fc-2000 porous ceramic wick

[vapdivrr]

cool thread, and much appreciated.

Just got a DID D16 today and set it up with 1/8 inch fc2000 ceramic. Pretty impressed with the the clouds I'm getting with flat kanthal wrapped to 1.2 ohms. taste is a bit muted though, will this get better over time?

hey tim man nice set-up, cant go wrong on a did & poldiac. i believe you will definatly get more flavor as the wick breaks in more, this is especially the case with flat kanthal, i think it is a little harder with this wire to get the wire really tight on the wick, so until you vape a tank or so the flavor might not be 100 percent. if you look really closely between the wire & wick do you see any gaps at all? sometimes it is hard to see these without a magnifying glass. if there are it can take a little time for those gaps to fill in from the juice build up and oxidation, but once they fill in you will see an improvement in flavor & vapor production. if you are noticing to much lag with the ceramic you might have to reduce your resistance a little. with the 1/8 ceramic wick and thick wire you may notice this, and being that you have a resistance of 1.2 with a mechanical mod you can afford to reduce slightly. sometimes it may require more then 12 watts for this set-up, but if your happy then all is good. but if you did want to decrease the lag time then lower the resistance slightly, and being that you are using flat wire your wick coverage would still be good. how did you wrap the wire?

 

[jasl90]

Just got the good copy uploaded to Google Docs.
This one has two tabs. The 1st tab has ohms broken out by 10th ohm increments and the 2nd tab has them broken out by 100th ohm increments.
ProVari Numbers2.xlsx

And for the super nerds... Here is the SQL Code used to put the numbers together...

--===============================================================
-- Hi Res --

IF OBJECT_ID ('tempdb..#Volts1') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Volts1
CREATE TABLE #Volts1 (Volts DECIMAL (2,1))
DECLARE @v1 DECIMAL (2,1) = 2.9
WHILE @v1 <= 6
BEGIN
INSERT INTO #Volts1 (Volts) VALUES (@v1)
SET @v1 = @v1 + .1
END

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Ohms1') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Ohms1
CREATE TABLE #Ohms1 (Ohms DECIMAL (3,2))
DECLARE @o1 DECIMAL (3,2) = .5
WHILE @o1 <= 4
BEGIN
INSERT INTO #Ohms1 (Ohms) VALUES (@o1)
SET @o1 = @o1 + .01
END

SELECT
v.Volts,
hms,
v.Volts / hms AS Amps,
v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms) AS Watts,
(v.Volts / hms) * (v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms)) AS [ProVari Number]
FROM
#Volts1 v
CROSS JOIN #Ohms1 o
WHERE
(v.Volts / hms) * (v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms)) <= 50
ORDER BY Watts DESC


--===============================================================
-- Low Res --

IF OBJECT_ID ('tempdb..#Volts2') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Volts2
CREATE TABLE #Volts2 (Volts DECIMAL (2,1))
DECLARE @v2 DECIMAL (2,1) = 2.9
WHILE @v2 <= 6
BEGIN
INSERT INTO #Volts2 (Volts) VALUES (@v2)
SET @v2 = @v2 + .1
END

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Ohms2') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Ohms2
CREATE TABLE #Ohms2 (Ohms DECIMAL (2,1))
DECLARE @o2 DECIMAL (2,1) = .5
WHILE @o2 <= 4
BEGIN
INSERT INTO #Ohms2 (Ohms) VALUES (@o2)
SET @o2 = @o2 + .1
END

SELECT
v.Volts,
hms,
v.Volts / hms AS Amps,
v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms) AS Watts,
(v.Volts / hms) * (v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms)) AS [ProVari Number]
FROM
#Volts2 v
CROSS JOIN #Ohms2 o
WHERE
(v.Volts / hms) * (v.Volts * (v.Volts / hms)) <= 50
ORDER BY Watts DESC

 

[vapdivrr]

Should I keep the coils spread apart or keep them tight? I can go no lower than 1ohm on my device.

you know there is not all that much space to really work with on the wick, and if your going to do a 4/5 i believe you will need to use all of the wick, so their going to be rather close. just try to space them evenly. if your device will let you go to 1 ohm a 3/4 might work even better. if you dont own a provari v-2, i believe you wouldnt be able to go under 1.2 to 1.3.

