Blew too hard into atty?

[marcoabuso]

Hey guys,

Very noob to the e-cig thing but glad to say I got my first kit (totally wicked tornado) and I'm loving every second of it.

Quick question though...I read through these forums and found that blowing out the atty every night is a good way to make them last long. I think I went a little overboard and used this air blower machine I found in the garage. I think this machine is for tires and it blows pretty damn hard. I used it at full strength in my atty and I think I broke it.. It's the same atty as the 510 and now I can see the screw on the bottom of the atty. It's also barely producing vapor and throat hits anymore. I'm pretty sure I broke the atty but I wanted some confirmation that I def. blew too hard.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Kurt]

You might be ok if it is still heating up. I don't know what you mean by "seeing the screws on the bottom of the atty", but it could be you blew the bridge out. The bridge is the silver-mesh part that sticks up into the cart filler, and wicks juice to the coil underneath it. It is removable, and does not carry voltage, its just a metal wick. If the bridge came out, and you still have it, you might be able to stick it back into its holes. If you don't have it, and this is what happened, the atty should still be good for dripping directly onto the coil. Try a couple drops and see if it vapes. Some actually prefer this atty setup, and they take the bridge out. Since juice is going right on the coil, however, you may wish to wash it in hot water every few days, and let it dry overnight. The next day, hook it up to a batt, without a cart on it, and do 5-second pulses while looking at the coil. There will be some residual moisture that will boil off, but after several pulses, and letting it cool a bit between pulses, you should see an orange glow from the coil. If you see this, you still have a good atty! But without the bridge it is a dripping-only atty now. If you see nothing and get no heat or sizzle, it is dead.

If you have a multimeter, you can check if the coil is intact still by measuring the resistance (ohms) with the black pin going into the hole in the middle of the thread-end, and the red pin going to the threads themselves. It should read about 2.5 ohms if its ok. If the value jumps around, the coil is broken and the atty is dead.

Here is how I prep my atty for bedtime. If I have been using a cart filled with juice, I remove that cart and put an empty one on the atty, then vape several hits more...this is just vaping out any residual around the coil. Then I do hard mouth-pulls with batt activated, like 5 of them. This will pull hot easy-to-flow juice out of the coil and up into the atty housing. Then while it is still warm, I remove the atty from the batt, and do several more mouth-pulls on the atty from the cart end, and put the atty thread-end up on a paper towel. The idea is to get juice out of the coil region so that it drains the rest of the way onto a paper towel.

Also, you should avoid blowing through the cart-end, which forces the juice out of the airholes on the thread-end. This is the easiest way to blow it out, but it will force juice onto coil and the mesh underneath it, which will lead to clogging over time.

And one last thing: get extra attys. Always wise to have plenty of backups, as things like this happen, and attys can just die outright when you least want them too. In general, compressed air is too hard on attys, and it is not needed at all.

Best of luck, and hope it is still a vapable atty!