Disclaimer: I received this device for free from FocalECig.com for the purposes of this review. I do not have any information at present about the RRP.
So this is the Fillian RDTA, from ShenRay. It’s a “true” RDTA in my opinion – the design is very much a deck sat on top of a tank, so essentially a dripper with exceptionally deep juice wells. It borrows an awful lot from existing RDTAs, particularly the Limitless, which has a very similar design.
I’ve broken this review down into sections of interest, with a summary at the end. Thanks for reading!
Packaging / Contents
The box the device comes in is quite nice – a commonly-seen hinged cardboard box with a magnetic catch, fairly sturdy. No real details of the device on the outside, although it does have some “features” listed which I will let you judge for yourself – ShenRay may wish to revisit the content of the text! I would have liked to see some additional information about the device itself, such as dimensions, materials etc. Not an absolute must though.
In the box is the device itself, fully assembled, along with a bag of spares. This includes the usual o-rings, several spare grub screws, an allen key, and a 510 adaptor for your own drip tip. The included drip tip is a screw-in delrin one, with a huge bore (about 12mm diameter). The adaptor appears to be stainless steel.
There is no instruction leaflet, which is a shame. I would have expected one to come with it – even simple information would be better than none at all.
Build Quality / Appearance
So this is the Fillian:
The tank is a hair under 25mm in diameter, with no flaring at any point. It fits very nicely on an RX200, which is what I’ve been using to power it. It’s 46mm in height, excluding the drip tip and 510. It comes in at 75g with a couple of coils installed but no liquid or wick.
The first thing that struck me was that the device has quite some weight to it. No flimsy steel here – everything has heft, and the walls of every section are quite thick. The top cap in particular is extremely chunky, with deep cuts into the edges to provide a bit of styling and to add grip when unscrewing. It may also help it to act as a heat sink. No issues with quality of materials here at all.
The overall appearance of the device is fairly spartan. It has the ShenRay logo deeply engraved into the tank section, but other than that it’s quite plain when it’s on a mod. That’s not to say this is a bad thing – it looks quite industrial, which I rather like. The drip tip suits the device pretty well, although the lip around the base of it feels a little unnecessary.
Unfortunately it did smell of machine oil when received. Nothing a soak in hot soapy water didn’t solve.
Threading is excellent throughout. No burrs, no problems catching the threads when assembling. Very nice.
The base has the device name and manufacturer, a CE logo, and a serial number.
The 510 pin appears to be solid brass, and screws into the base to connect with the deck directly. It is both adjustable and completely removable, allowing the tank to be fully broken down for cleaning. I had no issues with the 510 connector itself; it’s about average in terms of height, and screwing it onto an RX200 wasn’t a problem at all.
The o-rings seem to be nitrile, and fairly decent quality – however sizing appears to be a bit of an issue. More on that later.
Functionality / Performance
The device has a deck very similar to that in the Limitless, the Theorem and various others; however it does not use the velocity-style post layout, instead opting for horizontally aligned wire holes. Those holes are pretty enormous – they appear to be 3mm high by 2mm wide, each. Easily enough room for some very chunky coils indeed. The usual issues with room do apply when coiling the deck with this layout, specifically with the tails of the second coil interfering with the already-installed coil on the other side. Not a massive problem though.
I had no issues with wire snipping, even with soft wire. The grub screws appear to be of good quality, and are not sharp. As usual however I would recommend using a proper hex driver, as the included allen key is not brilliant.
Insulators appear to be PEEK.
Plenty of room in the chamber for some BIG coils. There’s almost a full centimetre of space between the posts and the chamber walls on either side. I put in some 3.5mm coils, and they look pretty small!
The two air holes going through to the deck (directly onto the coils) are 12mm x 3mm. Absolutely huge. I can easily breathe through this tank even with them closed off half way. For some reason ShenRay added three of them on the inner section, implying that the device can be used in single-coil mode – however there is no single coil adaptor included, so you would have to plug the liquid channels yourself with cotton or something similar. Suffice to say though, this is not a MTL device.
