Devices for testing conveniently
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Thanks for the feedback- a lot of food for thought here.
I actually do like smoking in a lot of ways, but the downsides are pretty real. Both my mother and her mother died of lung cancer. I was with my mother pretty continuously for the last week, and I'll just say that it wasn't very pretty.
Like you, the first thing I ordered was a cig-alike. The v2 "system," which was pretty expensive for me at the time. Despite the expense I ordered it on kind of a whim based on sites that, in retrospect, were clearly just affiliate marketing sites. I'm normally more perceptive than that, but I was in a weird mood at the time, I guess. I realized my error not long after placing the order, did more research, and ordered an eGo and some appropriate accessories before the V2 kit arrived. That was a lot better than the V2 kit (which was utter garbage, and very expensive garbage at that,) but still pretty frustrating. That said, I did wind up vaping almost exclusively for more than three years (I say almost, because once in a while I'd have a cigarette when drinking with smokers.)
I really struggled with the equipment for a long while though. I eventually settled on iClear 16s on a series of increasingly better pen-batteries (first came the Ego twists, then the Spinners, and eventually the Kanger iPow 2s- I still have a couple of those, and they actually work pretty well for low-watt MTL vaping if you put a decent tank on them.) The iClears were kind of a nightmare though- better than what I used before them, but a royal pain nonetheless. I think in the end I pretty much succumbed to frustration fatigue (and 100 hour work-weeks-) I was tired of spending money on things that didn't work very well, and that I didn't feel like I had much control over. I'll say one thing for cigarettes- they are very available, very consistent, and very disposable. There's not much else to be said for them, but there is that.
The equipment is so much better now. I'm still pretty basic in my setup- I have a few tanks, but I'm mainly walking around with a Nautilus 2 on a Pico these days, experimenting with different coils, using probably _way_ too much nicotine for that setup
, but old habits die hard. I'm starting to play with higher watt higher airflow sub-ohm DTL vaping, but I kind of doubt I'll ever be a real cloud-chaser. I care a lot more about nicotine and flavor, and I kind of like a pronounced throat hit. But variety is the spice of life, and I like to be open to new things, so I'm going to at least give other styles a chance. That said, compared to what I started with the Nautilus 2 (and even my old aerotank v2) are so much better, even with factory coils, that they seem like clouds to me .
Yeah, well apologies for derailing by describing my personal vaping history in too much detail, but to bring this back around to something reasonably on-topic for this forum juice was also always a bit frustrating for me, and since I'm reasonably happy with my equipment now it's what I want to concentrate on.
I think I mentioned that I was kind of broke when I started vaping, so I tried to buy inexpensive juices (which were still way more expensive than the cheap stuff is now- competition for the win.) At least back then the cheap tobacco flavors were... well, if I said that many of the tobacco flavors I tried were a combination of wet dog and used sofa I'd be being way too generous. One of the Chinese tobacco flavors I tried a 5 mill sample of was, literally, the worst thing I've ever tasted, and that's coming from someone who has more than once accidentally taken a nice big swallow from a beer bottle that had had discarded cigarettes steeping in it for a day or so.
I did like some premium tobaccos I tried that were mainly other flavors (trying to remember the name of one company- one of the big ones back then, shipped their sampler in a cookie tin) but they were too expensive for me to vape regularly. So I naturally gravitated toward certain fruit flavors, as some of them are hard to .... up too badly. Still kind of chemically and gross, but at least tolerably so.
Eventually a friend of mine who gave up smoking by exclusively vaping unflavored 3.6% in a 100% VG base gave that up because it was irritating his throat (wonder why...) and gave me close to a liter of his remaining nic. I started to play with DIY then, with just a couple of flavors, but that was right around the time I stopped vaping, so I didn't take it very far.
Anyway, the upshot is that while I care most about getting my nicotine (I'm an unapologetic fiend for the stuff, and have no desire to give it up or even reduce my intake, as long as I can get it through a better delivery mechanism than cigarettes) I do actually care about how my juice tastes. I'm a _lot_ better off than I was a few years ago, so I could probably afford to buy only premium juice now, but... first off my Scots heritage cries out against paying dollars for what I could make for cents, and second I've found even expensive juice kind of hit or miss.
