As I see it, this puzzle clamors to be solved in 1/6P.  Two fires yield one vitae, and you need three vitae to complete the product. 2x3=6 loops, QED.

My first solve with this recipe required 62i.  One of the trickiest and most expensive parts of the algorithm was producing quicksilver and silver on alternating loops.  The first round of improvements did this with a pair of busy simple arms arranged around a small hexarm in the center of the right chamber, clocking in at 56i.

The next big breakthrough was using a long hexarm on the right instead of a small one; a trick I've seen used to great effect by others in a handful of cases (shoutout to mr_puzzel in Brazing Cathode).  And wouldn't you know it--that immediately dropped the instruction count to 50.  Chalk up another win for the big wheel!

I was fairly happy with that, but there is another question that must always be asked in any I solve: What if we reduce the tape fraction and make the machine slower?

Feeding the purifier didn't work at 1/12P, but swapping the purifying hexarm for a magic-biarm offered a chance at 1/18P.  And once again, that random spaghetti stuck firmly to the wall. This pace allowed the metal-quicksilver swapping logic to operate with a single 3i biarm, and opened up space in the left chamber hexarm so that the mors arm could hand off instead of regrabbing to output by itself. That massively improved the machine to 44i.

For a long time I was stuck with an assembly chamber constructing 3-sticks at 21I, which really bothered me.  Nearly half the metric spent in one chamber? 
 Yuck!  My big breakthrough there came from swapping to elbow construction and squeezing in a third bonder.  That eliminated a drop-grab conditional and the need for the output arm to reset, operating at 16i and yielding the 39i machine you see here.

I do suspect that something around 34i could be possible, because this solve has a pretty-significant 7 instructions with empty grippers. But sub-40 is a very pleasing milestone nonetheless, so I don't mind being surpassed by wizardy.