Assembly of the tank is straightforward. The lower section screws down onto the 510 base, which has the deck attached to it via a hollow post (which the 510 pin goes through - the deck, by the way, unscrews from this post, allowing even easier cleaning). Once that’s assembled, the upper section (comprised of an inner sleeve, an air control ring, and the top cap) pops onto the tank section and is held with two o-rings. This allows for rotation of the upper section to allow for positioning of the air holes on the coils.
Air flow is controlled with the AFC ring, which is “locked” into place by screwing the top cap down. To adjust airflow, you unscrew the top cap slightly, reposition the AFC ring, and screw the cap back down. Not a terrible design, but a bit fiddly, especially one-handed.
This is where one of its flaws comes in, unfortunately. The o-rings on the lower section are simply not chunky enough to grip the top section. It spins far too easily, thus knocking the air holes out of alignment. I have also had the top section pop off just when wiping the tank down. If you try to pick it up by the tank, even with a super-light mod attached, it will separate. The spare o-rings are the same. Whether this is an o-ring issue or a design tolerance issue, I have no way of knowing, but it is a pain. It renders it a tabletop device, as it’s not pocketable without having to check alignment every time you take it out for a vape.
Having said that – performance is, thankfully, excellent. I built it with two 3.5mm SS317L coils, wicking with Rayon and leaving the tails long enough to touch the base of the tank. Overall the build came out at 0.47 ohms. Due to the huge air holes, anything under 75W was a bit lacklustre – but 100W and above is where things really start to come alive. With the air holes half closed (the smallest they can go, due to the inclusion of a third hole), vapour production is really something. Huge clouds, no issues with wicking whatsoever, and somewhat surprisingly flavour is excellent too, despite the size of the chamber.
Opening the air holes up completely results in massive clouds, with slightly more muted flavour. I pushed up to 150W before things got too hot for me, and there was no indication that it wasn’t keeping up with wicking. This is maybe to be expected, since there is no restriction on the wicks at all, so it essentially acts like a dripper on steroids.
The top cap design does work well as a heat sink, and the delrin drip tip is good for keeping things cool.
So performance is fantastic – but a few additional flaws to mention in this section, unfortunately.
Unlike the Limitless and similar tanks, this one uses a solid stainless tank section. That means you don’t know when it’s full, because the wicks block your view when it’s assembled. However, since the deck unscrews from the base, you could feasibly fill it up before screwing the assembled deck on. But that’s a faff, and it’s not really an option when refilling.
On the subject of refilling – also a bit of a pain. Because of how the wicks are placed, there’s not enough room to fit a standard thin-tip dropper bottle in without compressing the wicks. I'm not really sure what capacity it has, since there was no information provided, and it's highly dependent on your wick setup. But I estimated it at around 4-5ml, assuming it was full since there's no way to check!
Finally, it suffers from something of a leaking problem. This is to be expected from the deck, due to its design – you would never leave something like this on its side, as there’s no way to keep the liquid in place. However I also had a very slow seep from the base section where the tank screws on. Likely another o-ring sizing issue, which was not resolved by using the spares.
So, an overall list of pros and cons for the ShenRay Fillian RDTA:
Pros:
- Excellent performance, for both flavour and vapour production
- Excellent wicking capability – keeps up at very high wattage
- Good build deck, with huge wire holes allowing any build you can think of to be installed
- Easy to wick
- Great build quality – specifically for the steel construction and the 510 pin
- Easily disassembled, allowing for cleaning
- Decent spares pack
Cons:
- O-rings are not up to the job of keeping things in place, including the top cap and liquid in the tank. Swapping these out with thicker ones may or may not resolve this
- Filling and refilling is a pain, both in terms of knowing it’s full and fitting a dropper nozzle in
- Fiddly AFC adjustment
- Third air hole on the chamber sleeve seems redundant without a single-coil adapter included
- No information included with the device, either on the box or on an instruction leaflet
Overall, I don’t hate the Fillian. It’s not entirely my thing, since I chase flavour rather than clouds, but it is pretty good fun. I suspect that with some o-ring modifications to fix the leaking and looseness issues, it would be nice to have sat to one side to pick up from time to time for some cloud chucking.
For those who like cloud chasing and the option of putting in ridiculously complex builds, if you can overlook its flaws, this could be a winner. It's one of the easiest and roomiest decks I've built on, and air flow is second to none. Dripper performance with lots of liquid capacity.
