My Current Fina Formula

Pharma / TRT
1

EDIT: Further update – I don’t use any benzyl benzoate prior to filtering. This has the advantage of preventing a sticky, binder substance present in the pellets from ever going into solution, which makes filtering much easier. Method posted towards end of thread.

Rainjack requested I start a thread and not having any particular other ideas, why not my current Fina formula?

Now, there have been various ones published at various times so it could be that a reason why not is everyone is perfectly satisfied with their current formula.

But on the chance not, as this has I think certain advantages, this is my current method:

To a clean bottle e.g. a 100 ml vial is added the planned amount of Fina pellets, up to a maximum of 6 grams. This may be done in an aseptic way by breaking the corners of the top of each cartridge immediately prior to being added, and using the top to hold back the pellets of all rows except, in turn, each row being poured into the bottle.

The planned total volume is, in mL, 16.67 times the number of grams of pellets used.

To this is added a volume of benzyl benzoate equal to 1/10th the planned total volume. The bottle is stopped with a septum, the septum is pierced with an insulin syringe without plunger, and the bottle is placed in a water bath warmed to 70 degrees C. If there is no thermostatic control the exact temperature is not important but I would not much exceed 70 C (158 F) and it is satisfactory to be somewhat cooler.

A couple of hours are allowed for the pellets to dissolve. It is helpful to occasionally swirl or (with care to keep septum in place; insulin needle can be temporarily removed) shake the bottle. The dissolution process is ended when there are no visible pieces of pellets left. The mixture is allowed a few minutes to cool to about room temperature. (The cooling aids in the filler forming larger rather than smaller particles.)

At this point, Wesson oil is added to volume. It is more convenient and more easily aseptic to previously have established what fill point corresponds to the desired total volume, rather than having to measure out oil.

The insulin pin is removed, the bottle is inverted and swirled a few times to mix contents equally, and the bottle is allowed to settle.

The above-described process is started preferably at least a week before the preparation is needed. Two weeks or a month are better yet. It is possible though to use on a same-day basis, simply a little more trouble at the last step.

The last step is to, either as material is needed or as a job done all at once, to pour portions of the resulting oil solution into a 3 mL syringe to which an 0.45 micron disposable syringe filter is attached (nylon is a good choice) and dispense into a vial or vials.

The only somewhat-nuisance part of this method is that the filter tends to clog rapidly. The less time that was given in advance for the formulation to settle, the more rapid the clogging but there is always some degree of it.

An efficient means of dealing with this is, upon clogging occurring, to invert the syringe, draw back the plunger so as to recover almost all prepartion from the filter, cap the syringe with a needle and cover, and then draw ethanol or methanol up through the syringe filter with another syringe a few times to clean it. It can thus be reused many times.

If ethanol is used, the ethanol need be removed only by inverting the syringe and drawing the ethanol out, expelling the ethanol from the syringe, and then gently using the syringe to push out any remaining ethanol; if methanol is used it is preferable to also let the filter dry before reuse.

On the filter having been cleaned and made ready again for use, the same syringe used before to dispense the preparation may be used again, thus resulting in saving the fraction of an mL that remained from the previous dispensing.

That’s it!

The resulting product is nice bright, even brilliant canary yellow with no trace of brown tinge or any cloudiness of any kind. Any preparation which does not meet this description contains undesired substances.

Now as to the why’s:

Why no benzyl alcohol? Finaplix is composed of not only trenbolone acetate but also a filler (I think it is methylcellulose) and benzyl alcohol has ability to solubilize this filler. Even after oil is added, some methylcellulose I believe remains in solution. This is undesirable because it is metabolically inert and I am not sure it can be cleared from the injection site. Of course the amounts are extremely small, I am not saying it’s a big deal, but from the standpoint of idealism, it’s better not to have that.

Of course another way of solving that is using purification methods beforehand such as recrystallization or chromatography which I used to use, but that is so much more bother and this method produces a result which appears just as bright and clean.

Finaplix also has some degree, very slight when new but not zero, of what I assume is oxidized trenbolone acetate and is a brownish substance. Benzyl alcohol is also a powerful solvent of this material, but oil is not and an oil/BB solution also seems not to be.

Why 60 mg/mL? It is true that more concentrated formulations can be made but injecting reasonable volumes of vegetable oil if anything has the positive effect of a natural and subtle topical size increasing effect. It is easier to dissolve at 60 mg/mL, easier to filter, just generally easier and it is plenty, as for example 120 mg/day is a quite effective dose.