 

[vapdivrr]

5.3 v is as high as the provari goes on my 1.8...today the wick decided to kick it up a notch...man I have never blown that much smoke that tasted that good...Amazing I think Im hooked on this...now Im going to wait on the slotted wicks and try them. Maybe the Vapman can share that info when he gets it. Thanks again jasl90 for the charts good to have them thanks for the effort!! Im being wisked away in vape heaven right now!!

a few pages back i posted some info on the slotted wicks, and i did use the slotted one in the video i posted as well. i am totaly sold on the slotted wicks, i think they are the best fc wicks to date. the main reason i believe is that they seem to heat up faster, decreasing the lag time. this is due to the composition being slightly more open and because of the slots there is less area to heat up, so less heat sink. before these slotted wick the only down fall for me was the slight lag time from the initial vape, but now this seems to be less. also the slotted wicks do wick faster. at very hi wattages i can hold the mod at the 1 to 2 oclock position and fire it without the coils glowing. with the previous wicks i would have to hold to 2 to 3 oclock postion. i believe that next week these slotted wicks will be out.

 

[vapdivrr]

I vape mostly 100% VG, some 20/80 PG/VG, (diy, some retail) i watched tim_man's vid and that is generally what i am doing long slow, heavy draws and the the device kicks in, i'm guessing that is the coil-wick heating up, if that's normal i'm good?

so much for that theory. i also vape mostly 100 vg. i guess it can be the heat sink that your describing. in testing out the new slotted i have found this to be alot better. what wattage are you vaping? this lag time is decresed at higher watts. with ss mesh wicks this size wick and thick wire didnt matter much but with ceramic, especially the 1/8 wicks and thick wire you need more watts because the ceramic takes alot longer to heat up.

 

[vapdivrr]

Thinking of you guys and what happened in the marathon yesterday. Hope none of your families were touched by this disgusting act. Want to see these rsholes caught as soon as possible.

terrible thing isnt it? fortunatly i wasnt immediatly affected, but my thoughts do go out for those who are not as fortunate. thanks

 

[Elias]

terrible thing isnt it? fortunatly i wasnt immediatly affected, but my thoughts do go out for those who are not as fortunate. thanks

I worked in Boston some 15 years back, lived in the 4 story last waterfront apartment located on Long Wharf which is across the park and a couple of blocks away from where it happened, Boston is my most favorite city in the US, so peaceful, so relaxing, people are so nice, has the fishing village type feel to it yet is a city with all the hussle and bussle, my heart goes out to all effected by it.

 

[tim_man]

Hard to see any gaps...definitely need to get a magnifying glass. As for taste, it is getting a little better now. When posted the vid yesterday I had only vaped with the ceramic for less than an hour. Now after a tank it seems to be better. I'll see how it goes after a couple of days. Thanks for the tips. Next coil will be lower ohms with either 30 or 28 gauge. May even attempt that hot-wrap method.

hey tim man nice set-up, cant go wrong on a did & poldiac. i believe you will definatly get more flavor as the wick breaks in more, this is especially the case with flat kanthal, i think it is a little harder with this wire to get the wire really tight on the wick, so until you vape a tank or so the flavor might not be 100 percent. if you look really closely between the wire & wick do you see any gaps at all? sometimes it is hard to see these without a magnifying glass. if there are it can take a little time for those gaps to fill in from the juice build up and oxidation, but once they fill in you will see an improvement in flavor & vapor production. if you are noticing to much lag with the ceramic you might have to reduce your resistance a little. with the 1/8 ceramic wick and thick wire you may notice this, and being that you have a resistance of 1.2 with a mechanical mod you can afford to reduce slightly. sometimes it may require more then 12 watts for this set-up, but if your happy then all is good. but if you did want to decrease the lag time then lower the resistance slightly, and being that you are using flat wire your wick coverage would still be good. how did you wrap the wire?

 

[Railrust]

Hope I dont go off the subject to much...but has anyone had a problem with the AC9 screwing into the 510 connection on some devices?

 

[DSmooch]

Just got the good copy uploaded to Google Docs.
This one has two tabs. The 1st tab has ohms broken out by 10th ohm increments and the 2nd tab has them broken out by 100th ohm increments.
ProVari Numbers2.xlsx

And for the super nerds... Here is the SQL Code used to put the numbers together...

thought it was a joke until I actually read the code.. beautiful!
could even drop the objects in the end if you really wanted to leave nothing behind, but who cares

 

[jasl90]

thought it was a joke until I actually read the code.. beautiful!
could even drop the objects in the end if you really wanted to leave nothing behind, but who cares

Why thank you!
I do make it a point to explicitly drop temp tables in any code that's going into production... Not that it matters, they drop auto-magically as soon as they fall out of scope anyway.
This was just a quickie I threw together after I got some hard numbers from Provape back in January.

