My REO hates me...

[Vegastar]

Something has gone catastrophically wrong with my Grand... I mean like, when it rains it pours kind of wrong.

Yesterday I noticed my reomizer wasn't firing at all. No big deal, I figure, that crappy little rod in the middle probably came loose again. Clean, disassemble, reattach parts, fire... nothing! What?

I threw it on my chinese provari knockoff and ohm'd it. 1.8, as expected. It fires fine!

Yanked the Kick out and threw in the 18650 from the clonevari... works! I guess something's wrong with my kick. Too bad.

Today, using the same coil setup and battery and... hey, what's that rattling? Oh... oh goody, the spring melted. Something shorted out. Pull spring back up, replace coil with smaller, well built coil. Fires fine, but I take a peek inside and sparks are flying off the battery! Oh [expletive deleted]... Yank the battery back out, put in new battery. Super short test fire. Same thing.

[multiple expletives deleted]. Change the reomizer over to a carto. SPARKS! Oh god.

Try to disassemble the reomizer, and it's stuck. Grab the pliers and get a hold of the body, and end up tearing off a chunk of the sidewall.

End result: blown out kick, destroyed (and thrown the heck away) reomizer, unknown shorting issue resulting from multiple cartos/attys that is not a blown out gasket (everything is exactly the way it was after rob repaired my 510 connector a month ago, I do not overtighten things, and heck, it's only had the reomizer on it since I got it back!)

I think I just lost about a hundred bucks in vaping gear in one 24 hour period, plus my reo acting up. This is a really terrible day.

Any ideas on just how to redeem this short of shipping everything back to robert again? If it's gone that far, I'm just gonna replace it with a VV when taxes come back.

 

[ltrainer]

Could you have inadvertently put the battery in upside down when the Kick was in? That will melt the spring and burn out the Kick. Not much help I know. I suspect your gasket in the Reo is shot.

Maybe you could buy a rebuild kit and a new spring. That should make the Reo whole again and not cost too much. Then you keep it or sell it and buy yourself a VVG. If it weren't for bad luck you would have no luck at all. Sorry about all that.

 

[Vegastar]

Negative on the upside down battery, plus it wasn't even kicked when the spring melted. I'm not sure what killed the Kick (heck, I don't even really know it's dead. It might be fine as soon as I put it in a device that isn't shooting sparks at every touch ) I'm charging my older button top 18650 AWs now. I'm hoping in a last desperate moment that something about the flat top 18650s is pissing the reo off, but they're quality batteries...

Should find out in the next half an hour. Not like it can really hurt it anymore...

 

[Norman Clature]

Ouch

The bad thing about the REO is that it's so pleasurable when everything is working that when you have any issues whatsoever it really wrecks your day.

You were on a real roll!

Did you say you put a new spring in when you had the collapse or tried some other way of making things work? If you didn't have a spare spring handy and modded it some other way to get it "firing" that could be one of the problems (out of the many that you had) as to why you keep seeing sparks but perhaps you just didn't mention you put in a new spring (your post makes it seem like you pulled up the "collapsed" spring somehow to get it to work again. I'm a new "reonaut" but I've never heard of that.)

Sorry about all that happend and I hope you have some other good gear to use while you get stuff sorted out.

This sounds like something some more experienced folks here can help you with (or perhaps it's going to have to be sent to Rob again...)

Good luck,

Norman

 

[Vegastar]

I did do the naughty "restretch the spring" because I haven't got a spare handy at the moment. I figured it was probably a bad coil, and I'd do a couple quick tests then go back to the relative safety of cartos until I could get a couple more shipped out. Considerably harder to short with a carto than an RBA at least, and outside the crappy clonevari, I've got nothing else to use...

I think I'm screwed.