I've liked a few premium juices I've tried a _lot_, but I've found many inferior, for my tastes at least, to a flavor or two mixed with a decent base, which is about as far as I've taken DIY so far. And in the end I do like to have some control over things like that (I keep using that word- I must sound like a control freak) rather than letting other people make all my decisions for me. I doubt I'll entirely stop buying pre-made juice, just as I still eat at restaurants. But just as I wouldn't want to eat at restaurants all the time I don't want to entirely vape pre-made juice.
I think it has some similarities to the way I cook, at least. Most of what I cook is based on traditional recipes that have stood the test of time, but even with things I've cooked hundreds of times I'm always looking for small improvements, and some of those come from better understanding of the molecules involved, and how they interact. For instance, I make a mean cacciatore, originally based on a recipe by Marcella Hazan, but tweaked heavily. The tweaks I've made in the last few years involve adding a little bit of fish sauce and soy, not for their individual flavors (you can't taste either in the finished dish,) but for their molecules.
I'm interested in the way the molecules in flavors interact, which is why I want to make a lot of small two-flavor batches.
OK- I have not yet tried dripping into a tank atty.
Ah, that's helpful. I know airflow is important, but I hadn't made the connection with the chimney size until now. I'm a bit between preferences, tbh- as I said, I'm experimenting with new things a lot at the moment, and I think my preferences might be pretty fluid right now. But it's good to know the parameters involved.
Ah- I work in an industry that has traditionally been pretty ego-driven, and pretty error-prone, sometimes in significant ways. If we've gotten a bit better at what we do over the last ten years or so (and I think we have) it's mainly because we've started to realize that no matter how smart we might be at our best, we are all idiots much of the time. I trust no one, least of all myself.
I actually do like smoking in a lot of ways, but the downsides are pretty real. Both my mother and her mother died of lung cancer. I was with my mother pretty continuously for the last week, and I'll just say that it wasn't very pretty.
Like you, the first thing I ordered was a cig-alike. The v2 "system," which was pretty expensive for me at the time. Despite the expense I ordered it on kind of a whim based on sites that, in retrospect, were clearly just affiliate marketing sites. I'm normally more perceptive than that, but I was in a weird mood at the time, I guess. I realized my error not long after placing the order, did more research, and ordered an eGo and some appropriate accessories before the V2 kit arrived. That was a lot better than the V2 kit (which was utter garbage, and very expensive garbage at that,) but still pretty frustrating. That said, I did wind up vaping almost exclusively for more than three years (I say almost, because once in a while I'd have a cigarette when drinking with smokers.)
I really struggled with the equipment for a long while though. I eventually settled on iClear 16s on a series of increasingly better pen-batteries (first came the Ego twists, then the Spinners, and eventually the Kanger iPow 2s- I still have a couple of those, and they actually work pretty well for low-watt MTL vaping if you put a decent tank on them.) The iClears were kind of a nightmare though- better than what I used before them, but a royal pain nonetheless. I think in the end I pretty much succumbed to frustration fatigue (and 100 hour work-weeks-) I was tired of spending money on things that didn't work very well, and that I didn't feel like I had much control over. I'll say one thing for cigarettes- they are very available, very consistent, and very disposable. There's not much else to be said for them, but there is that.
The equipment is so much better now. I'm still pretty basic in my setup- I have a few tanks, but I'm mainly walking around with a Nautilus 2 on a Pico these days, experimenting with different coils, using probably _way_ too much nicotine for that setup
, but old habits die hard. I'm starting to play with higher watt higher airflow sub-ohm DTL vaping, but I kind of doubt I'll ever be a real cloud-chaser. I care a lot more about nicotine and flavor, and I kind of like a pronounced throat hit. But variety is the spice of life, and I like to be open to new things, so I'm going to at least give other styles a chance. That said, compared to what I started with the Nautilus 2 (and even my old aerotank v2) are so much better, even with factory coils, that they seem like clouds to me .Yeah, well apologies for derailing by describing my personal vaping history in too much detail, but to bring this back around to something reasonably on-topic for this forum juice was also always a bit frustrating for me, and since I'm reasonably happy with my equipment now it's what I want to concentrate on.
