Guys -- I've been a total fan (as in fanatic) of the HH.357s. I absolutely love what Hanna's done for the vaping community with these things. Not long ago, I showed a friend of mine how much these things shine on the REO Mini, and she jumped right in and bought one. About a month later, she bought a second - y'know, backups and all that.
She pinged me the other day, saying that one would fire very inconsistently, and the other wouldn't fire at all even though it'd been fine for a week. She was able to reproduce the problem on her other (backup) REO by swapping the atties.
The first one is a blue 1.5Ω that she got roughly 2 months ago. She's been running it daily on the Mini but, despite my advice (nagging), never cleaned it. Everything's been fine until recently when it would fire sporadically. So, having received the backup, another 1.5Ω - in green, she did the startup procedure and popped it on the REO. Nothing. It may have fired a couple times, but I can't swear to that.
So, knowing that the behaviour followed the atty, my first thing to check was their resistance. The blue (older) one measured 1.0Ω and the green (newer) one came in a 0.6Ω. As a sanity check, I tested the HH.357 from my REO, and it properly clocked in at 1.5Ω. I confirmed these findings with my Darwin. Both the blue and green atties tripped the short-protection in the Darwin, shutting it down pretty much immediately. The only reason she didn't collapse the spring in her REOs is that she's running TrustFire protected LiON batts, and they were simply cutting off, much like my Darwin did.
I put them through a cleaning with PGA (soaked for 15 hours, air-dried for another 12-15 hours), and did the tap-on-the-table thing that Hanna mentioned earlier ITT. No change in their resistances. For fun, I took a couple photos of them to get a closer look:
The blue one:
The green one:
I was mostly interested with how the coils looked after a cleaning using extreme close-up. I did see some of the mesh possibly getting involved, so I gently pushed it out of the way with a dental pick. They still ohm out at the same levels.
I find it interesting, suspicious even, that both of her HH.357s failed in the same way. She had an additional spare and it's running fine on her REO, so I doubt that it's the cause. I'm coming up short (no pun intended) on any other possible causes. Plus, I'm more interested in a solution. I assume there's not much more I can do, but I've been wrong before. Can you guys think of anything else I can look at/try?