 

[Rhapsodies Fire]

I'm guessing it isn't the battery. I'm putting my money on the gasket. My advice is to get a hold of Rob. And perhaps take a look at the rebuild video to see if you're comfortable opening it up to check the gasket for damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K44zR7OWzqU

 

[pianoguy]

Maybe pop the delrin cover off and make sure the firing pin can't touch the screw that holds the cover on - there should be a sleeve on the firing pin that keeps it from making contact with the screw. I imagine bad things would happen if that sleeve was damaged/cut.

 

[redeyedancer]

did the mod drop the spring when you put a carto on the mod ?

 

[Vegastar]

did the mod drop the spring when you put a carto on the mod ?

I thought that bending a spring back out would cause it to lose the whole "dropping the battery" trick a second time. But no, thus far firing the carto hasn't resulted in the spring re-collapsing.

I'm guessing it isn't the battery. I'm putting my money on the gasket. My advice is to get a hold of Rob. And perhaps take a look at the rebuild video to see if you're comfortable opening it up to check the gasket for damage.
Video3 - YouTube

This is telling me to break a part of the feed tube off... I don't have a replacement for that, so I don't think I'm okay with this plan...

 

[redeyedancer]

The spring will still drop even if you pull it back up . Sounds to me like your mod is fine you dropped a spring with the rba . put a good drop of noalox on the tip of the positive contact this will eliminate the sparks your seeing . If your going to use rbas on a mechanical mod you need back up springs and a extra button would be a good idea . Pm me your email and your address . I just noticed your in the usa you can order some springs

 

[Vegastar]

Update: Button tops came off the charger. Not sparking on firing. One tiny little spark just as the battery loses contact with the firing pin. I almost feel like that's something that may be expected. It's literally in the space between the pin and the battery for a split second as they part. I've never really observed this closely before. Am I redeemed, or is this still in FUBAR terriroty?

 

[redeyedancer]

Update: Button tops came off the charger. Not sparking on firing. One tiny little spark just as the battery loses contact with the firing pin. I almost feel like that's something that may be expected. It's literally in the space between the pin and the battery for a split second as they part. I've never really observed this closely before. Am I redeemed, or is this still in FUBAR terriroty?

The little spark you see is normal a dab of noloax will stop it .

 

[Vegastar]

The spring will still drop even if you pull it back up . Sounds to me like your mod is fine you dropped a spring with the rba . put a good drop of noalox on the tip of the positive contact this will eliminate the sparks your seeing . If your going to use rbas on a mechanical mod you need back up springs and a extra button would be a good idea . Pm me your email and your address . I just noticed your in the usa you can order some springs

Sending you that in a minute. I meant to get extra springs with the reomizer order and plum forgot until I dropped this one

Thankfully, in an annoying way, at least I shouldn't have to worry too much about more backups until I can afford an ERA. With no offense intended to you, the build quality on the modified chinese attys apparently isn't high enough to put up with my abuse. My reomizer is completely hosed.

Thanks rob, and everyone else, for the advice and assistance, at least. I gotta go dig up my tube of noalox now. It's been a while since I gave this thing a bath anyway.

 

[redeyedancer]

Sending you that in a minute. I meant to get extra springs with the reomizer order and plum forgot until I dropped this one

Thankfully, in an annoying way, at least I shouldn't have to worry too much about more backups until I can afford an ERA. With no offense intended to you, the build quality on the modified chinese attys apparently isn't high enough to put up with my abuse. My reomizer is completely hosed.

Thanks rob, and everyone else, for the advice and assistance, at least. I gotta go dig up my tube of noalox now. It's been a while since I gave this thing a bath anyway.

No offense taken yes a good cleaning is always a good idea . Have a look at the video on my site
Basic mechanical mod maintenance

 

[JC Okie]

Cleaning the firing pin and adding a dab of Noalox will get rid of that tiny little spark.

 

[Vegastar]

So, New Years REOsolution: Quit breaking nice s&!$, stupid. Got it.

Noalox does seem to have cleaned up my tiny spark problem. Now let's see if I can coax the life back in to this kick, just for S&Gs. I really hope that I didn't short the coil twice, the first one nuking the kick and the second killing the spring later. We'll find out!