Crazy newbie, crazy first dual coil!

[Mercster]

Hi all,

I'm proud, so I'm sharing this!

I've only been building for about 5 days. I picked up a TFV4 Mini, which comes with the TF-RCA "Rebuildable clapton coil deck". It's a funny little thing...I don't know why it's specific to clapton coils. It has 4 screws/posts or whatever, but the pre-installed clapton only uses two. I was told by a few people this is for "choice and flexibility". Not sure I understand, but oh well. It's tiny, but I saw four screws and thought, I'm gonna put two coils on that. So I did!

I used 25ga kanthal (all I have), 2mm ID, 7 wraps or so...I was aiming for 0.3ohms and ohm reader confirmed, but it's firing at 0.45ohms now...

I tried to get a shot of me firing it, but it's blurry. I did have to mess around quite a bit to both glow evenly.



Here's two more shots:

(Sorry if I'm screwing this up with the images.)

It even kinda works! It ramps up really slowly; I have to fire for 3 seconds or so and chain-vape to really get anything out of it. Wicking was challenging too...as you can see the coils aren't pointed in the right direction for the juice channels, so I just kinda curved the ends of the wicks back to reach the top of the channels.

I use Steam Engine to plan, it's pretty cool, but I still can't figure out how to get the low ohms with the wire I have. Like, does anyone actually ever do a 3-wrap coil? Or is that just ridiculous and I need thicker wire? Or thinner? God I'm bad at math.

Anyway, thanks for putting up with me, sorry again for the long post. If anyone has general hints or tips, I'd love to hear them. Imagine what I'll be able to do when I get a proper dual coil deck!

 

[MrDripper]

Did you heat squeeze your coils? That is the act of heating your coils to glowing and then squeezing the tight together with ceramic tipped tweezers. Avoid using metal if you can. If you can't, heat to glowing and just as you release the fire button, then squeeze.
I have done some 3 wrap coils and honestly, there's just no flavor there for me. Plenty of vapor and clouds all day but I'm becoming a flavor chaser and clouds are less and less important to me. My wraps usually sit from 5 to 7 with the occasional trip to 10 but don't usually have that much time to wait for them to heat up.
Anyway, keep building and Vape On!

 

[Mercster]

Did you heat squeeze your coils? That is the act of heating your coils to glowing and then squeezing the tight together with ceramic tipped tweezers. Avoid using metal if you can. If you can't, heat to glowing and just as you release the fire button, then squeeze.

Hey thanks for replying! Yes I did heat squeeze...don't have ceramic yet so I just made sure I wasn't firing when I did it.

I have done some 3 wrap coils and honestly, there's just no flavor there for me. Plenty of vapor and clouds all day but I'm becoming a flavor chaser and clouds are less and less important to me. My wraps usually sit from 5 to 7 with the occasional trip to 10 but don't usually have that much time to wait for them to heat up.
Anyway, keep building and Vape On!

OK cool, well I'll try it at least.

 

[Jdurand]

5 days of building and you attempted that....good for you! congrats, it pays to just try stuff so you know how and why some things work better than others. I've built plenty of coils that, even though they didn't work so good, they taught me a lot about my next builds. keep it up.

 

[edyle]

this is the first i've heard that the tfv4 might have a rebuildable head; suddenly I am now interested in the tfv4.

is the one on the left the rebuildable one?

 

[Mercster]

this is the first i've heard that the tfv4 might have a rebuildable head; suddenly I am now interested in the tfv4.

Hah, they already have 3 out...the TF-R1, single coil, the TF-R2, dual coil, and TF-RCA, clapton coil. Don't ask me why the RCA is for clapton coils, it's just a single coil deck with 4 screws (which i built dual coils on earlier today).

You can get the R1 and the R2 separately, but I don't think the RCA has come out as a seperate purchase yet (comes only with the TFV4 Mini).

 

[eddiea]

Hi all,

I'm proud, so I'm sharing this!

I've only been building for about 5 days. I picked up a TFV4 Mini, which comes with the TF-RCA "Rebuildable clapton coil deck". It's a funny little thing...I don't know why it's specific to clapton coils. It has 4 screws/posts or whatever, but the pre-installed clapton only uses two. I was told by a few people this is for "choice and flexibility". Not sure I understand, but oh well. It's tiny, but I saw four screws and thought, I'm gonna put two coils on that. So I did!

I used 25ga kanthal (all I have), 2mm ID, 7 wraps or so...I was aiming for 0.3ohms and ohm reader confirmed, but it's firing at 0.45ohms now...

View attachment 501896

I tried to get a shot of me firing it, but it's blurry. I did have to mess around quite a bit to both glow evenly.

View attachment 501897

Here's two more shots:
View attachment 501898
View attachment 501899

(Sorry if I'm screwing this up with the images.)

It even kinda works! It ramps up really slowly; I have to fire for 3 seconds or so and chain-vape to really get anything out of it. Wicking was challenging too...as you can see the coils aren't pointed in the right direction for the juice channels, so I just kinda curved the ends of the wicks back to reach the top of the channels.

I use Steam Engine to plan, it's pretty cool, but I still can't figure out how to get the low ohms with the wire I have. Like, does anyone actually ever do a 3-wrap coil? Or is that just ridiculous and I need thicker wire? Or thinner? God I'm bad at math.

Anyway, thanks for putting up with me, sorry again for the long post. If anyone has general hints or tips, I'd love to hear them. Imagine what I'll be able to do when I get a proper dual coil deck!

Try increasing the wattage if your ramp up time is slow.

Also, you might experience wicking issues (performance might suffer) with that build because of the position of the coils and because you're putting both ends of one wick into one juice channel which might not be optimal. You could however try trimming one end of each wick short and keep the other end long so you could place only the long end into the juice channel. If your wire options are limited and you have only 25g to work with (and want to try a build which offers more surface area than a standard coil), I would try a single coil twisted build and place the coil in the proper position.

You'll find your perfect build soon.