Wow everybody... lots of doom and gloom here. But, I get it... safety is important here.
Hellov,
I would agree that a week and a half of experience in vaping is quite early to jump into rebuildables, especially with a mechanical. Do you have a VV/VW mod already? If so, I'd highly recommend you start with higher gauge wire (30 or 32 awg), with coils in the 1.8 range FIRST. Understand what works and what doesn't, and get your technique down. There IS a steep learning curve with Genesis-style atomizers like the RSST (albeit the RSST is the easiest one to learn on for sure). Using a VV/VW device gives you a lot of safety features while learning, as they won't fire coils that are shorted or too low in ohms. Move to a mech AFTER you have your technique down; you'll be there when you can rebuild a coil quickly and nail an ohm target right away with no real fiddling.
If you insist on proceeding, you absolutely need to have a multimeter to check resistance before firing, and you MUST understand that a reasonably-priced multimeter has inherent resistance. To see this, take your multimeter on the lowest ohms setting, and touch the two leads together. It won't register 0 ohms as you'd expect, but will register something else (e.g. my cheapo Harbor Freight special reads 0.5 ohms). You must subtract this value from the coil you're reading, e.g. a coil reading 2.2 ohms on your MM is really 1.7 ohms. I mention this because, if you check your coil and you're seeing 0.5 ohms, you have a short, NOT a 0.5ohm coil!
Now, to answer your questions:
1. I bought AW IMR 18490 and 18350 batteries. Would the kick clone by sigelei offer me the same safety features as the vapesafe or the other clone safety things?
The wire you chose (28 gauge) has very low resistance... see my comment above. A normal 4 or 5 wrap coil will be less than or right around 1 ohm. I don't know if the Kick can fire these or not (I don't own one), but typically the use of sub-ohm coils are the reason people use mechs with Genesis-style atomizers as most VV/VW devices won't fire anything below 1.2 ohms or so. If you want to use a Kick, get thinner (higher gauge number) Kanthal for higher ohm coils, or put a ton of coils on it (which is less than ideal).
And yes, the Kick reports having short-circuit protection.
2. Is the RSST portable? I would like to carry it around with me in my backpack. If I do carry it in my backpack, and leave it unattended for hours at a time, should I keep the battery out until I use it?
In short, nope... Gennies are not really very portable. They must be kept upright, otherwise they leak in a major way. I've always had to leave the fill plugs out to get good wicking -- I know others say this isn't necessary, but my experience is that fill plug = dry hits so I leave it out. This means you have open holes for juice to make a horrific mess....
3. What resistance do you suggest I start off with taking safety into account? I bought 28 gauge kanthal wire.
^^ See my comments at the beginning of this (long-winded) post. In short, not recommended for starting out IMHO.
Stay safe...
