TC beyond Ni200: Nickel Purity, Dicodes; Ti, SS, Resistherm NiFe30; Coefficient of Resistance

[druckle]

Any USA source links to share? How is the malleability/workability of 52? Is it dryburnable?

I'm just beginning a search on sources for Alloy 52 wire but an interesting thing that came up in search is that Alloy 52 strings are apparently popular for guitar strings.

La Bella Electric Guitar Super Alloy 52, .010 - .046, SA1046

It appears that a set of strings can be acquired including the wrapped strings. Wouldn't that be a hoot. Beautiful prewrapped "claptons" for beautiful vaping or beautiful music. Just choose one from column A or one from column B.

Duane

 

[TheBloke]

Hahaha awesome!

But yeah, if it's already used for something else that could be really useful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time vaping has piggy backed off of other hobbies/industries/technologies, and it won't be the last

I am sure that Alloy 52 can be easily bought from ResistanceWire.com, but it will have the same issue as Alloy 120 - you need to spend $50 which means getting 900 foot, and for non-US customers the total cost will be $100 or more including shipping.

 

[cigatron]

I'll bet the low f note string from a 92 key piano would make a monster clapton.....whoohooo

 

[druckle]

Hahaha awesome!

But yeah, if it's already used for something else that could be really useful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time vaping has piggy backed off of other hobbies/industries/technologies, and it won't be the last

I am sure that Alloy 52 can be easily bought from ResistanceWire.com, but it will have the same issue as Alloy 120 - you need to spend $50 which means getting 900 foot, and for non-US customers the total cost will be $100 or more including shipping.

There appear to be a LOT of brands of Alloy 52 guitar strings and a LOT of suppliers. I have no idea yet if any of that could be useful but I'll bet that one could find sources for any single string so it wouldn't be necessary to buy a whole set if there is a string that would be useful for us. Prices for a full set appear to start at about $3.00

I'm no musician so I don't know beans about the dimensions of standard guitar strings. I did make a guitar once out of Brazilian Rosewood/Spruce/Ebony when I was in college even though I couldn't play a lick. I gave it to my cousin who eventually sold it. He told me it was surprisingly good and he got quite a bit of money for it. (He also wouldn't share even a penny of the loot with me). I did it just because I was curious how it was done. Kids can be really stupid. Old vapers aren't too far behind.

Duane

 

[TheBloke]

Wow, you must be great with woodwork to be able to make a guitar that both looks and sounds good!

After that you should have made a big stick to beat the cousin with

 

[cigatron]

There appear to be a LOT of brands of Alloy 52 guitar strings and a LOT of suppliers. I have no idea yet if any of that could be useful but I'll bet that one could find sources for any single string so it wouldn't be necessary to buy a whole set if there is a string that would be useful for us. Prices for a full set appear to start at about $3.00

I'm no musician so I don't know beans about the dimensions of standard guitar strings. I did make a guitar once out of Brazilian Rosewood/Spruce/Ebony when I was in college even though I couldn't play a lick. I gave it to my cousin who eventually sold it. He told me it was surprisingly good and he got quite a bit of money for it. (He also wouldn't share even a penny of the loot with me). I did it just because I was curious how it was done. Kids can be really stupid. Old vapers aren't too far behind.

Duane

My brother is a guitar luthier by trade and a pro lead guitarist in his spare time, lol, I'll ask him.

 

[druckle]

Wow, you must be great with woodwork to be able to make a guitar that both looks and sounds good!

After that you should have made a big stick to beat the cousin with

My Granddad had a huge wood shop to feed his hobby and I grew up "helping" him. Great Planers and all the fixings so I just read a lot of books. Attacked his suppliers of exotic wood and started doing it. I have always wished I kept that thing and learned to play it.

Duane

 

[TheBloke]

Made my first NiFe30 coil. Or is it called NiFe70? Why two names? Isn't it complicated enough already? Thomas @ ZiVipf calls it NiFe30, so does this mean that he hasn't bought Kanthal NiFe70 - in which case our assumption on TCRs etc might not be exact? Or maybe he called it NiFe30 to match Resistherm NiFe30 which is what (some) vapers are already familiar with.

@funkyrudi do you happen to know the exact brand of wire that Thomas has stocked, whether it's definitely Kanthal NiFe70?

Anyway, coil! I twisted it, 2x29, exactly as I did with Resistherm. The twisting went a bit wrong, something that happens sometimes and I'm not sure why. I suck at twisting, I don't know what I'm doing wrong - I can never get it to stay on the drill, it always falls off the moment I start turning. This time I had to double wrap it around about three times, and even then it came off until I held it on the allen key with some blu tack!

This is how the wire looks - you can hopefully see what I mean about not being fully twisted? Instead of tight wraps, it has flat areas. I guess the problem is it's simply not twisted enough, and that it broke off too early before it had properly twisted. I'm not sure what I did wrong to achieve that. I shall have to try again. It still fires and vapes OK.