“Fina cough” is also about or actually zero with this method unless injected too rapidly or unless injected into the bloodstream. Although in general products with moderate concentration of benzyl alcohol don’t cause coughing, for some reason the combination of Finaplix and benzyl alcohol, or higher concentration Fina preparations than this, can cause it.

The efficiency of the method is quite high. I have not measured it but I would think over 95%. Almost all the oil can be poured off while leaving the sediment behind pretty much as a hardpack assuming that reasonable time was allowed for settling.

At the price of only, what is it, something like $17 per gram and the ease of this method, it is really hard to beat for efficiency. Even 120 mg/day is only about $2 per day to use.

EDIT/UPDATE: It is an improvement to the method to not use heat to dissolve. Followup post at current end of thread will explain.

2

very interesting.

I believe RJ was looking for your input on the whole Raw Deal thing.

Also, I posted a question for you in the MAG-10 log thread.
If you could give me some input on it when you get a minute, I would really appreciate it.

thanks

3

Oh, and as further thoughts on dosing:

Those who may have read my stuff from way back when may recall that I used to always say 50 mg/day. The reason for that was, in those days, every single other steroid writer treated trenbolone – the generally available form being Parabolon – as being practically nuclear, quite toxic, and something that a pro bodybuilder was brave to be using at two Parabolan per week, which would correspond (as the molecular weight is different) to 100 mg of TA per week.

However I knew athletes that used a Parabolan per day. This was considered extreme dosage but only by reputation: actually there was not the slightest trace of problem.

So when I was recommending 50 mg/day this was considered by previous standards to be quite extreme, even perhaps crazy, but in fact it was the highest proven-safe dosage. At that point. It was effective and had I recommended more yet, I would have been recommending something I did not know for a fact was safe.

However time has shown that at least triple that amount is still safe.

So although 50 mg/day remains as effective as it ever was when combined with a good oral or with lots of T, even more can be obtained with a higher dose and if the price is good, as it is with homemade (and is NOT the case with Mexican stuff that I’m aware of) then why not?

Secondly, just as a convenient way to use daily doses that are not exact multiples of the concentration of the preparation: If for example you’d like to use 90 mg/day but don’t want to inject one-and-a-half cc per day (why do an extra injection that’s only half a mL?) then this does not mean you need a 90 mg/mL preparation, but rather a less concentrated preparation can be used somewhat more frequently than once per day.

For example, moving up the injection time 8 hours each day, so the time between injections is 16 hours instead of 24, results in a daily dose 50% higher than what each injection is. So, for example, a 60 mg/mL prep that’s injected each 16 hours yields 90 mg/day, if for whatever reason this was preferred instead of using, for example, 2 mL each 24 hours to give 120 mg/day.

Anyway, the point is, it’s not needed to have a high concentration simply because one wants to use a value somewhat higher than the per-mL concentration of the product. One can just move up the injection frequency moderately and appropriately.

4

(That last post was before yours went up.)

I will look at the MAG-10 thread, thanks for pointing it out!

I actually don’t know anything in particular about the Raw Deal thing, except that someone I was friends with and was an extremely nice guy and very good to his customers unfortunately got busted in that same time frame. He wasn’t even involved in the China thing whatsoever so I don’t know if it was coincidence or the same thing.

Anyway, I truly hated seeing that happen to him. He was and is nothing remotely like a “real criminal” so what is happening is just not right.

5

Damn, alot of good info in 3 posts.

6

I won’t be using steroids for a very long time, I’m pretty young. But that was incredibly informative and incredibly interesting. great info.

7

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
So when I was recommending 50 mg/day this was considered by previous standards to be quite extreme, even perhaps crazy, but in fact it was the highest proven-safe dosage. At that point. It was effective and had I recommended more yet, I would have been recommending something I did not know for a fact was safe.

However time has shown that at least triple that amount is still safe.

So although 50 mg/day remains as effective as it ever was when combined with a good oral or with lots of T, even more can be obtained with a higher dose and if the price is good, as it is with homemade (and is NOT the case with Mexican stuff that I’m aware of) then why not?[/quote]

Bill, have we since learned more about cycle duration as well? What would be your upper limit recommendations for the length of a TA-based cycle?