I think I mentioned that I was kind of broke when I started vaping, so I tried to buy inexpensive juices (which were still way more expensive than the cheap stuff is now- competition for the win.) At least back then the cheap tobacco flavors were... well, if I said that many of the tobacco flavors I tried were a combination of wet dog and used sofa I'd be being way too generous. One of the Chinese tobacco flavors I tried a 5 mill sample of was, literally, the worst thing I've ever tasted, and that's coming from someone who has more than once accidentally taken a nice big swallow from a beer bottle that had had discarded cigarettes steeping in it for a day or so.
I did like some premium tobaccos I tried that were mainly other flavors (trying to remember the name of one company- one of the big ones back then, shipped their sampler in a cookie tin) but they were too expensive for me to vape regularly. So I naturally gravitated toward certain fruit flavors, as some of them are hard to .... up too badly. Still kind of chemically and gross, but at least tolerably so.
Eventually a friend of mine who gave up smoking by exclusively vaping unflavored 3.6% in a 100% VG base gave that up because it was irritating his throat (wonder why...) and gave me close to a liter of his remaining nic. I started to play with DIY then, with just a couple of flavors, but that was right around the time I stopped vaping, so I didn't take it very far.
Anyway, the upshot is that while I care most about getting my nicotine (I'm an unapologetic fiend for the stuff, and have no desire to give it up or even reduce my intake, as long as I can get it through a better delivery mechanism than cigarettes) I do actually care about how my juice tastes. I'm a _lot_ better off than I was a few years ago, so I could probably afford to buy only premium juice now, but... first off my Scots heritage cries out against paying dollars for what I could make for cents, and second I've found even expensive juice kind of hit or miss.
I've liked a few premium juices I've tried a _lot_, but I've found many inferior, for my tastes at least, to a flavor or two mixed with a decent base, which is about as far as I've taken DIY so far. And in the end I do like to have some control over things like that (I keep using that word- I must sound like a control freak) rather than letting other people make all my decisions for me. I doubt I'll entirely stop buying pre-made juice, just as I still eat at restaurants. But just as I wouldn't want to eat at restaurants all the time I don't want to entirely vape pre-made juice.
I think it has some similarities to the way I cook, at least. Most of what I cook is based on traditional recipes that have stood the test of time, but even with things I've cooked hundreds of times I'm always looking for small improvements, and some of those come from better understanding of the molecules involved, and how they interact. For instance, I make a mean cacciatore, originally based on a recipe by Marcella Hazan, but tweaked heavily. The tweaks I've made in the last few years involve adding a little bit of fish sauce and soy, not for their individual flavors (you can't taste either in the finished dish,) but for their molecules.
I'm interested in the way the molecules in flavors interact, which is why I want to make a lot of small two-flavor batches.
OK- I have not yet tried dripping into a tank atty
.Ah, that's helpful. I know airflow is important, but I hadn't made the connection with the chimney size until now. I'm a bit between preferences, tbh- as I said, I'm experimenting with new things a lot at the moment, and I think my preferences might be pretty fluid right now. But it's good to know the parameters involved.
For coil building; I like the simplicity of the Kuro Koiler/Coil-Master style of coiler. I find it pretty "Joel" (re: idiot) proof. It is not the only way, nor the "best" way, but it makes the "chore" tolerable for me.
Ah- I work in an industry that has traditionally been pretty ego-driven, and pretty error-prone, sometimes in significant ways. If we've gotten a bit better at what we do over the last ten years or so (and I think we have) it's mainly because we've started to realize that no matter how smart we might be at our best, we are all idiots much of the time. I trust no one, least of all myself
.
