The Syringe Method of filling cartomizers, declare its proponents, is superior to the Condom Method, first and foremost because it wastes less juice.
It's more labor and equipment-intensive than the Condom Method, and comes with a steeper learning curve, but once we find our One True juice, our happy-go-splashy attitude toward things like those little drops that spill over the top of the condom when we don't get the level of juice and pushing action just right is going to do a sudden 180.
For people with our varied laundry list of limitations and diminished capacities, the best way for us to employ the Syringe Method is to have a loved one watch the youtube videos and do it for us.
But as noted in the discussion of the Condom Method, life has a habit of happening, usually when it's most inconvenient.
Whether our loved ones are, at any given moment, available and able to help us is subject to a myriad of variables.
Our need for filled cartomizers, however, is not.
Instead of visualizing a selection grim scenarios that end up with us reproaching ourselves for not having equipped ourselves with the basics of the Syringe Method when we had the time and Practice Juice to do it with, let's just accept that it behooves us all to acquire a rudimentary level of competency and glide directly to
Step One - Shopping!
While the only equipment needed for Condom Method consists of something to serve as a hat remover, which can be any number of things, one of which everybody will have around the house, lawu, or yurt, and condoms, which come with most cartomizers, the Syringe Method comes with the eponymous requirement of syringes (the part that isn't a needle) and needles (the part that is).
Even if we think we have those around the house, we don't. Scroll down and find out why** if you like, but first we need to send off for some.
The affable operatives of the One Stop DIY Shop will send us syringes with blunt needles - nice fat ones, exactly the kind we need!
They've made it super-easy, too. All you have to do is click here.
Pick "3 ml" for the syringe. Whether you pick 14 or 16 for the needle size doesn't matter.
We don't need many. Get one for each flavor of juice you plan to practice with (I'd suggest no more than 3) and a few to put away for your Unscheduled Zombie Attack & Other Grim Scenario Preparedness Kit.
(One Stop DIY Shop is a Forum Supplier. If you've been doing your Required Reading, you know that means they're a reputable and legitimate merchant that you may click with confidence).
Step Two - Prepare!
While you wait for your syringes to arrive, there are a number of informative and helpful treatises on the Syringe Method right here on the forum.
There are also a number of youtube videos, made by helpful and knowledgeable people, that you can download and watch as many times as you need to, just as we did with the Condom Method.
Read them all, and watch them all. Neither I nor anyone else can predict which one(s) will be the one that makes sense to you.
Additional Bonus Exposition For The Curious
In the forums, you'll see lots of people talking about getting syringes and needles from pharmacists, doctors, and crowing with delight over the rock-bottom prices for which they can be bought in bulk from veterinary supply houses.
But look closer and you'll see 2 ways that their path is not for us:
1) Those people are frequently talking about buying tiny little pointy needles to fill fancy newfangled yingtootums. Few pharmacies and veterinary supermarkets have needles with blunt ends, nor sufficient fatness for us.
2) Those people are allowed to hold and use sharp objects all the time, every day.
In addition, while it may be OK for some of us to have sharp things sometimes, as long as there's someone else around to make sure that it really is one of those times, we should probably reserve those precious, fleeting moments for things like slicing chiles or cutting nail art stickers.
** Even if you have a loved one who's one of those B12 junkies, or a Luddite diabetic who refuses to get a pen, the kind of syringes we need are different from the regular medical ones in 2 ways:
1) We need needles that are called "blunt." They don't have a point. They're just flat on the end.
Why do I keep repeating this?
Because while there is some discussion on this point (I know. go ahead and cringe) many people believe that a sharp pointy needle can hurt the fibers of the cheap Wal-Mart pillow stuffing inside the cartomizer, which can impact both performance and longevity.
2) The ones we need are much fatter than those used to inject medicine into people, or even most animals. That's because some juices have a high level of viscosity, and playing pushmepullyou with something that has the consistency of maple syrup would have a very low fun quotient and be unlikely to result in a mystical union between cartomizer and juice.
Commonly sold syringe needles come in sizes from 14 to around 25 or 26, with 14 being the fattest. As the size number goes up, the diameter of the needle gets smaller.
18 seems to be the most commonly used, but we're going to get size 14.
People who take to the art of creating juice usually end up with a variety of sizes, and one day, if you turn out to have a gift for l'art du jus, or should your eventual range of juice preferences so warrant, you, too can amass an entire wardrobe of needle sizes, but right now we're just going to send off for a few size 14 ones.
Those'll be fat enough to comfortably accommodate even the thickest and gooeyest of juices - like ones that have a generous dollop of caramel, or a higher percentage of vegetable glycerine, the thicker sister of the Humectant Dyad, with propylene glycol being the skinny......