8

In addition to the above question, I’m also interested as to what you suggest as the upper threshold dose of Tren Ace that will give the maximum amt. of strength benefits without a maximum of mass gains? Is there a direct dose dependence for mass gain, or is there a certain (lower) dose that tends to have profound efffects on strength rather than mass?

I’m not planning to use in the foreseeable future, but the thought has crossed my mind that if/when I decide to use, my primary purpose will be strength based cycles, as I plan to stay inside my weight class. What I know about tren seems to say that it’s great for strength and mass both. I’m aware that caloric control is the surest way to prevent gain, but I’m asking anyway. :slight_smile: Thanks in advance. I always enjoy your posts, they’re amazingly informative.

9

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:

So although 50 mg/day remains as effective as it ever was when combined with a good oral or with lots of T, even more can be obtained with a higher dose and if the price is good, as it is with homemade (and is NOT the case with Mexican stuff that I’m aware of) then why not?

[/quote]

For me - I am heading the other direction. Less has definitely been more in my recent cycle, running 300mg of Tren Enanthate per week.

I would have laughed at anything less than 500mg/week just 6 months ago.

10

Chillain, really things seem the same as ever to me on cycle length, with trenbolone acetate not differing from other things except where other things suffer from either long half-life resulting in slow clearance at end of cycle, or progestagenic effect (particularly Deca) worsening recovery. So it doesn’t have unusual properties with regard to recovery but rather lacks any unusually bad ones.

On the cycle length, with good PCT 8 weeks remains a conservative cycle length that everyone in good shape to start with seems to recover from quickly (I can’t guarantee zero exceptions) and without PCT represents a point where a significant minority will have trouble without PCT.

Each additional week past 8 increases chance of recovery difficulty somewhat. Something like 10 weeks, for example, with PCT is still generally going to be fine but is not as conservative.

Also same as ever, it’s possible and effective to do briefer cycles of which the optimum cycle length, from that perspective, is 2 weeks. TA is taken up till about day 12.

Aragorn, I don’t know, I tend to think about 120 is a fine dose for most. However personally on a training scheme where only 1 or 2 workouts per week are specialized, heavily-hitting-the-target workouts and all other workouts are intended only to maintain those bodyparts, I use 120 mg as the ongoing dose and 360 mg as a “kicker” on the target days. This doesn’t achieve a level equal to ongoing 360 mg/day usage, incidentally: rather if (if) the half life were exactly 1 day then it would be equivalent to 240 mg/day ongoing usage. (60 mg from previous day, and only half of the current day or 180 mg counts for such accounting for the current day, so 240 mg/day effective level.)

This does seem to do a little more than does staying on 120 mg/day so I guess 120 mg/day does, in the absence of any other Type 1, at least for some individuals, leave a small amount of room for improvement.

By the way, there’s a strong tendency for it to be the case that the more gifted the individual as a bodybuilder, the less dose needed. Perhaps because having less sensitivity to the drugs, thus requiring more, goes hand in hand with being less gifted; whereas the gifted bb’ers ability to do as well or better with natural T than a typically-gifted person does with steroid use suggests very high sensitivity and thus need for lower dosages.

There are a lot of guys who have done very, very well with less than 100 mg/day so it really does come down to individual ability to efficiently utilize the drug.

Besides all this, there could be drug metabolism factors too. If one person has twice the clearance time of another, his 50 mg/day will give the same blood levels as the other person’s 100 mg/day. This probably is a major factor between individuals yet is completely unpredictable and short of testing which nobody does, unknowable.

11

Yesssssss! Homebrew. You can also get testosterone proprionate from the same places you get the fina pellets from. It has been a while, but I believe it is under the name “Synovex.” Be careful and make sure and take some arimidex or other anti-estrogen with it, because it has 25 mg’s of estradiol to ever 2000 mg’s of test. If you don’t, you’ll get lumps and get the worst water retention you’ve ever had in your life.

If you can get test from another source, go ahead and get it. If you can’t, go about it the exact same as you would with the fina, and add the pellets in the same vial, or seperate.

12

[quote]Phire210 wrote:
Yesssssss! Homebrew. You can also get testosterone proprionate from the same places you get the fina pellets from. It has been a while, but I believe it is under the name “Synovex.” Be careful and make sure and take some arimidex or other anti-estrogen with it, because it has 25 mg’s of estradiol to ever 2000 mg’s of test. If you don’t, you’ll get lumps and get the worst water retention you’ve ever had in your life.

