Refurbishing A Working But Real Old Nasty 510 Cartomizer pt 1 of 5

Mark Linehan;2100720 said:

Okay, this is sort of a long one. Well, it has a lot of pictures to it. It is actually not as difficult as some might think, and it might even appear. The main thing you need to really concentrate on with this, is taking your time, paying attention to things and being careful! If you want to try and blow through this rebuild/refurb then you should not attempt it. If you are not methodical and patient, you WILL destroy the cartomizer.

Now this is a 510 refillable carto from madvapes. I think the brand is BogeTech. So I don't know if this process works with other brands or models. I have done this three times with this brand though, and only screwed up on the first one. I will explain about that one at a later point in this tutorial. I hope I can post enough of these images for this tutorial. There are 33 of them.

BEGIN
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Take a disconnected 510/ego battery connector (or other threaded thing to screw carto into that you don't care about) and take your beat up nasty old 510 cartomizer that still works but is gross, or if you have nichrome wire and can solder well, then take your carto that is broken and you can use this tutorial as a how-to repair these as well.
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Grab the battery connector with pliers, and the cartomizer tube with smaller pliers just above the connection point. You are going to bend the pliers' as if you were trying to snap the cartomizer in two. You can use quite a bit of force here, I have never had one come apart easily. Most likely the cartomizer is not going to come apart at this point. I end up heating up my beat up soldering iron that gets hot but is so old and oxidizes it is frightening.
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Use the hot iron to slowly move around the carto in circles just at the bottom of the carto where the connector is. Move the iron smoothly and slowly, and heat it for about 4 or 5 minutes depending on how hot or old your soldering iron is. Note, if this is a nice clean iron, use your dremel cleaning bit to zip the paint/tape/sticker off of the cartomizer or it will do nasty things to your soldering iron.
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Once it is hot enough, resume the breaking motion with the pliers' and now with enough pressure and perseverance, you should start to see the grooved inside of the connector showing a little bit. Work this until about an 1/8 inch is showing or so, and then switch to your fingers (if it is cool by now silly). Don' worry if you pop the carto tube off with the pliers, it will most likely be fine still.
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Now you will see the filler material which is wrapped around the center of the carto in a nice tight tube shape. This is kind of tricky here, but you want to start picking gently at the material until you can start unpeeling this filler, it is a long wide but flat strip of this material. Unwind this completely from the cartomizer.

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