My SS Goon RDA was delivered today, and I am very impressed. Build quality, fit, and finish are all excellent, with sharp engraving and clean machining. It arrived absolutely spotless without even a hint of machine oil.
The deck is just stupidly easy to build on, since you don't have to worry about your coils being the right width to fit into post holes. Wire thickness doesn't matter either -- the clamps will solidly hold anything that will fit between them. I tried feeding through a single strand of 30 gauge wire to simulate a thin gauge single coil and two strands of twisted 22 gauge wire to simulate a thick dual coil, and both were held quite securely. The posts have a beveled edge, so you don't even have to lift up the loosened clamps to mount your coils, just shove the wire in and the clamps will raise themselves. Little touches like this show that a lot of thought went into the design of this RDA.
I started off with my standard go-to build, a 9-wrap, 3 mm diameter 24 gauge dual coil which metered out at 0.39 ohms. It's nothing fancy, but it works great at 75 watts. This is my first 24 mm RDA (all my others are 22 mm), and I was concerned that flavor would be diminished by the larger diameter chamber, but I am glad that those concerns were unwarranted. Even with the airflow wide open, which is a looser draw than I prefer, flavor is still quite good. Two holes open on each side is where I like it, and flavor there is excellent. Vapor production is also excellent -- even with my simple and plain 24 gauge build, I'm getting copious and dense clouds.
The juice well is the perfect depth for me at around 5 mm. I don't like super deep wells, and get better results with a relatively shallow well which doesn't need long wick tails to reach the bottom. For example, the drip well on my Wotofo Lush is too deep in my opinion, and while overall it is still a good RDA, I always found myself gravitating towards my CLT V3 Mini and my Bambino, since they have shallower wells (but are still able to hold enough juice that I'm not redripping every 5 pulls).
And despite not having a super deep well, the extra 2 mm diameter on the Goon means it can hold quite a large amount of juice -- I just re-dripped and even though the wick was still mostly saturated, it took more than 40 drops to fill. That is twice what most of my 22 mm RDA's will hold. Even my Lush, with its much deeper well, can only hold around 25 drops with an already saturated wick. And the fit on the o-rings holding the airflow control / top cap are just a bit looser than the o-rings holding the barrel to the deck (and the drip tip to the top cap), so when you go to re-drip, you can just grab the drip tip and pull, and the top cap will come off without pulling the barrel up along with it. That's another one of those little touches that make me smile, like the beveled edges on the posts.
Overall, I am seriously impressed with this RDA. It is super easy to build on. You can use pretty much any build you want, from single coils with very thin wire, all the way to exotic dual and quad coil builds with ridiculously thick wire, and the Goon will clamp it down solid. Vapor production and flavor are both excellent. And it can hold a very large amount of juice. I've only been using it for a few hours, but I honestly cannot find any fault, flaw, or issue with this thing. At $60 the Goon is an incredible value, and I highly recommend this RDA. I also love that it is made by a company right here in my home state of New Jersey. It really is a gamechanger, something that right now makes me both very happy and very sad, since if we can't defeat the new FDA regulations, innovations like this will no longer be possible.
The deck is just stupidly easy to build on, since you don't have to worry about your coils being the right width to fit into post holes. Wire thickness doesn't matter either -- the clamps will solidly hold anything that will fit between them. I tried feeding through a single strand of 30 gauge wire to simulate a thin gauge single coil and two strands of twisted 22 gauge wire to simulate a thick dual coil, and both were held quite securely. The posts have a beveled edge, so you don't even have to lift up the loosened clamps to mount your coils, just shove the wire in and the clamps will raise themselves. Little touches like this show that a lot of thought went into the design of this RDA.
I started off with my standard go-to build, a 9-wrap, 3 mm diameter 24 gauge dual coil which metered out at 0.39 ohms. It's nothing fancy, but it works great at 75 watts. This is my first 24 mm RDA (all my others are 22 mm), and I was concerned that flavor would be diminished by the larger diameter chamber, but I am glad that those concerns were unwarranted. Even with the airflow wide open, which is a looser draw than I prefer, flavor is still quite good. Two holes open on each side is where I like it, and flavor there is excellent. Vapor production is also excellent -- even with my simple and plain 24 gauge build, I'm getting copious and dense clouds.
The juice well is the perfect depth for me at around 5 mm. I don't like super deep wells, and get better results with a relatively shallow well which doesn't need long wick tails to reach the bottom. For example, the drip well on my Wotofo Lush is too deep in my opinion, and while overall it is still a good RDA, I always found myself gravitating towards my CLT V3 Mini and my Bambino, since they have shallower wells (but are still able to hold enough juice that I'm not redripping every 5 pulls).
And despite not having a super deep well, the extra 2 mm diameter on the Goon means it can hold quite a large amount of juice -- I just re-dripped and even though the wick was still mostly saturated, it took more than 40 drops to fill. That is twice what most of my 22 mm RDA's will hold. Even my Lush, with its much deeper well, can only hold around 25 drops with an already saturated wick. And the fit on the o-rings holding the airflow control / top cap are just a bit looser than the o-rings holding the barrel to the deck (and the drip tip to the top cap), so when you go to re-drip, you can just grab the drip tip and pull, and the top cap will come off without pulling the barrel up along with it. That's another one of those little touches that make me smile, like the beveled edges on the posts.
Overall, I am seriously impressed with this RDA. It is super easy to build on. You can use pretty much any build you want, from single coils with very thin wire, all the way to exotic dual and quad coil builds with ridiculously thick wire, and the Goon will clamp it down solid. Vapor production and flavor are both excellent. And it can hold a very large amount of juice. I've only been using it for a few hours, but I honestly cannot find any fault, flaw, or issue with this thing. At $60 the Goon is an incredible value, and I highly recommend this RDA. I also love that it is made by a company right here in my home state of New Jersey. It really is a gamechanger, something that right now makes me both very happy and very sad, since if we can't defeat the new FDA regulations, innovations like this will no longer be possible.
Last edited:
