Brief Equipment Review
I'm using the "KR808d-1" kind of e-cigarettes, both wireless and electric hookah-doodle. Each of those is available in both pushybutton and pick-up-n'-puff styles. The same cartomizers (little cylinders that hold the stuff we inhale) screw into all of them.
If you're using something different, you'll want to ask questions of people who know about your specific e-cigarette, but much of your preparation for Intermediate Class will be the same as mine.
Each cartomizer has stuffing in it, kind the insides of those $5 Wal-Mart pillows that go flat in a week. The stuffing is wrapped around scientific machinery that heats up when we puff.
At the factory, specially trained professionals saturate the stuffing with juice.
After we notsmoke it for a while, we use up the juice in the cartomizer. We can throw it away - or we can put more juice in it, even though we are not specially trained professionals!
Refilling cartomizers can not only save you money, it exponentially increases our flavor options.
While prefilled cartomizers are available in dozens of flavors, there are thousands of flavors of juice, with more being created every day.
Even if you plan to use pre-filled cartomizers most or all of the time, this is a useful skill for you or a loved one to have, and a rainy day may come when having it means the difference in having something you like - or even something at all - in your electric hookah-doodle.
Organization
I know. Multi-cultural site, watch the language. While it's certainly not the kind of behavior I engage in, we're going to have to do just a smoosh of organizing to get ready for the Intermediate class.
If you've been saving your used-up cartomizers, as well as the little plastic end caps (and if they have them, things that look like a tiny push-pin) - good! If not, start now.
You've already learned that no matter what the some companies may say in their ads, a cartomizer so does NOT equal a pack of cigarettes.
For once, being a heavy smoker, and thus a heavy notsmoker, is an advantage - you'll have a nice little heap of spent cartomizers and translucent plastic ends and near-microscopic push-pin things cluttering up your immediate vicinity in no time!
I keep mine in baggies, one labeled "NEEDS JUICE," and one labeled "MAYBE."
The plastic end caps and the little pushpin things that you can't see without magnifying lenses go in their own baggie, which I don't bother labeling.
How Juice Gets Into Cartomizers
In e-cigarette nerd language, the white end caps are called "condoms," and the push-pins are called ".... plugs."
You'll hear those terms used a lot in the Instructional youtube Videos,
which are Required Prerequisite Viewing for the Intermediate Class, so we're going to suspend our assorted generational overdeveloped sense of delicacy and cultural baggage and save our blushes for more interesting situations.
If you have Windows on your computer, you'll have noticed that there's usually more than one way to do just about anything.
There's more than one way to get more juice into a cartomizer, too, but the method that's most likely to be a good fit with our shaky hands, vestigial vision and pill-induced loopiness is called the "condom method," because it uses those plastic end caps, or "condoms."
In addition to the youtube videos, several squillion knowledgeable people here have been kind enough to post step-by-step instructions, in varying degrees of detail, so if you do better with words than images, your ECF brothers and sisters have your back.
Here's how the "condom method" works so you can get started visualizing yourself doing it - or begin interviewing loved ones for the position of Official Cartomizer-Juice Marriage Officiant, if the tasks involved are not a good fit for your various ailments, some or all of the time.
Look at and/or touch the end of the cartomizer you puff. It's white plastic, and it has a little hole the vapor uses to travel from the e-cigarette to your mouth.
That little white plastic end comes off. You'll read all kinds of things about people taking apart those big bulldog clip things, and unbending regular paper clips, climbing up on stepladders and messing up their window treatments by removing drapery hooks. I can't explain that.
What I can tell you is that you can get the little white plastic ends off your cartomizers with a crochet hook, or one of those little NerdDrivers we all have sets of, in little plastic boxes from the dollar store, even if we haven't taken the skins off our towers, much less unscrewed anything inside there, in years, if ever. You can use a fish fork, a nutpick, an Old School hairpin, or a bobby pin.
