Thank you for this! I have looked this picture over and over and still can't quite tell. The ones towards the bottom look like quartz points, but if you look at the one that would appear to be the "top" one in the picture and the one to the right of it, they look like basically jagged breaks in a tube. I have ordered the raw points, and also have capillary tube samples coming to me. I am going to try a build with both and will report with each.
The points should be here today or tomorrow, I just got another email about the tube samples saying they were shipped this morning. I thought they shipped the same day I requested them, but I was mistaken.
This is the first post that referenced "tubes" and that is where I began to see what he was talking about.
GMayberry,
Yes, I saw that and figured that it was where people were getting confused. I think it's just a crystal that was put in "upside-down" (i.e. you're seeing the .... end rather than the point end).
I did a bunch of fooling around with capillary tubes; when I started I thought pyrex was a real high-temperature glass. It isn't. I was hoping to find a configuration for a head where the coil was on the outside of the tube, and the
e-liquid went through the tube and got vaporised. This way the coil never touches the liquid. I also tried coiling the wire inside the capillary and having the liquid on the outside. (This effort was inspired by the design of the "Wizard Stick" mini-fog-making thingie). To my dismay, the pyrex just didn't stand up to the temperatures (I repeat, however, that I was looking for a construction where the coil never touched the liquid, so the temperature of the glass was considerably higher than what would happen in a normal construct). The capillary tubes sagged, melted, and became as brittle as pringles. (Not to mention, it took several seconds for the thing to heat up, and liquid in the tube had a nasty tendency to spit hot globs of
e-liquid like a roman candle!)
I am eagerly awaiting the quartz rods I ordered. (In retrospect, it's hard to believe that they can make a 4-foot-long 1mm diameter piece of glass, never mind keep it in stock!). I did allow them to cut the length down to save on shipping. It will be interesting to see if this is smooth or rough on the surface; If it's smooth, I'm thinking of trying to roughen it up a bit with a dremel diamond-disk as well.
If the capillaries can withstand the heat I'd be VERY interested; might re-awaken some of my previous experimental urges. Perhaps we can do a group buy? I'm still looking for that "eternal head" - something more like a lightbulb than a "change it out every week" type of head. The Wizard-Stick came pretty close, except it couldn't handle the gunking from heavy liquids.