My old, abused, lungs can't handle true cloud chasing (not to mention how much juice it chews through). If anything, I am finding myself lowering wattage, upping the resistance of my coils, and trying to get less vapor while maintaining flavor satisfaction. I am even considering looking to see if anyone is making a good "flavor chaser" single coil tank. But that is a discussion for another thread.
As O.P., you alone, can not derail your own thread (and therefore owe nobody an apology). Anyway, I think I set the initial precedent for sharing history, so if anyone needs to apologize, it is me. I apologize.
I also find background info helpful for finding solutions so I never mind.
You paint the most fantastic word imagery! A true pleasure to read. Not to metion you had me laughing my posterior off!
I am with you on both counts. I am thrifty (my ex-wife says "Cheap!") and I can now make juice as good as, or better (to me), than anything I can buy locally here in the Boise area.
Once tanks got away from the tiny hole drilled on the bottom, or side, the chimney seems (to me at least) to be the bottleneck. Once I started seeking out the wider chimneys; airflow seemed to improve greatly.
And, as a DIYer, airflow is not as critical. You can adapt your recipe to taste great for high, medium, or low airflow. Just keep in mind, if you have a lot of different devises, the juice you mix to taste good in one, may not taste as good in another.
Boy; did you just describe me!we are all idiots much of the time. I trust no one, least of all myself
Yeah, I can see that. I think I might wind up vaping in different ways at different times. That's already kind of the case. Sometimes I like a lot of vapor (by my very low standards- any self-respecting cloud-chaser would call what I call clouds tootling) and sometimes I like to dial it back and just vape enough to keep myself topped up.
But I can see the fun in chucking massive clouds, and while I don't think it's something I'll want to do all the time (or even very much) I figure I'll eventually at least play with some of the 12-coil monstrosities they have out these days- of course by the time I do 12 coils will be passé, and the cool kids will have moved on to self-replicating nano-coils that disperse uniformly through your tank and let you vape the whole thing in one quick puff. Bonus points if they let you fart clouds too
.Going back to food... sometimes I want a bolognese with a stick of butter in it followed by osso buco and then some profiteroles. Other times I want a nice piece of white fish with lemon and pepper accompanied by steamed broccoli with plum vinegar and sesame oil. I'm unapologetically a man of prodigious appetites, and a hedonist, but if there's one thing I've learned as I've gotten older it is that there is no excess you cannot become habituated to, and it is far better to be occasionally excessive, and otherwise Spartan, than it is to be always and progressively testing the limits of excess.
I've been buying expensive juice at B&M's lately, and I completely understand why you find fruits cloying. The trend in premium juices these days seems to involve a lot of sweeteners. I understand that, from a marketing perspective, 'cause boy those very sweet flavors taste _good_ when you first vape them.
I have one right now that seems to me as if it's a blend of dragon fruit, some strawberry, a bit of another berry, marshmallow, a bit of cream, and a huge amount of some sweetener. My palate for juice isn't yet good enough to know which sweetener, but I'm guessing sucralose, and a lot of it. It's a fine dessert mix, but way too sweet for an ADV, for me at least. I have another juice which is supposed to be just berry, but is actually a few berries and a lot of sweetener. I'm a bit constrained in my choices at B&M's, because I like high nic. But I am getting very, very tired of sweeteners.
OTOH, I used to really like a fairly expensive juice I used to buy that I suspect was just TFA Pomegranate and a bit of some sour. Super-simple flavor, easy on coils, not very sweet at all, almost odorless, and hard to get terribly tired of. Sometimes I want something complex, delicious, and sweet, but most of the time I just want a good ADV. I kind of want to play with some unsweetened green tea and milk flavors for that purpose... is NET a thing if the 'T' stands for tea? I might have to find out...
As O.P., you alone, can not derail your own thread (and therefore owe nobody an apology). Anyway, I think I set the initial precedent for sharing history, so if anyone needs to apologize, it is me. I apologize.
I also find background info helpful for finding solutions so I never mind.
You paint the most fantastic word imagery! A true pleasure to read. Not to metion you had me laughing my posterior off!