All we're talking about doing is sticking something into the little hole and gently pushing up, moving over a little bit and pushing up again, until the thing pops off. (And get your mind out of the gutter. For shame! You're a elder now, you're supposed to be able to think about other things occasionally by now, and this is an occasion.)
Once it's off, set it aside and remember where you put it, because we're going to put it back once our cartomizer is re-juiced.
I'm not going to insult your common sense by telling you to do this in one of your good windows, if any of your windows can be described as "good" with regard to use of sharp objects, even small ones.
If you're too blind, shaky or loopy to be able to safely go poking crochet needles into little holes in white plastic things, this will hardly be astonishing news to your loved ones. One of them will be more than happy to remove them for you, and set them someplace.
Some cartomizers won't even require all that. You can just lift them off with your fingernail.
Next we'll be filling one of the little condoms about halfway with juice, and holding our cartomizer with the now-capless puffing end up, we'll push one of our used-up cartomizers down into the condom.
With colored juices, if we use magnifying lenses and a magnifying mirror, some of us may be even be able to watch as the stuffing around the scientific machinery slowly becomes wet.
This is because pushing the cartomizer down into the condom will invoke a Science Spirit, which will cause the juice to relocate itself from the condom to the cartomizer's stuffing.
Identification
Unless we refill a cartomizer with the exact same juice it came with, we'll need a way to identify just what's in it.
If you'll be using Braille labels, one of those labeling machines is your best bet.
If you can see colors, or magnified letters, you can use sticky labels, or scraps of paper, or sharpie markers.
Whatever you use, you'll need to cover it with scotch tape, because the juice will dissolve sharpie ink, even gold leaf pen.
I apologize for using the O word again, but it's a good idea to go ahead and put these things in a baggie:
NerdDriver, crochet hook, or fish fork for removing the little white caps
Scotch tape
Small scissors
Markers or colored pens
Sticky labels or scraps of paper
Put that baggie in a shoebox with your "NEEDS JUICE", "MAYBE" and condom and buttplug baggies, and when it's time to move up to the Intermediate Class, you'll be all ready!
NEXT: Can This Cartomizer Be Saved?
I'm using the "KR808d-1" kind of e-cigarettes, both wireless and electric hookah-doodle. Each of those is available in both pushybutton and pick-up-n'-puff styles. The same cartomizers (little cylinders that hold the stuff we inhale) screw into all of them.
If you're using something different, you'll want to ask questions of people who know about your specific e-cigarette, but much of your preparation for Intermediate Class will be the same as mine.
Each cartomizer has stuffing in it, kind the insides of those $5 Wal-Mart pillows that go flat in a week. The stuffing is wrapped around scientific machinery that heats up when we puff.
At the factory, specially trained professionals saturate the stuffing with juice.
After we notsmoke it for a while, we use up the juice in the cartomizer. We can throw it away - or we can put more juice in it, even though we are not specially trained professionals!
Refilling cartomizers can not only save you money, it exponentially increases our flavor options.
While prefilled cartomizers are available in dozens of flavors, there are thousands of flavors of juice, with more being created every day.
Even if you plan to use pre-filled cartomizers most or all of the time, this is a useful skill for you or a loved one to have, and a rainy day may come when having it means the difference in having something you like - or even something at all - in your electric hookah-doodle.
Organization
I know. Multi-cultural site, watch the language. While it's certainly not the kind of behavior I engage in, we're going to have to do just a smoosh of organizing to get ready for the Intermediate class.
If you've been saving your used-up cartomizers, as well as the little plastic end caps (and if they have them, things that look like a tiny push-pin) - good! If not, start now.
You've already learned that no matter what the some companies may say in their ads, a cartomizer so does NOT equal a pack of cigarettes.
For once, being a heavy smoker, and thus a heavy notsmoker, is an advantage - you'll have a nice little heap of spent cartomizers and translucent plastic ends and near-microscopic push-pin things cluttering up your immediate vicinity in no time!
I keep mine in baggies, one labeled "NEEDS JUICE," and one labeled "MAYBE."
The plastic end caps and the little pushpin things that you can't see without magnifying lenses go in their own baggie, which I don't bother labeling.