So this is the Fillian RDTA, from ShenRay. It’s a “true” RDTA in my opinion – the design is very much a deck sat on top of a tank, so essentially a dripper with exceptionally deep juice wells. It borrows an awful lot from existing RDTAs, particularly the Limitless, which has a very similar design.
I’ve broken this review down into sections of interest, with a summary at the end. Thanks for reading!
Packaging / Contents
The box the device comes in is quite nice – a commonly-seen hinged cardboard box with a magnetic catch, fairly sturdy. No real details of the device on the outside, although it does have some “features” listed which I will let you judge for yourself – ShenRay may wish to revisit the content of the text! I would have liked to see some additional information about the device itself, such as dimensions, materials etc. Not an absolute must though.
In the box is the device itself, fully assembled, along with a bag of spares. This includes the usual o-rings, several spare grub screws, an allen key, and a 510 adaptor for your own drip tip. The included drip tip is a screw-in delrin one, with a huge bore (about 12mm diameter). The adaptor appears to be stainless steel.
There is no instruction leaflet, which is a shame. I would have expected one to come with it – even simple information would be better than none at all.
Build Quality / Appearance
So this is the Fillian:
The tank is a hair under 25mm in diameter, with no flaring at any point. It fits very nicely on an RX200, which is what I’ve been using to power it. It’s 46mm in height, excluding the drip tip and 510. It comes in at 75g with a couple of coils installed but no liquid or wick.
The first thing that struck me was that the device has quite some weight to it. No flimsy steel here – everything has heft, and the walls of every section are quite thick. The top cap in particular is extremely chunky, with deep cuts into the edges to provide a bit of styling and to add grip when unscrewing. It may also help it to act as a heat sink. No issues with quality of materials here at all.
The overall appearance of the device is fairly spartan. It has the ShenRay logo deeply engraved into the tank section, but other than that it’s quite plain when it’s on a mod. That’s not to say this is a bad thing – it looks quite industrial, which I rather like. The drip tip suits the device pretty well, although the lip around the base of it feels a little unnecessary.
Unfortunately it did smell of machine oil when received. Nothing a soak in hot soapy water didn’t solve.
Threading is excellent throughout. No burrs, no problems catching the threads when assembling. Very nice.
The base has the device name and manufacturer, a CE logo, and a serial number.
The 510 pin appears to be solid brass, and screws into the base to connect with the deck directly. It is both adjustable and completely removable, allowing the tank to be fully broken down for cleaning. I had no issues with the 510 connector itself; it’s about average in terms of height, and screwing it onto an RX200 wasn’t a problem at all.
The o-rings seem to be nitrile, and fairly decent quality – however sizing appears to be a bit of an issue. More on that later.
Functionality / Performance
The device has a deck very similar to that in the Limitless, the Theorem and various others; however it does not use the velocity-style post layout, instead opting for horizontally aligned wire holes. Those holes are pretty enormous – they appear to be 3mm high by 2mm wide, each. Easily enough room for some very chunky coils indeed. The usual issues with room do apply when coiling the deck with this layout, specifically with the tails of the second coil interfering with the already-installed coil on the other side. Not a massive problem though.
I had no issues with wire snipping, even with soft wire. The grub screws appear to be of good quality, and are not sharp. As usual however I would recommend using a proper hex driver, as the included allen key is not brilliant.
Insulators appear to be PEEK.
Plenty of room in the chamber for some BIG coils. There’s almost a full centimetre of space between the posts and the chamber walls on either side. I put in some 3.5mm coils, and they look pretty small!
The two air holes going through to the deck (directly onto the coils) are 12mm x 3mm. Absolutely huge. I can easily breathe through this tank even with them closed off half way. For some reason ShenRay added three of them on the inner section, implying that the device can be used in single-coil mode – however there is no single coil adaptor included, so you would have to plug the liquid channels yourself with cotton or something similar. Suffice to say though, this is not a MTL device.
Assembly of the tank is straightforward. The lower section screws down onto the 510 base, which has the deck attached to it via a hollow post (which the 510 pin goes through - the deck, by the way, unscrews from this post, allowing even easier cleaning). Once that’s assembled, the upper section (comprised of an inner sleeve, an air control ring, and the top cap) pops onto the tank section and is held with two o-rings. This allows for rotation of the upper section to allow for positioning of the air holes on the coils.