 

[vapdivrr]

Hard to see any gaps...definitely need to get a magnifying glass. As for taste, it is getting a little better now. When posted the vid yesterday I had only vaped with the ceramic for less than an hour. Now after a tank it seems to be better. I'll see how it goes after a couple of days. Thanks for the tips. Next coil will be lower ohms with either 30 or 28 gauge. May even attempt that hot-wrap method.

you know when i first started vaping ceramic i noticed better flavor then ss, sometime later i picked up another one of my set ups that was still set up with mesh and couldnt vape it. so give it some time and after a week or so go back to ss mesh and see if you cant taste the difference. also i had thought you made this set-up with either 30g or 28, but being that you said you might try them next makes me think your current set-up is 32g, is this right? if so that is a fairly low resistance for 32g wire which makes me believe that this could be why the flavor mute. everyone that has come over from 32 to either 30 or 28 has said the flavor is much better.

 

[gdeal]

a few pages back i posted some info on the slotted wicks, and i did use the slotted one in the video i posted as well. i am totaly sold on the slotted wicks, i think they are the best fc wicks to date. the main reason i believe is that they seem to heat up faster, decreasing the lag time. this is due to the composition being slightly more open and because of the slots there is less area to heat up, so less heat sink. before these slotted wick the only down fall for me was the slight lag time from the initial vape, but now this seems to be less. also the slotted wicks do wick faster. at very hi wattages i can hold the mod at the 1 to 2 oclock position and fire it without the coils glowing. with the previous wicks i would have to hold to 2 to 3 oclock postion. i believe that next week these slotted wicks will be out.

v-man : It would be interesting to compare the new formulation of the slotted wick with the same formulation with a non-slotted wick. While I dont have a slotted wick yet. I am still trying to understand why creating a gap underneath the coil would provide a better vape (putting aside the increased wicking of the new stuff). Going from a manual hand wrap to a hot wrap (thank you Elias!) changed my whole perspective on ceramic wicks. Eliminating those microgaps was the game changer for me. Now we have micro gaps but better wicking. Its a bit confusing...

 

[vapdivrr]

v-man : It would be interesting to compare the new formulation of the slotted wick with the same formulation with a non-slotted wick. While I dont have a slotted wick yet. I am still trying to understand why creating a gap underneath the coil would provide a better vape (putting aside the increased wicking of the new stuff). Going from a manual hand wrap to a hot wrap (thank you Elias!) changed my whole perspective on ceramic wicks. Eliminating those microgaps was the game changer for me. Now we have micro gaps but better wicking. Its a bit confusing...

yes it would be interesting to compare, and to be honest i really am unsure if they all are going to be slotted or not. i dont quite understand it either, i keep telling people that the most important factor is not having any gaps, yet this new design requires them. all i can think of is that if you have gaps and no juice, thats bad, no flavor and possible dry hits, but if these gaps have a supply of juice behind them, then its all good.

 

[zygote]

so much for that theory. i also vape mostly 100 vg. i guess it can be the heat sink that your describing. in testing out the new slotted i have found this to be alot better. what wattage are you vaping? this lag time is decresed at higher watts. with ss mesh wicks this size wick and thick wire didnt matter much but with ceramic, especially the 1/8 wicks and thick wire you need more watts because the ceramic takes alot longer to heat up.

My first RBA was a zen~, i JUST VAPE IT! I am running a 2-3 wrap 28k on the 1/8 ceramic and a fatty ss. I sanded down the wick just enough to get some wiggle room and was impatient to wrap and did not EHW, big mistake, there are gaps you could drive a truck through so for tonite i am using another rig and tomorow i will hot wrap. Also a heads up for everyone ELECTRONICSTIX is supposed to put up some of those new wicks that you have VAP., time is unknown, it will probably be a free for all, so be fast. Cool thread man.

 

[ricks]

I have a lot of space for the coil. I've gotton as much as 8 wraps on the ceramic with 32g on my did clone. I can go down to 1Ω on my device. I just wondered if the wraps should be spread out or close together.

you know there is not all that much space to really work with on the wick, and if your going to do a 4/5 i believe you will need to use all of the wick, so their going to be rather close. just try to space them evenly. if your device will let you go to 1 ohm a 3/4 might work even better. if you dont own a provari v-2, i believe you wouldnt be able to go under 1.2 to 1.3.

 

[gdeal]

yes it would be interesting to compare, and to be honest i really am unsure if they all are going to be slotted or not. i dont quite understand it either, i keep telling people that the most important factor is not having any gaps, yet this new design requires them. all i can think of is that if you have gaps and no juice, thats bad, no flavor and possible dry hits, but if these gaps have a supply of juice behind them, then its all good.

I hear ya, if you say its working better, I am in. However, the one side of me that says "if its all good just go with it" is debating with the other side saying "push"....

