Refurbishing A Working But Real Old Nasty 510 Cartomizer pt 1 of 5

[Mark Linehan]

Okay, this is sort of a long one. Well, it has a lot of pictures to it. It is actually not as difficult as some might think, and it might even appear. The main thing you need to really concentrate on with this, is taking your time, paying attention to things and being careful! If you want to try and blow through this rebuild/refurb then you should not attempt it. If you are not methodical and patient, you WILL destroy the cartomizer.

Now this is a 510 refillable carto from madvapes. I think the brand is BogeTech. So I don't know if this process works with other brands or models. I have done this three times with this brand though, and only screwed up on the first one. I will explain about that one at a later point in this tutorial. I hope I can post enough of these images for this tutorial. There are 33 of them.

BEGIN

Take a disconnected 510/ego battery connector (or other threaded thing to screw carto into that you don't care about) and take your beat up nasty old 510 cartomizer that still works but is gross, or if you have nichrome wire and can solder well, then take your carto that is broken and you can use this tutorial as a how-to repair these as well.

Grab the battery connector with pliers, and the cartomizer tube with smaller pliers just above the connection point. You are going to bend the pliers' as if you were trying to snap the cartomizer in two. You can use quite a bit of force here, I have never had one come apart easily. Most likely the cartomizer is not going to come apart at this point. I end up heating up my beat up soldering iron that gets hot but is so old and oxidizes it is frightening.


Use the hot iron to slowly move around the carto in circles just at the bottom of the carto where the connector is. Move the iron smoothly and slowly, and heat it for about 4 or 5 minutes depending on how hot or old your soldering iron is. Note, if this is a nice clean iron, use your dremel cleaning bit to zip the paint/tape/sticker off of the cartomizer or it will do nasty things to your soldering iron.

Once it is hot enough, resume the breaking motion with the pliers' and now with enough pressure and perseverance, you should start to see the grooved inside of the connector showing a little bit. Work this until about an 1/8 inch is showing or so, and then switch to your fingers (if it is cool by now silly). Don' worry if you pop the carto tube off with the pliers, it will most likely be fine still.

Now you will see the filler material which is wrapped around the center of the carto in a nice tight tube shape. This is kind of tricky here, but you want to start picking gently at the material until you can start unpeeling this filler, it is a long wide but flat strip of this material. Unwind this completely from the cartomizer.

 

[Mark Linehan]

This is the filler material

Unwind it from the cartomizer slowly and carefully it will be a pain to find the start of it but I swear it is there someplace, just pick around for it.

Unwind it completely

Now you will get to a second inner material. This is a kind of cloth like material and it is a rectangular shape. You must pull on the thick black wire to pull it away from the cloth material, gently.

Then remove the cloth material.

 

[Mark Linehan]

Now you see the revealed innards of the cartomizer. That woven tube is for air flow, keep it at the top, the thing that looks like a dark lump is actually your coil. You can spread that apart with your fingernail a TINY bit. Enough so it will get cleaned.

Now take all the parts of your cartomizer, filler, cloth, innards, tube and...

Drop them in a small bowl of very hot (not boiling) water for 10 minutes. Swish them around a bit, clean all the jkunk off of them. You may want to gently rub the coil with something like a Q-Tip or very soft toothbrush maybe, but nothing too hard and DON't make it all misshapen unless you are sure you can rewind it like around a nail or something and get it back to roughly the same size. Although at this point, you could technically unsolder the wire, if you feel you can do it, maybe trim it a bit to decrease the resistance a tiny bit, and then resolder it, or replace the nichrome altogether if you know how. I have some nichrome on order and when I get it, I will be replacing all of my coils, and filler material too if I can get it to wrap properly. So far I can't rewrap the innards with polyfil properly.

Once cleaned, use a large wad of tissue to completely wrap up the filler strip and cloth rectangle and squeeze the bajeezuss out of it until it is dry.

It doesn't take long with this toilet paper/tissue squeeze method to dry this stuff. Then use the tissue to gently pat dry the innards and the carto tube as well in and out.

 

[Mark Linehan]

Now wrap that rectangle of cloth around the coil again from the center of the rectangle and make a two layer wrap around. Keep the tube at the top of the carto, and remember that this has to be the air way through the carto, so when wrapping, keep that in mind. Wrap as though you were leaving a tube in the middle of the cloth material. The top tube, the coil(lump heh) and the bottom connector tube all help form the airway in the middle of this cloth.

Now carefully and methodically begin wrapping the filler material again. If you find a great way to do this or a good replacement method PLEASE let me know! Wrap it snugly, but not overly tight. You want the juice to fill the spaces in the filler so don;t make it a solid object.

Now you see the rewrapped innard again, check your tube at the top is not covered with filler.

At this point you can try sliding a needle GENTLY and SLOWLY and CAREFULLY down the tube and see if it can get all the way through. You may have to guide it around a bit and get it out the bottom.

Now since you forgot to clean and dry the empty tube like I did, right? No? Well put something heavy on your carto innards so it does not unroll and then clean and dry your carto. This includes Dremeling off any sticker that might be left gluey and dying to attract dirt.

 

[Mark Linehan]

Now you start stuffing the innards back into the tube. Notice the little tool I am using. This is a homemade feat of technical prowess and mastery. Ermm.. Well, it is a paperclip with a dab of solder on the end and the solder is flattened out well so it make a small blunt blade for stuffing wayward filler into the carto tube as needed.

Now get the carto started onto the connector and make sure it is completely straight

Use the heavy pliers to place on top of the carto upside down (the carto not the pliers) and place the carto on something sort of soft as you will bang on the pliers

generally two good whacks is enough to fiully seat the connector and innards back in place

Look in there, does it look like a carto. If not go back and start over again, if it does. I'm impressed, I actually made all this up as I went. Nooononono Just Kidding!

 

[Mark Linehan]

..and there is my nice refurbished/rebuilt carto (repaired even if needed as well)

Now you want to take a paper clip and feed it through the air hole like you did with the sewing needle. VERY SLOWLY. VERY CAREFULLY. You will probably have to work it around a bit. Take your time, it will find the way eventually, and then you are sure you have an air stream. If you flat out can not get it through then you may have wrapped it to tight. Do not force it at all, you could hook the nichrome and easily break it, warp it or disconnect it. Also be sure you do not shove the filler material up, the woven tube or catch the bend in the wire and stretch it out.

Once you are through the carto you can spin it slowly a few times and make sure it will stay clear. (incidentally, when I fill a carto, I do this paperclip trick and spin the carto really fast and it pulls the juice away from the center and eliminates the gurgling of new juice and makes a MUCH better vape.

..and here is my LIKE NEW carto putting out the happy clouds of love <barf> on my just built today 5v dual 14500 mod built entirely from items gotten at MadVapes. The BEST modders supply EVER!!