How Juice Gets Into Cartomizers
In e-cigarette nerd language, the white end caps are called "condoms," and the push-pins are called ".... plugs."
You'll hear those terms used a lot in the Instructional youtube Videos,
which are Required Prerequisite Viewing for the Intermediate Class, so we're going to suspend our assorted generational overdeveloped sense of delicacy and cultural baggage and save our blushes for more interesting situations.
If you have Windows on your computer, you'll have noticed that there's usually more than one way to do just about anything.
There's more than one way to get more juice into a cartomizer, too, but the method that's most likely to be a good fit with our shaky hands, vestigial vision and pill-induced loopiness is called the "condom method," because it uses those plastic end caps, or "condoms."
In addition to the youtube videos, several squillion knowledgeable people here have been kind enough to post step-by-step instructions, in varying degrees of detail, so if you do better with words than images, your ECF brothers and sisters have your back.
Here's how the "condom method" works so you can get started visualizing yourself doing it - or begin interviewing loved ones for the position of Official Cartomizer-Juice Marriage Officiant, if the tasks involved are not a good fit for your various ailments, some or all of the time.
Look at and/or touch the end of the cartomizer you puff. It's white plastic, and it has a little hole the vapor uses to travel from the e-cigarette to your mouth.
That little white plastic end comes off. You'll read all kinds of things about people taking apart those big bulldog clip things, and unbending regular paper clips, climbing up on stepladders and messing up their window treatments by removing drapery hooks. I can't explain that.
What I can tell you is that you can get the little white plastic ends off your cartomizers with a crochet hook, or one of those little NerdDrivers we all have sets of, in little plastic boxes from the dollar store, even if we haven't taken the skins off our towers, much less unscrewed anything inside there, in years, if ever. You can use a fish fork, a nutpick, an Old School hairpin, or a bobby pin.
All we're talking about doing is sticking something into the little hole and gently pushing up, moving over a little bit and pushing up again, until the thing pops off. (And get your mind out of the gutter. For shame! You're a elder now, you're supposed to be able to think about other things occasionally by now, and this is an occasion.)
Once it's off, set it aside and remember where you put it, because we're going to put it back once our cartomizer is re-juiced.
I'm not going to insult your common sense by telling you to do this in one of your good windows, if any of your windows can be described as "good" with regard to use of sharp objects, even small ones.
If you're too blind, shaky or loopy to be able to safely go poking crochet needles into little holes in white plastic things, this will hardly be astonishing news to your loved ones. One of them will be more than happy to remove them for you, and set them someplace.
Some cartomizers won't even require all that. You can just lift them off with your fingernail.
Next we'll be filling one of the little condoms about halfway with juice, and holding our cartomizer with the now-capless puffing end up, we'll push one of our used-up cartomizers down into the condom.
With colored juices, if we use magnifying lenses and a magnifying mirror, some of us may be even be able to watch as the stuffing around the scientific machinery slowly becomes wet.
This is because pushing the cartomizer down into the condom will invoke a Science Spirit, which will cause the juice to relocate itself from the condom to the cartomizer's stuffing.
Identification
Unless we refill a cartomizer with the exact same juice it came with, we'll need a way to identify just what's in it.
If you'll be using Braille labels, one of those labeling machines is your best bet.
If you can see colors, or magnified letters, you can use sticky labels, or scraps of paper, or sharpie markers.
Whatever you use, you'll need to cover it with scotch tape, because the juice will dissolve sharpie ink, even gold leaf pen.
I apologize for using the O word again, but it's a good idea to go ahead and put these things in a baggie:
NerdDriver, crochet hook, or fish fork for removing the little white caps
Scotch tape
Small scissors
Markers or colored pens
Sticky labels or scraps of paper
Put that baggie in a shoebox with your "NEEDS JUICE", "MAYBE" and condom and buttplug baggies, and when it's time to move up to the Intermediate Class, you'll be all ready!
NEXT: Can This Cartomizer Be Saved?
