(Disclosure: The good folks at Elegomall sent me this for a test drive and a write-up. FWIW, you are getting my unvarnished appraisal.)
I recently acquired a Serpent SMM tank. I was prepared not to like it as it does not appear to be intended for my normal style of vape. It's a single coil design, where I am a dyed-in-the-wool dualie man. I generally prefer large capacity tanks when I choose a tank over an RDA or RDTA; this is 4ml. More fool me, actually: the topper is a collaboration between Wotofo and Suck My Mod, both of whom are famous for quality gear. This tank is no exception. (Plus my apologies for the sometimes-blurry photos accompanying. Apparently I have not yet mastered the macro mode on my new camera and, of course, your humble correspondent (the idiot) didn't notice this until after the tank was built and filled.)
For those who don't want to read all this, my conclusions first. I like it. A lot. It is not, IMHO, a full-blown cloud machine. Full open, I would estimate it breathes about as well as a Boreas RTA or a V4 Velocity RDA with the air closed half way. That's not to say it won't handle power. I've had it to 125 watts for as long as my lungs would stand it (I'm a 40 watt vaper) and could not dry hit it. It is very flavorful, something I should have expected given Wotofo's Sapor is my go-to RDA for flavor. It has a very nice airflow design and should be near impossible to make it leak. So far, I haven't gotten a single drop out of mine, even the time I forgot to close the air and invert when filling. The air also closes down nicely, and it should be a very good big flavor MTL tank as well, albeit I have not yet built it so. If you like the idea of a big-flavor tank up in the 10 to (at least) 100 watt range, you want one of these. If you are a fancy-wire, big single coil type, you need one of these. I have seen it online in the sub-$40 range, and I think it worth the money.
The tank is a fairly conventional air-over-vacuum, bottom coil design, not counting the airflow system. It measures 24mm in diameter by 31mm tall. It is top fill, and the manufacturer recommends closing off the air and inverting when filling to prevent leakage. The build deck is spacious and easy to use, but it is designed as a single coil machine. It would be possible to squeeze dualies in there, I think, but it wouldn't be easy and they'd have to be small internal diameter. Hhhmmm... perhaps a vertical double barrel shotgun set... Aaahhh... another project.
In the box you will find the tank itself, not one but two spare glasses (kudos!), a Little Blue Screwdriver (actually, mine is black and of conspicuously better quality than the standard, another Wotofo tradition), O's and screws, three coils of different but untested values and sizes all wrapped in Alien wire, a strip of cotton (I'd actually guess rayon, it looks like a piece cut off a rope), a manual and a contest entry form for a Wotofo T-shirt. I found myself particularly amused by the “contains nicotine” warning prominent on the front since, obviously, a new atty has nothing in it but air and maybe some machine oil residue.
And here is the little darling assembled. Barely visible in the photo is the engraving on the barrel, reading “Serpent SMM” on one side and with the slanted SMM logo on the other:
The pieces of the tank, clockwise from upper left, drip tip, top cap, barrel and tank glass assembly and base with deck:
The airflow is interesting: the air inlets are in the inward facing sides of the towers, making it just about perfect for a single coil set between them, see arrow in the below photo. It also means you'll have to just about have to fill up the vape chamber inside the barrel to make it leak. That's a super-neat design element.
The towers each have a generous wire slot cut on both sides, measuring 1.7mm tall. If that means nothing to you, trust me when I tell you you can put some big wire in there. No need to thread the ends of the wires through holes; they lay in neatly from the sides, meaning you can leave the tails long and clip them later, making the deck much easier than normal to build. The fact there are four slots also means you can wind your coil clockwise or counter clockwise, plus install either type legs down or up, just by choosing the set of slots appropriate for the task.
I then got down to building it. I happened to have some ROFVapes alien wire in Kanthal A1 laying around (.3 x .8 ribbon Claptoned with 32ga round) which I hadn't used in forever plus three days, having been converted to Stainless back along. So I whipped it out and wrapped a 5 full turn spaced coil on a 3.5mm mandrel, which is the largest I had handy. The coil calculated to .475 in Steam Engine, measured .482 and the mod thinks it is a .44 ohm coil. The literature says it will take a 4mm diameter coil, and it might, see the following two photos:
I popped it atop the Predator, set for 50 watts, and got a burn slightly cooler than a furnace:
Wicking the machine is child's play. Pull the cotton (rayon!) through the coil and trim the mustaches slightly wider than the base:
Then stuff the tails down in the deck holes using any convenient implement:
(Out of photo space, continued)
I recently acquired a Serpent SMM tank. I was prepared not to like it as it does not appear to be intended for my normal style of vape. It's a single coil design, where I am a dyed-in-the-wool dualie man. I generally prefer large capacity tanks when I choose a tank over an RDA or RDTA; this is 4ml. More fool me, actually: the topper is a collaboration between Wotofo and Suck My Mod, both of whom are famous for quality gear. This tank is no exception. (Plus my apologies for the sometimes-blurry photos accompanying. Apparently I have not yet mastered the macro mode on my new camera and, of course, your humble correspondent (the idiot) didn't notice this until after the tank was built and filled.)