Air flow is controlled with the AFC ring, which is “locked” into place by screwing the top cap down. To adjust airflow, you unscrew the top cap slightly, reposition the AFC ring, and screw the cap back down. Not a terrible design, but a bit fiddly, especially one-handed.
This is where one of its flaws comes in, unfortunately. The o-rings on the lower section are simply not chunky enough to grip the top section. It spins far too easily, thus knocking the air holes out of alignment. I have also had the top section pop off just when wiping the tank down. If you try to pick it up by the tank, even with a super-light mod attached, it will separate. The spare o-rings are the same. Whether this is an o-ring issue or a design tolerance issue, I have no way of knowing, but it is a pain. It renders it a tabletop device, as it’s not pocketable without having to check alignment every time you take it out for a vape.
Having said that – performance is, thankfully, excellent. I built it with two 3.5mm SS317L coils, wicking with Rayon and leaving the tails long enough to touch the base of the tank. Overall the build came out at 0.47 ohms. Due to the huge air holes, anything under 75W was a bit lacklustre – but 100W and above is where things really start to come alive. With the air holes half closed (the smallest they can go, due to the inclusion of a third hole), vapour production is really something. Huge clouds, no issues with wicking whatsoever, and somewhat surprisingly flavour is excellent too, despite the size of the chamber.
Opening the air holes up completely results in massive clouds, with slightly more muted flavour. I pushed up to 150W before things got too hot for me, and there was no indication that it wasn’t keeping up with wicking. This is maybe to be expected, since there is no restriction on the wicks at all, so it essentially acts like a dripper on steroids.
The top cap design does work well as a heat sink, and the delrin drip tip is good for keeping things cool.
So performance is fantastic – but a few additional flaws to mention in this section, unfortunately.
Unlike the Limitless and similar tanks, this one uses a solid stainless tank section. That means you don’t know when it’s full, because the wicks block your view when it’s assembled. However, since the deck unscrews from the base, you could feasibly fill it up before screwing the assembled deck on. But that’s a faff, and it’s not really an option when refilling.
On the subject of refilling – also a bit of a pain. Because of how the wicks are placed, there’s not enough room to fit a standard thin-tip dropper bottle in without compressing the wicks. I'm not really sure what capacity it has, since there was no information provided, and it's highly dependent on your wick setup. But I estimated it at around 4-5ml, assuming it was full since there's no way to check!
Finally, it suffers from something of a leaking problem. This is to be expected from the deck, due to its design – you would never leave something like this on its side, as there’s no way to keep the liquid in place. However I also had a very slow seep from the base section where the tank screws on. Likely another o-ring sizing issue, which was not resolved by using the spares.
So, an overall list of pros and cons for the ShenRay Fillian RDTA:
Pros:
- Excellent performance, for both flavour and vapour production
- Excellent wicking capability – keeps up at very high wattage
- Good build deck, with huge wire holes allowing any build you can think of to be installed
- Easy to wick
- Great build quality – specifically for the steel construction and the 510 pin
- Easily disassembled, allowing for cleaning
- Decent spares pack
Cons:
- O-rings are not up to the job of keeping things in place, including the top cap and liquid in the tank. Swapping these out with thicker ones may or may not resolve this
- Filling and refilling is a pain, both in terms of knowing it’s full and fitting a dropper nozzle in
- Fiddly AFC adjustment
- Third air hole on the chamber sleeve seems redundant without a single-coil adapter included
- No information included with the device, either on the box or on an instruction leaflet
Overall, I don’t hate the Fillian. It’s not entirely my thing, since I chase flavour rather than clouds, but it is pretty good fun. I suspect that with some o-ring modifications to fix the leaking and looseness issues, it would be nice to have sat to one side to pick up from time to time for some cloud chucking.
For those who like cloud chasing and the option of putting in ridiculously complex builds, if you can overlook its flaws, this could be a winner. It's one of the easiest and roomiest decks I've built on, and air flow is second to none. Dripper performance with lots of liquid capacity.
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