If you can get test from another source, go ahead and get it. If you can’t, go about it the exact same as you would with the fina, and add the pellets in the same vial, or seperate. [/quote]

I wouldn’t do it this way.

Before Raw Deal, you could buy kits that would remove the estrodiol from solution. It was an involved process, but it worked like a charm.

But - DEA said that the kits were drug paraphernalia and are now illegal.

My preferred method would be to make test no-ester.

13

Yea, I’ve taken the fina, but two guys I know thought that ratio of estradiol wouldn’t effect them, but they had to take letrozole for a good time to get rid of the estrogen sides.

That’s why I was saying if you can get test from another source. I should of said if you MUST have test and don’t have other sources for pure test, you can choose to go with the synovex.

But test no-ester, can you do this the same way of making fina? After fina, I’ve never looked into what other types you can make. I only heard of the prop from the guys I mentioned.

14

If what you mean is the possibility of using testosterone itself in an oil preparation, this does not work properly as the resulting half-life is extremely short. I don’t recall the specific but it’s something like an hour. This is why it is not done pharmaceutically, but instead a testosterone suspension is made. The limited dissolution rate of the particles is then the means of prolonging action.

Actually I’ve been thinking of making a little bit of Synovex preparation. The reason is that, having an unfortunate present lack of Dianabol and of HCG (true, the paper would be an option), trenbolone acetate alone results in abnormally low estrogen levels. The solubility of testosterone propionate in oil is about 100 mg/mL (----- EDIT: No, it is 50 mg/mL ----- ), whereas that of estradiol benzoate is only about 1 mg/mL (a rough figure.) So 1/2 mL per day would presumably put estradiol levels midnormal despite the TA. And midnormal is better than too low.

15

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
If what you mean is the possibility of using testosterone itself in an oil preparation, this does not work properly as the resulting half-life is extremely short. I don’t recall the specific but it’s something like an hour. This is why it is not done pharmaceutically, but instead a testosterone suspension is made. The limited dissolution rate of the particles is then the means of prolonging action.

Actually I’ve been thinking of making a little bit of Synovex preparation. The reason is that, having an unfortunate present lack of Dianabol and of HCG (true, the paper would be an option), trenbolone acetate alone results in abnormally low estrogen levels. The solubility of testosterone propionate in oil is about 100 mg/mL, whereas that of estradiol benzoate is only about 1 mg/mL (a rough figure.) So 1/2 mL per day would presumably put estradiol levels midnormal despite the TA. And midnormal is better than too low.[/quote]

Test suspension was what I was referring to.

I just don’t think it is a smart idea to be taking estradiol - especially at 10% of testosterone which is the ratio I came up with (200mg test prop/20mg estradiol benzoate).

I think the safest way, currently, to convert pellets is to make a test suspension, and inject twice a day.

16

It would be 10 to 1 if using enough material to dissolve all the EB, but if using only enough to just barely dissolve the TP, then it is somewhere around 100 to 1.

Anyway, agreed, except for a specialized purpose such as wanting to take a very lose specifically to normalize otherwise abnormally low T, I would not use a method like this.

17

Bill,

You heat the BB and pellets until dissolved. Is this the point where heat is removed, or is it removed after the Wesson oil is added? When you say it is best to start the process a 2-4 weeks out, do you mean thats the amount of time the solution should be allowed to settle?

18

Yes, the mixture of BB and the pellets is kept warmed until the pellets are dissolved. No heat is needed as the oil is added.

Allowing 2-4 weeks for settling is preferable because then the sediment will be pretty much a hard-pack and it is easy to pour off product without any suspension of sediment and it filters more easily. But if in a rush, a day will work, but there will be some suspended sediment – caught by the filter, so no problem with the end product – and so the filter will clog a lot faster.

19

Got it, thanks. Is there any merit to using a .22 micron filter instead of a .45? Or will this just clog too easily?

20

[quote]WilliamH.Bonney wrote:
Got it, thanks. Is there any merit to using a .22 micron filter instead of a .45? Or will this just clog too easily?[/quote]

That’s a personal choice. I use a .22 with all my homebrew concoctions except when converting pellets. it just clogs too fast, and is very hard to push with the sediment.

No matter what you do, or how long you let it set - you are going to get binder sediment. It’s just like going to the beach: You will get sand in something.