The syringe itself - the plastic part that holds the liquid, with the little markings on it in microscopic writing - also comes in a variety of sizes.
Syringes are sized according to how much liquid they'll hold, with the most common being from 1 ml to about 10, but we're going to pick the 3 mil size, because:
1) While a cartomizer will only hold less than one ml, if we want to fill more than one with the same flavor, the 3 ml size will let us do that without having to go back and fill the syringe again.
2) If at some point you decide to get one of those new fancy KR808d-1s that use the fancy Gigante Leakomizers that make so many of our ECF brothers and sisters sob aloud, or even one of those outlandish non-KR808d-1s that are shaped like Barbie heads and rocket ships, many of which hold 3 ml or thereabouts, you'll be able to squirt it real good without having to go back and fill the syringe again.
Obviously Begged Questions
How many 3 ml syringes and size 14 needles should we ask the amiable juice nerds at the One Stop DIY Shop to send us?
How many flavors of juice do you want to practice with?
Achieving basic Syringe Method competency does not mean that we are obliged to assign every single flavor of juice we have to the Syringe Method Practice detail.
I suggest choosing just one flavor, certainly no more than 3, just for the sake of minimizing effort.
The Syringe Method is already labor-intensive, there's no need to make it label-intensive as well, and the last thing we want to do is get into the business of washing our syringes and needles, and agonizing over whether we have gotten every little fleck of syrupy ooze out of the inside of a long tube we can't get in there and scrub if we wanted to, which, I repeat, we so don't.
In one of those ironies that you really have to be here to even begin to get, so for heaven's sake don't go off recounting it to your grandchildren with one side of your mouth pulled down in a wry twist, while the principal advantage of the Syringe Method is "less waste," the learning curve is virtually guaranteed to waste just as much, if not more juice, than the great quantities with which we've just soaked ourselves, our clothing and much of the surrounding upholstery practicing the Condom Method!
Why the One Stop DIY Shop?
1) Mine came from there, and I can personally testify that they sell very nice syringes and fat needles that work just fine.
Of course if you are an old internet shopping hand and a champion navigator of drop-down menus, and especially if you're buying other things from another store that sells syringes and fat blunt needles, you should get yours there.
Full Disclosure: I do not work for the One Stop DIY Shop, I will receive no benefit whatsoever if you buy yours there. They don't even know that any syringes purchased from them were given to me, and as far as I know, they are unaware of the existence of this blog, or of me.
Next: The Syringe Method: Arranging a Juice-Cartomizer Marriage
It's more labor and equipment-intensive than the Condom Method, and comes with a steeper learning curve, but once we find our One True juice, our happy-go-splashy attitude toward things like those little drops that spill over the top of the condom when we don't get the level of juice and pushing action just right is going to do a sudden 180.
For people with our varied laundry list of limitations and diminished capacities, the best way for us to employ the Syringe Method is to have a loved one watch the youtube videos and do it for us.
But as noted in the discussion of the Condom Method, life has a habit of happening, usually when it's most inconvenient.
Whether our loved ones are, at any given moment, available and able to help us is subject to a myriad of variables.
Our need for filled cartomizers, however, is not.
Instead of visualizing a selection grim scenarios that end up with us reproaching ourselves for not having equipped ourselves with the basics of the Syringe Method when we had the time and Practice Juice to do it with, let's just accept that it behooves us all to acquire a rudimentary level of competency and glide directly to
Step One - Shopping!
While the only equipment needed for Condom Method consists of something to serve as a hat remover, which can be any number of things, one of which everybody will have around the house, lawu, or yurt, and condoms, which come with most cartomizers, the Syringe Method comes with the eponymous requirement of syringes (the part that isn't a needle) and needles (the part that is).
Even if we think we have those around the house, we don't. Scroll down and find out why** if you like, but first we need to send off for some.
The affable operatives of the One Stop DIY Shop will send us syringes with blunt needles - nice fat ones, exactly the kind we need!
They've made it super-easy, too. All you have to do is click here.
Pick "3 ml" for the syringe. Whether you pick 14 or 16 for the needle size doesn't matter.
We don't need many. Get one for each flavor of juice you plan to practice with (I'd suggest no more than 3) and a few to put away for your Unscheduled Zombie Attack & Other Grim Scenario Preparedness Kit.
(One Stop DIY Shop is a Forum Supplier. If you've been doing your Required Reading, you know that means they're a reputable and legitimate merchant that you may click with confidence).
Step Two - Prepare!
While you wait for your syringes to arrive, there are a number of informative and helpful treatises on the Syringe Method right here on the forum.
There are also a number of youtube videos, made by helpful and knowledgeable people, that you can download and watch as many times as you need to, just as we did with the Condom Method.
Read them all, and watch them all. Neither I nor anyone else can predict which one(s) will be the one that makes sense to you.