Well thanks very much for your replies- I've found them very useful. I think you underestimate my derailing prowess though- I'm so powerful a derailer that I can indeed derail my own threads. More seriously, I just didn't want to get _too_ far off-topic for the forum. I'm afraid I like chit-chat, and while I'm glad you find me amusing, not everyone does.
I probably don't really understand why so many have adopted cloud making as their vaping style. I don't look down on cloud chasers. I just wonder what they heck they get out of it.
I smoke to replicate the cigarettes I once smoked. I vape at 10W +/- to reproduce a cigarette style inhale and exhale. Low watt vaping lets me vape in stores and restaurants and people's homes without anyone being offended. I can blow it downward everywhere I go and no one really notices and certainly doesn't care.
go_player, once you can take an atomizer apart and reassemble it, you are ready to build a coil. It's just a matter of winding a wire around a nail and using the nail to hold the coil while you insert the ends under two screw heads on the coil deck and tighten them down.
Most coils are stainless steel (SS316L is the most popular) or Kanthal. Kanthal won't work if you like TC mode (temperature control). Stainless steel is probably the most popular, but nichrome or titanium are also used for TC mode.
You can use your mod as a holder for the coil deck while installing a coil. I unwind one turn from the spool and clip it for each coil. That's more than you need, but it gets you back to the slot in the side of the spool where you can insert the wire end to keep it from unwinding. A 100' foot spool of wire for $5 will make as many as 200 coils or more that way. A plastic bag of cotton balls or a bag of Kho Gen Do cotton pads will last you a year. That's all you need. No more expensive factory made atomizer coils! Think of all the money you will save on vaping costs.
If you are using SS or Kanthal you can dry burn to anneal the wire and burn off any oils or lubricants used in making the wire at the factory. Titanium can't be dry burned. It turns to an ashy looking surface. Don't ask me how I know this!
Dry burning a coil (after the wick is removed) cleans off the gunk that accumulates on the wire as you vape. You just remove the wick and dry fire the atomizer until the coil turns red. Then, you run the coil under the sink tap to wash it off. You will do this a couple of times a week and then install a new wick. Once you get familiar with the process it only takes about 10 minutes or less. Do that when the flavor drops off. You'll learn to tell when it's needed.
I smoke to replicate the cigarettes I once smoked. I vape at 10W +/- to reproduce a cigarette style inhale and exhale. Low watt vaping lets me vape in stores and restaurants and people's homes without anyone being offended. I can blow it downward everywhere I go and no one really notices and certainly doesn't care.
go_player, once you can take an atomizer apart and reassemble it, you are ready to build a coil. It's just a matter of winding a wire around a nail and using the nail to hold the coil while you insert the ends under two screw heads on the coil deck and tighten them down.
Most coils are stainless steel (SS316L is the most popular) or Kanthal. Kanthal won't work if you like TC mode (temperature control). Stainless steel is probably the most popular, but nichrome or titanium are also used for TC mode.
You can use your mod as a holder for the coil deck while installing a coil. I unwind one turn from the spool and clip it for each coil. That's more than you need, but it gets you back to the slot in the side of the spool where you can insert the wire end to keep it from unwinding. A 100' foot spool of wire for $5 will make as many as 200 coils or more that way. A plastic bag of cotton balls or a bag of Kho Gen Do cotton pads will last you a year. That's all you need. No more expensive factory made atomizer coils! Think of all the money you will save on vaping costs.
If you are using SS or Kanthal you can dry burn to anneal the wire and burn off any oils or lubricants used in making the wire at the factory. Titanium can't be dry burned. It turns to an ashy looking surface. Don't ask me how I know this!
Dry burning a coil (after the wick is removed) cleans off the gunk that accumulates on the wire as you vape. You just remove the wick and dry fire the atomizer until the coil turns red. Then, you run the coil under the sink tap to wash it off. You will do this a couple of times a week and then install a new wick. Once you get familiar with the process it only takes about 10 minutes or less. Do that when the flavor drops off. You'll learn to tell when it's needed.
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