Questions on resin, yo!

The way I do it is this:

Put your piece in a cup that it can fit within without sticking out of the top, fill the cup with water, and microwave until boiling. Keep a really close eye on the cup and take it out as soon as it starts bubbling. Then CAREFULLY remove the pipe (with tongs or potholder) and set it onto a paper towel. You can even put the water from the cup through a coffee filter to get a little extra out. But if you take the cup out of the microwave RIGHT when it starts bubbling, it will loosen the resin in the pipe but not break a lot off into the water. Anyway, the tool that I use is a hairpin broken in half so that you have a nice little hook at the end. The hot water will have loosened up the resin from your pipe so you should be able to scrape it off. Only AFTER you've scraped off enough resin to be satisfied should you use a cleaning solution as these will just remove the resin without giving you anything left to smoke. What I do if I have a lot of resin but still have weed on hand is put the resin between two pieces of wax paper for safe keeping until I am out of bud and am desperate. If you have a good supply for a long time, you can keep building up this ball and then when you run out, you'll be able to get high for up to a week on the shit. (That is if you keep the resin to yourself. A lot of people don't like smoking rez anyway so sharing the shit isn't usually an issue with me.)