Additional Bonus Exposition For The Curious
In the forums, you'll see lots of people talking about getting syringes and needles from pharmacists, doctors, and crowing with delight over the rock-bottom prices for which they can be bought in bulk from veterinary supply houses.
But look closer and you'll see 2 ways that their path is not for us:
1) Those people are frequently talking about buying tiny little pointy needles to fill fancy newfangled yingtootums. Few pharmacies and veterinary supermarkets have needles with blunt ends, nor sufficient fatness for us.
2) Those people are allowed to hold and use sharp objects all the time, every day.
In addition, while it may be OK for some of us to have sharp things sometimes, as long as there's someone else around to make sure that it really is one of those times, we should probably reserve those precious, fleeting moments for things like slicing chiles or cutting nail art stickers.
** Even if you have a loved one who's one of those B12 junkies, or a Luddite diabetic who refuses to get a pen, the kind of syringes we need are different from the regular medical ones in 2 ways:
1) We need needles that are called "blunt." They don't have a point. They're just flat on the end.
Why do I keep repeating this?
Because while there is some discussion on this point (I know. go ahead and cringe) many people believe that a sharp pointy needle can hurt the fibers of the cheap Wal-Mart pillow stuffing inside the cartomizer, which can impact both performance and longevity.
2) The ones we need are much fatter than those used to inject medicine into people, or even most animals. That's because some juices have a high level of viscosity, and playing pushmepullyou with something that has the consistency of maple syrup would have a very low fun quotient and be unlikely to result in a mystical union between cartomizer and juice.
Commonly sold syringe needles come in sizes from 14 to around 25 or 26, with 14 being the fattest. As the size number goes up, the diameter of the needle gets smaller.
18 seems to be the most commonly used, but we're going to get size 14.
People who take to the art of creating juice usually end up with a variety of sizes, and one day, if you turn out to have a gift for l'art du jus, or should your eventual range of juice preferences so warrant, you, too can amass an entire wardrobe of needle sizes, but right now we're just going to send off for a few size 14 ones.
Those'll be fat enough to comfortably accommodate even the thickest and gooeyest of juices - like ones that have a generous dollop of caramel, or a higher percentage of vegetable glycerine, the thicker sister of the Humectant Dyad, with propylene glycol being the skinny......
The syringe itself - the plastic part that holds the liquid, with the little markings on it in microscopic writing - also comes in a variety of sizes.
Syringes are sized according to how much liquid they'll hold, with the most common being from 1 ml to about 10, but we're going to pick the 3 mil size, because:
1) While a cartomizer will only hold less than one ml, if we want to fill more than one with the same flavor, the 3 ml size will let us do that without having to go back and fill the syringe again.
2) If at some point you decide to get one of those new fancy KR808d-1s that use the fancy Gigante Leakomizers that make so many of our ECF brothers and sisters sob aloud, or even one of those outlandish non-KR808d-1s that are shaped like Barbie heads and rocket ships, many of which hold 3 ml or thereabouts, you'll be able to squirt it real good without having to go back and fill the syringe again.
Obviously Begged Questions
How many 3 ml syringes and size 14 needles should we ask the amiable juice nerds at the One Stop DIY Shop to send us?
How many flavors of juice do you want to practice with?
Achieving basic Syringe Method competency does not mean that we are obliged to assign every single flavor of juice we have to the Syringe Method Practice detail.
I suggest choosing just one flavor, certainly no more than 3, just for the sake of minimizing effort.
The Syringe Method is already labor-intensive, there's no need to make it label-intensive as well, and the last thing we want to do is get into the business of washing our syringes and needles, and agonizing over whether we have gotten every little fleck of syrupy ooze out of the inside of a long tube we can't get in there and scrub if we wanted to, which, I repeat, we so don't.
In one of those ironies that you really have to be here to even begin to get, so for heaven's sake don't go off recounting it to your grandchildren with one side of your mouth pulled down in a wry twist, while the principal advantage of the Syringe Method is "less waste," the learning curve is virtually guaranteed to waste just as much, if not more juice, than the great quantities with which we've just soaked ourselves, our clothing and much of the surrounding upholstery practicing the Condom Method!
Why the One Stop DIY Shop?
1) Mine came from there, and I can personally testify that they sell very nice syringes and fat needles that work just fine.
Of course if you are an old internet shopping hand and a champion navigator of drop-down menus, and especially if you're buying other things from another store that sells syringes and fat blunt needles, you should get yours there.
Full Disclosure: I do not work for the One Stop DIY Shop, I will receive no benefit whatsoever if you buy yours there. They don't even know that any syringes purchased from them were given to me, and as far as I know, they are unaware of the existence of this blog, or of me.
Next: The Syringe Method: Arranging a Juice-Cartomizer Marriage
