You dont need pressure to press tablets.
Tablets can be made by wetting the material with a solution of water and alcohol say 80/20 then simply filling a Triturates mould with it using a spatula. Pop them out with the peg plate and wait until they dry.
The result are nice and hard tablets upto 200mg each – you can go higher if you make your own Triturates mould.
The molds do need caliberating each time you make a new tablet using different chemicals.
Calibration of the mold:
Tablets that contain only the powder base are made first. The tablets produced are weighed as a batch and the average weight per tablet for that base is calculated.
The average weight per tablet of the active drug is determined. Generally, just a few cavities are used in this determination. Tablets containing only the active drug are made and the average weight per tablet for the drug is calculated.
The quantity of drug that will be required in the prescription per tablet is divided by the average weight per tablet of the active drug. This will give a percentage of the cavity volume that will be occupied by the active drug
Subtracting the percentage in step 3 from 100% will give the percentage of the cavity volume that will be occupied by the tablet base.
The percentage of active drug in the cavity volume and the percentage of base in the cavity volume are used to calculate the appropriate amounts of base and drug to weigh. For example, if the mold contains 50 cavities and each will hold approximately 100 mg, then 5000 mg of mixture will be needed to fill the mold. The amount of base and drug to weigh can be determined by multiplying 5000 mg by the two different percentages determined in the preceding steps.
It is prudent to prepare a slight excess of powder mixture (5 – 10%). This will allow for any variance in the approximate and actually capacity of the mold, and will also allow for powder loss during the compounding procedure.
So yeah providing you can do basic maths you can be popping hundreds of tablets out a day for under $200 of equipment 😉
