so this is an easy way to develop alternate dosing methods for your liquid oil based supplements, like our supercritical fluid holy basil extract or our lucidispore red reishi spore supercritical fluid extract. Achieving proper fill weight with oils is also much easier than with powders since you can rely on volumetric dosing. Say for example that you want each capsule to contain one dose of supercritical holy basil extract, then you can use our graduated dropper, measure out 0.5 mL of holy basil extract and squirt it directly into the capsule. This then means you are not at the mercy of the fill weight of the capsule, and you can be very precise with dosage while not having to utilize fillers. 

Working with Fillers

Capsule machines are quite rudimentary, even state of the art encapsulation machines all rely on the idea that a capsule can hold a certain amount of material and then will not accept any additional material. This means that when we make capsules, we have to consider that we will be filling them up all the way and this is not always possible with pure ingredients. For example, if you need to encapsulate say 25 mg of 7,8-DHF in a 00 capsule, then you will be WAY over dose if you do not utilize a filler. A 00 capsule can hold 500 mg of 7,8-DHF powder, which would be 475 mg over target. When this is the case, we need to use a filler, whether that is an inert one like maltodextrin or a functional filler like taurine, magnesium glycinate, creatine monohydrate etc. Basically, products that have high dosages and flexible dosing ranges. Essentially, we need to develop a blend of ingredients, which, when filling up a capsule all the way, will result in 25 mg of 7,8-DHF residing in each capsule.

As an example, let’s consider we want 25 mg of 7,8-DHF but we also want taurine, then we can use taurine as our filler. Now we need to do some math and measuring! For this we will also need a milligram scale like our NDS-201 scale. Take an empty 00 capsule and fill it up all the way with 7,8-DHF, then dump the powder out on a scale and measure how much 7,8-DHF can fit in a capsule. Now repeat the same process with taurine. We got the following results:

• 7,8-DHF: 500 mg per 00 capsule
• Taurine: 840 mg per 00 capsule

Unfortunately, both 7,8-DHF and taurine have drastically different fill weights, so we need to do some math to figure out how much taurine to use. Luckily this is not very hard! This is the formula we use here:

(filler per 00 capsule) - (Target active ingredient x filler per 00 capsule / target ingredient per 00 capsule)  

When we apply this to our 7,8-DHF and taurine example, we get the following numbers:

(840 mg taurine) - (25 mg 7,8-DHF x 840 mg taurine/500 mg 7,8-DHF)

(840 mg taurine) - (42 mg taurine) = 798 mg taurine

This formula tells us how much taurine we need to use in order to take up 475 mg of space which 7,8-DHF would take up in a pure 7,8-DHF capsule. Due to the different fill weights, we need to use 798 mg of taurine in order to match the space 475 mg of 7,8-DHF would take up in the 00 capsule. Once we’ve got this figured out, we can do a quick test to see if our theoretical formulation holds up in the real world. Since we are using 25 mg of 7,8-DHF and 798 mg of taurine, a capsule should be able to hold 823 mg of our 7,8-DHF and taurine blend. To test this, simply fill up a capsule all the way with your blend, then tamp it down with the tamper and fill it up some more until no more powder can fit inside of the capsule. Then dump it out on the scale and if we get +/- 10% within our 823 mg target then the blend was successful and we can start encapsulating our blend with the capsule machine!

Capsule Stacks

While quite difficult to pull off, it is also possible to make your own capsule stacks. We use the same exact method as above, except now we are working with multiple ingredients. What we do now, is make up our active ingredient blend, and then we fill up our capsule with the stack blend and just treat it as a “single ingredient” like we did above for 7,8-DHF. We then select a filler if we need to, and go through the same process as above.