Atty Cleaning: So where did all that juice go?

[PaulB]

This kind of surprised me. I had been using the same 510 atty for three weeks or so, the first one I've removed the bridge for dripping. It had been behaving really well (best ever, I'd say), but flavor and vapor had begun to wane so I decided to give it the Highping soak-blow-burn-soak-blow-burn treatment. I got it to where the entire length of the coil would again turn red quickly. (When I started dry burning both ends weren't glowing.) OK, good.

So then I added three drops of juice and waited a minute. I wasn't thinking of that as primer, per se, given there's no bridge to do a lot of wicking. Commenced to vape. The draw was soda straw easy (suspiciously easy), the coil was glowing great. But I was getting nearly no flavor or vapor at all. Had I wrecked something? Added another drop (hesitantly, as I feared I might flood). Still nothing. Set it down for a bit, then tried it again. Still nothing. Decided "Here goes nothing," and added three more drops. And with that I returned to vaping heaven.

Now I had seven drops in there, minus whatever my primer drags had vaporized, before things got working right. There's no bridge to wick juice, excepting the remaining perimeter of the atty base. I know there's wicking material in the coil (or I think I know that...).

So where did all that juice go? Seven drops seems a lot!

 

[Quick1]

Here is my guess. Look at your atomizer. The bottom of the bridge/open area on the top is about half way down the barrel. Under that is the wires connecting the atomizer coil to the connector, that plastic piece or whatever it is... my guess is that it ran down there. Maybe the reason you didn't get any/much vapor until it sort of filled up or got wet down there is that you don't have a mesh bridge (this is the one with the bridge removed right?) and/or wicking material there to retain the juice up around where the coil is.

I'm not sure I ever understood the benefit of removing the bridge. You have a heating coil down there. I would think that coil would do vaporizing liquid if it's in close proximity to it. It doesn't work so well if it's submersed in the liquid. The mesh and wick serve to feed the juice close to the coil at some rate where the coil is close or only coated with a thin layer of juice. I would think it hard to maintain that between submerged/flooded and none at all without at least the mesh bridge.

 

[PaulB]

The explanation stands to reason. All the more so because at one point I noticed it was almost time to re-drip, and set it down on its side for a few minutes. Picked it up again and drew on it and it still had juice to deliver. So bridge removal does make the unit a little more susceptible to forces of gravity. What I like about no-bridge is it eliminates a lot of the wicking material that seem to like to combust if I don't do things exactly right. (What "things," I'm not sure.)

 

[quasimod]

There is a lot more going on inside your atomizer than you might think. Tear one apart next time you kill one, and you'll see what I mean. Your juice probably soaked into the nickel foam that wraps around the white thingy that your coil is sitting on, forming a porous layer between that and the inside wall of the atomizer.