Right. Coil. In my new second Aqua SE on the Dicodes:



0.22Ω, 9 wraps of 2x0.28mm (29G), around 3.0mm ID coiling rod which resulted in a 3.25mm ID coil, a spring factor of 8.3% - identical to my best Titanium result, but as this is twisted wire that's a good result. (Though I tested the raw 29G wire and it came to 3.2mm, 6.6%, only slightly better than Stealth Vape, the least springy Titanium I've tested. But better is still better, and it might be improved further at a thicker gauge.)

I set the TCR to 0.0052 (520 on the Dicodes scale), as that's what I calculated from the 250°C figure on the Nifethal 70 datasheet. Vaping at 250°C which is higher than I normally have, which might indicate a too low TCR but also could be because I'm using 90% VG - the highest I've ever vaped.

Vaping fine with a full tank. I didn't bother doing a cotton test or a proper temp test, first I'll empty this tank and confirm no dry hits and then temp test it properly soon.

Very glad to be back on NiFe wire! I've been exclusively Titanium for a few weeks, both to give it a good shot for experience purposes and because I kept putting off twisting more wire. But as soon as I saw that dry burn glow I felt like I'd come home

We really need a single name by which to refer to these wires, something that differentiates the group of Resistherm NiFe30, Kanthal NiFe70/52, Alloy 120, Alloy 52, etc etc, from Titanium, Ni200 and SS. I suppose just NiFe might be good enough - pronounced 'knife', because it's.. cutting edge?

 

[jazzvaper]

Made my first NiFe30 coil. Or is it called NiFe70? Why two names? Isn't it complicated enough already? Thomas @ ZiVipf calls it NiFe30, so does this mean that he hasn't bought Kanthal NiFe70 - in which case our assumption on TCRs etc might not be exact? Or maybe he called it NiFe30 to match Resistherm NiFe30 which is what (some) vapers are already familiar with.

@TheBloke Am at the site, about to order "knife" [emoji18] 0.28mm. Would you recommend anything less than 100 meters?

Thanks

 

[vapealone]

Awesome, thanks for the link. And yeah both 70 and 52 look fine, but 52 definitely better

And wow, I forgot just how excellent this spreadsheet is. Superb work, @vapealone ! It really has everything.

Thank you for the compliment
In the meantime I have added a CSV tab for easy copy/paste as I kinda like to know where the data I use is coming from

Edit: Scroll down and the light orange is the one CSV, in light orange has been moved up for easy recognition Now, you have scroll down to check the source data

 

[WileE]

Had to step out for a while.
Bloke 26 - 30 will work. I prefer a little more spread though. like 26 core 31-36 wrap. The bigger the spread the less ramp up time you'll have. Based on what I've learned from the new wire wizard and testing you can just use Kanthal A1 for the wrap wire on a Clapton. Or at least on a fused Clapton with 2 wire core there is little affect on TC by the Kanthal wrap. It would have a bigger affect on a single wire core Clapton.

I will tread lightly on where it came from for now, but I can tell you it was manufactured in the US Specifically for TC Vaping & will be released for sale in the US next weekend at Vape Mania15 Sept. 4th in Winston Salem I will try to put up a link or two towards the end of next week for who will have it in stock & available for online ordering.

cigatron - The workability is very similar to Kanthal A1, just a little softer. Not to springy on the picture below the coil measures .0815 & was wrapped on a .0795 (2mm) coil master mandrel. A .002 spring isn't bad. Yes it can and should be dry burned. Ideally the coil should be pre-oxidized with a torch prior to dry burning on the mod, but I'm lazy so I usually just use the mod. Second picture is a staged hybrid parallel coil that has been dry fired/oxidized. If you look closely the darker wire =10 wraps is the A52 & the lighter 7 wrap is Kanthal A1. This shows the difference between A52 & Kanthal A1 in oxidized state.

The thing that bugs me when I look at that pick of the Titanium coil is how pitted it looks. To me I see missing metal & think the more metal that's missing the higher the chances some of it wound up in my vaper. I just feel better when I pop the hood on an atty for maintenance & all the metal is still on the coil. The thought of a dry hit with Titanium makes me cringe But hay still better then Nickel!!

 

[vapealone]

We really need a single name by which to refer to these wires, something that differentiates the group of Resistherm NiFe30, Kanthal NiFe70/52, Alloy 120, Alloy 52, etc etc, from Titanium, Ni200 and SS. I suppose just NiFe might be good enough - pronounced 'knife', because it's.. cutting edge?

Knife sounds about right
BTW, I don't really understand why Zivipf and Resistherm selling their wire as NiFe30. I mean, FeNi 30(/70) would be understandable as NiFe 70(/30) is OK for Nifethal, however the later contains 72% Ni.... OK, I give up
Why dont we simply say Ni!

