if you want to wrap around silica:
Wrap your silica over once or twice depending on how thick you want it.
Hold a needle - like a sewing pin or something else really thin but decently sturdy - horizontally and place the wrapped silica ontop of that.
the needle will give the you a firmer object to warp your coil around, making it MUCH less frustrating.
That said, micro coils are the way to go, with cotton. Cotton is cheap, highly available, has better flavor than silica for most, and easy to rewick a coil with.
Microcoils are easy to rewick. I've seen some people say a loose coil (normal coil, like what comes stock in the protank head, some times called spiral coil) isn't hard to wick - but be that as it may, I find a microcoil much easier to wick as the wraps wont get all wonky as you feed the cotton through.
When rewicking, you only have to recoil the head once a month or so depending on how you vape and the juice you use. Vaping thicker juice, darker juice, or juice with sweetener will cause more wear and tear on your coil, causing you to have to reqwick more often and replace your coil more often, its not too bad though. Vaping more often will obviously also cause your coil to need replacing sooner.
All that said, rebuilding protank heads is a good way to get started in rebuildables... it is a HUGE PITA, so its like learning to drive a standard transmission (in a clown car) before going to a (compact) automatic. There is very little room in those stock heads, and you really have to get it right to make it work in my experiance. too much wick and your getting dry hits, too little wick and the thing floods and leaks on you. RDAs (rebuildable dripping atomizers) are MUCH easier to work with because there is a much larger build area (build deck) and its a ton less finicky with getting the right amount of cotton (though wicking is still important and too much/too little will have similar results as your PT heads). RTAs (rebuildable tank atomizers) come in all shapes and sizes, and some can be finicky and more difficult to build/wick than others, but in my opinion they are still considerably easier to build than a protank head IMO, though I've never built on a Genesis style RTA.
hth
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