For those who don't want to read all this, my conclusions first. I like it. A lot. It is not, IMHO, a full-blown cloud machine. Full open, I would estimate it breathes about as well as a Boreas RTA or a V4 Velocity RDA with the air closed half way. That's not to say it won't handle power. I've had it to 125 watts for as long as my lungs would stand it (I'm a 40 watt vaper) and could not dry hit it. It is very flavorful, something I should have expected given Wotofo's Sapor is my go-to RDA for flavor. It has a very nice airflow design and should be near impossible to make it leak. So far, I haven't gotten a single drop out of mine, even the time I forgot to close the air and invert when filling. The air also closes down nicely, and it should be a very good big flavor MTL tank as well, albeit I have not yet built it so. If you like the idea of a big-flavor tank up in the 10 to (at least) 100 watt range, you want one of these. If you are a fancy-wire, big single coil type, you need one of these. I have seen it online in the sub-$40 range, and I think it worth the money.
The tank is a fairly conventional air-over-vacuum, bottom coil design, not counting the airflow system. It measures 24mm in diameter by 31mm tall. It is top fill, and the manufacturer recommends closing off the air and inverting when filling to prevent leakage. The build deck is spacious and easy to use, but it is designed as a single coil machine. It would be possible to squeeze dualies in there, I think, but it wouldn't be easy and they'd have to be small internal diameter. Hhhmmm... perhaps a vertical double barrel shotgun set... Aaahhh... another project.
In the box you will find the tank itself, not one but two spare glasses (kudos!), a Little Blue Screwdriver (actually, mine is black and of conspicuously better quality than the standard, another Wotofo tradition), O's and screws, three coils of different but untested values and sizes all wrapped in Alien wire, a strip of cotton (I'd actually guess rayon, it looks like a piece cut off a rope), a manual and a contest entry form for a Wotofo T-shirt. I found myself particularly amused by the “contains nicotine” warning prominent on the front since, obviously, a new atty has nothing in it but air and maybe some machine oil residue.
And here is the little darling assembled. Barely visible in the photo is the engraving on the barrel, reading “Serpent SMM” on one side and with the slanted SMM logo on the other:
The pieces of the tank, clockwise from upper left, drip tip, top cap, barrel and tank glass assembly and base with deck:
The airflow is interesting: the air inlets are in the inward facing sides of the towers, making it just about perfect for a single coil set between them, see arrow in the below photo. It also means you'll have to just about have to fill up the vape chamber inside the barrel to make it leak. That's a super-neat design element.
The towers each have a generous wire slot cut on both sides, measuring 1.7mm tall. If that means nothing to you, trust me when I tell you you can put some big wire in there. No need to thread the ends of the wires through holes; they lay in neatly from the sides, meaning you can leave the tails long and clip them later, making the deck much easier than normal to build. The fact there are four slots also means you can wind your coil clockwise or counter clockwise, plus install either type legs down or up, just by choosing the set of slots appropriate for the task.
I then got down to building it. I happened to have some ROFVapes alien wire in Kanthal A1 laying around (.3 x .8 ribbon Claptoned with 32ga round) which I hadn't used in forever plus three days, having been converted to Stainless back along. So I whipped it out and wrapped a 5 full turn spaced coil on a 3.5mm mandrel, which is the largest I had handy. The coil calculated to .475 in Steam Engine, measured .482 and the mod thinks it is a .44 ohm coil. The literature says it will take a 4mm diameter coil, and it might, see the following two photos:
I popped it atop the Predator, set for 50 watts, and got a burn slightly cooler than a furnace:
Wicking the machine is child's play. Pull the cotton (rayon!) through the coil and trim the mustaches slightly wider than the base:
Then stuff the tails down in the deck holes using any convenient implement:
(Out of photo space, continued)