 

[WileE]

Tis but a glitch!

 

[vapealone]

Had to step out for a while.
Bloke 26 - 30 will work. I prefer a little more spread though. like 26 core 31-36 wrap. The bigger the spread the less ramp up time you'll have. Based on what I've learned from the new wire wizard and testing you can just use Kanthal A1 for the wrap wire on a Clapton. Or at least on a fused Clapton with 2 wire core there is little affect on TC by the Kanthal wrap. It would have a bigger affect on a single wire core Clapton. (...)!

I use Kanthal core Ni wrap claptons a lot but will try Kanthal wrap on the A52/Nifethal52 when I will have any.
BTW, clapton-wise I am a bit confused with wire wizard as my little maths shows on the bottom of this post.
I consider Claptons as paralel resistances and calculate accordingly: R=1/(1/R1+1/R2)
The fact that only 1 of the resistances changes by temperature is an easy go, however it lasted for a while to make a working formula for the wrap wire length as approximating the wrap length as simple rings wasn't good enough. And even with this formula the actual wrap spacing (on the wire, not the coil) and any space between the core and the wraps is just a guestimate.
Anyway, I am happy with the things I got. (last tab on the table)

 

[DeareN]

I don't care how to name them (NiFe Feni Knife) but I must admit I am confused.
If only Dicodes made a Resistherm in thicker dimensions I would be happy.

I now think that it's time to twist some wire...

 

[TheBloke]

I don't care how to name them (NiFe Feni Knife) but I must admit I am confused.
If only Dicodes made a Resistherm in thicker dimensions I would be happy.

I now think that it's time to twist some wire...

ZiVipf will have NiFe 70 and NiFe 52 in thicker gauges, up to 0.4mm (26G) in the next week or two:

I have ordered yesterday NiFe52 in different diameters ( 0,25 0,28 0,32 0,35 0,40 )

and i will do a new order next week with bigger diameters of the NiFe30 wire​

NiFe52 looks to be all round the best wire because of its higher resistance and flatter TCR, so NiFe52 at 0.40 sounds like it will be my favourite wire. He already ordered it last week so I am hoping it will come next week, worst case the week after.

In the meantime, yes I twist 2x29 and that works well for me. Comes out to roughly the same thickness as 26, in that region anyway.

 

[DeareN]

TheBloke I would really like to give me some estimated temperatures for NiFe52. For example I use 160C on dna40 for Resistherm and 120 on yihi.

How is the tcr on NiFe52? Is it usable with dna40 and yihi?
Thanks a lot

 

[TheBloke]

@TheBloke Am at the site, about to order "knife" [emoji18] 0.28mm. Would you recommend anything less than 100 meters?

Thanks

Yes, I would only get 10m at this stage! In a week or two he will have NiFe52 in thicker gauges and with higher resistances. I am confident that when that is available, you will want to buy and use that instead.

In fact if money is an issue you might want to wait until NiFe52 is available, as personally speaking I doubt I will ever use NiFe70 @ 0.28mm again once I have 52 @ 0.4mm.

 

[TheBloke]

TheBloke I would really like to give me some estimated temperatures for NiFe52. For example I use 160C on dna40 for Resistherm and 120 on yihi.

How is the tcr on NiFe52? Is it usable with dna40 and yihi?
Thanks a lot

I don't know yet for NiFe52. The TCR is around 0.004, a little higher than Titanium and Resistherm. So you will need less of a temperature offset.

For Titanium @ 0.0035 I use 180-185°C on my DNA 40, therefore maybe 190-200 will work for NiFe52. On a Yihi in Ni200 mode I use 140°C for Titanium, so maybe 150-160°C for NiFe52.

But these are just guesses. When I get the NiFe52 in my hands I will test it properly.

Then the question becomes: do we use Ni200 mode with offset X, or Titanium mode with offset Y? For mods that have a Titanium mode that is, such as most Yihi mods. I will test this too.

My default guess would be that Titanium mode, where available, would be better - because Titanium's TCR is flat like NiFe's is. Then again there are reports of many Titanium mods needing offsets with Titanium! I don't yet know what's going on there but hope to test sometime.

But I cannot know until I get the wire and that won't be for at least 10 days, maybe more.

For NiFe30/70, the wire I have now, the TCR is 0.0052 and so this will need even less of an offset on non-TCR mods. I will do some testing at some point soon, although I am not so interested now in NiFe70/30 now I know 52 will soon be available and looks better. But I will try to test it also, for completeness.

 

[DeareN]

Thanks, I look forward to see your tests. They helped me a lot so far.
I agree with you for the NiFe52 40mm. If it's working as we hope you should focus your tests on that.
Very excited...