 

[Hello World]

yes it would be interesting to compare, and to be honest i really am unsure if they all are going to be slotted or not. i dont quite understand it either, i keep telling people that the most important factor is not having any gaps, yet this new design requires them. all i can think of is that if you have gaps and no juice, thats bad, no flavor and possible dry hits, but if these gaps have a supply of juice behind them, then its all good.

The pores of the ceramic itself serve as gaps, and juice does travel up the outside of the wick, and that flood has a thickness.

In view of that, how close really does the Kanthal need to be to the wick?

Do hot-wraps restrict the upflow of the juice somewhat, whereas slotting and hand-wrapping provide a faster path providing no visible gaps exist?

I'm more inclined to believe an optimum distance range is more applicable rather than any absolute position between wick and wire, since heat sink effects can also be considered within that equation.

Maybe someone will do a comparison test on it sometime. My hand-wrapped 28ga Kanthal coils show no visible voids even with a 5x loupe, and the vape as far as I'm concerned is perfect. But I also know it cannot possibly be on as tight as a hot-wrap, be it Elias' or Dan's.

I don't think I ever had a better setup than I have right now. Almost no time lags (no primer puffing), no heat-sink effects, more vapor than I can comfortably inhale, the 1.2ohm mechanical is almost knocking me out (The other 1.4ohm, 28ga hand-wrapped Genny not quite, but close) ... and that's at 6mgs, the clean taste of the nic nearly overbearing. All so good, I get breathing difficulties if I don't watch it ...

Blowing through 4 x 3.2ml tanks daily.

 

[gdeal]

@Hello World

That the $64K question here. Did the micro gaps really only make a difference because of the pore structure on the previous version of FC-2000?

I agree that tightness is not necessary, it all about the position of wire on wick. At some point, a gap will make a difference and become a noticeable hotspot, but what is that distance? That said I really cant imagine getting a significantly better vape than what I am getting with the non-slotted version with no gaps, other than maybe a slightly faster response time/less heat sink for the larger diameter versions. We may be talking about splitting hairs....but I am still gonna get a couple to try anyway. Funny, how much more free time you have not dealing with SS Mesh.

 

[Elias]

The pores of the ceramic itself serve as gaps, and juice does travel up the outside of the wick, and that flood has a thickness.

In view of that, how close really does the Kanthal need to be to the wick?

Do hot-wraps restrict the upflow of the juice somewhat, whereas slotting and hand-wrapping provide a faster path providing no visible gaps exist?

I'm more inclined to believe an optimum distance range is more applicable rather than any absolute position between wick and wire, since heat sink effects can also be considered within that equation.

Maybe someone will do a comparison test on it sometime. My hand-wrapped 28ga Kanthal coils show no visible voids even with a 5x loupe, and the vape as far as I'm concerned is perfect. But I also know it cannot possibly be on as tight as a hot-wrap, be it Elias' or Dan's.

I don't think I ever had a better setup than I have right now. Almost no time lags (no primer puffing), no heat-sink effects, more vapor than I can comfortably inhale, the 1.2ohm mechanical is almost knocking me out (The other 1.4ohm, 28ga hand-wrapped Genny not quite, but close) ... and that's at 6mgs, the clean taste of the nic nearly overbearing. All so good, I get breathing difficulties if I don't watch it ...

Blowing through 4 x 3.2ml tanks daily.

I thought I was bad going through 2x 3.5ml tanks on some days, I found that when I do I have a thirst probably due to the nic in the juice, I also found that its like being in a steam room, the heart works a little harder and you dont want to go run a marathon not that I run marathons but just dont feel I could when I vape heavily... it may just be imaginary and I might actually be fine....
I also found that if I vape too much I can no longer get the taste of the vape, heck one night I remember after a fairly heavy vape day I mixed juices, the next day when I tasted the same juice I had to reduce the mix by adding 50% more PG and VG.

Coming back to the ceramics... I was getting a great vape when there was no gap around the wick hole, but when I made the hole larger the juice flowed better, does this mean that gappy is better? your making us think here, looking at the results of the slotted and your hand wraps might mean that those gaps here and there might be more beneficial that a tight wrap using heat be it flame or electric wraps.

I am setting up a little jig for my dremel tool that simply makes it slide so I can groove the ceramics I have here and try it out, I was going to grove it just before the coil starts but not under the coil section initially and then take it out and grove it again all the way up to see the difference, but in light of whats being said here I think I might try a hand wrap as well just for comparisons sake.

arghhh an all day project by the looks of things....

I also have various diamond coated tips some that are simply small drill bit types, I was going to hollow out the top part of the wick also to see if the speed of heat up by having less mass produces a better vape or a dry hit because it gets too hot.

the testing is all over the place at the moment and I dont have time for everything, but I am planning on trying various things, hopefully all of the above.... lol wishful thinking....

Elias