I can't thank DeeLeeKay enough for sending a 5-pack of cartos. I was down to only one functioning bloog, so she helped in the nick of time. My wife and I have our own cartos again.
However... I must say QC on these things leave a lot to be desired. With my now infamous original 10 cartos, the resistance was consistently 2.5-2.6. The resistance of these new 5 were not so consistent. Dismayingly most varied under moderate pressure on the battery tip. I discovered this when some of the cartos wouldn't work, or work reliably, unless threaded so lightly they wiggled a lot. Two of them had a stinging rancid acidic taste.
3.5, 3.1-3.9 under pressure
2.4 consistent
2.5, 2.5-2.8 under pressure
2.6, 1.1-2.8 under pressure
2.5, 0.9-2.6 under pressure
For the ohms to drop as much as they did on the last two, the battery tip wire must have been bowing to the point of almost shorting on the shell or the other wire.
I really didn't feel like taking them apart, so I looked through them with my (well, my wife's) trusty 30X loupe. I could see that: 3 of the cartos had the coil way off to the side; 1 coil was centered but the coil was loose and one of the leads crossed back over the coils; the coil wasn't even visible in one of the cartos... Sigh.
Yes, I took them apart... It's not fun anymore. I wasted 2.5 hours of my evening. Three of them looked like Rift's pic where part of the coil was actually in the slit of the tube. One them had the coil just completely against the side of the tube. The coil was actually completely outside the tube on one! I'm sure that would have tasted really good soon. On the plus side, the wicks were long enough to easily span the tube unlike my original cartos.
The adhesive was nothing like my original cartos. Not one had anywhere near as much adhesive. Most had a small paper thin ring, instead of a fat thick ring. One had just barely enough to adhere to the silicone sleeve and the inwards pulled out with little pressure. I didn't have to swivel the tube to release it. One had virtually no adhesive and the innards just pulled right out. At first I thought I reopened one again, but I hadn't.
The wicks look completely different than after being used for a while. It almost has the same appearance as the tube's braiding, which means it's probably fiberglass too. If true, I'm not sure I like the possibility of breathing in shards of fiberglass, but the coil should be holding it all together. The juice gums things up so that should help too.
I managed to get 3 of them to be consistently 2.4-2.6 and they seem to work reasonably well, although there is noticeable variance in the taste of identical liquids. Two of them are still unusably rancid, but one of them is 2.2 and the other still drops precipitously under pressure. I'll probably mess with them some more when I have nothing better to do.
I really like the way these cartos hit, or I wouldn't keep doing this. At this point, I can't recommend these to my friends who would expect me to mess with them and it's getting to be a waste of my time. Oh please, oh please, let the next batch be better and/or come out with the filler-less carto that was hinted in another post...
