@DancingHeretik I agree with a lot of things you say. However, you cannot put a Chinese knock off battery or mod in the same category as you would a fork or knife. When I first started vaping, I purchased an Itazte SVG. I still have that mod to this day and have had absolutely no problem with it other than I have to turn it off occasionally to reset it as the logic goes screwy on it. I also purchased a Cloupor T5. The third day I owned it, I sat it down on a counter in my favorite vape store in College Station and went to take a leak. When I came back, the owner of store was frantically trying to get the battery out of it, because the mod freightrained (fired itself and locked in the firing position). When he pulled the battery out, it was very hot and venting. Thankfully, it was an authentic high discharge Sony C5 battery.
When I contacted Cloupor, they were less than helpful, giving me a bunch of placating talk but doing nothing to address the problem. I work in China four months out of the year, so I contacted some friends of mine to look in to Cloupor. What I found out was very disturbing. Cloupor is three men and a woman who have a small office in the slums of Shenzen China. A company in the same providence, Greenleaf, actually makes the T5. One of their engineers use to work for me and confided to me that they had informed Cloupor that the circuit board design they provided for the T5 was junk. It will not stand up to the voltage that the T5 operates at because Cloupor refuses to use adequate capacitors in lieu of the junk they specified in their design. Greenleaf will build anything someone is willing to pay them to build in quantity.
There are some interesting facts that you may or may not be aware of. Most of the regulated mods that enter this country slip by customs because their paperwork is often prevaricated. For instance, the replacement I finally received from Cloupor after putting considerable heat on them, arrived with a manifest indicating that it was an 'engineering sample.' I have had some long talks with customs officials in the port of Houston; I often have to deal with when shipping packaing and processing equipment to our plants in India and China. From what I have been told, many of them have already been banned but it is almost impossible for them to intercept the majority of them.
Finally, I am not a proponent for more government regulation. In fact, at the risk of sounding like a pessimist, I truly believe that my safety and that of other Americans is of little concern to our government. Additionally, I truly believe that everything comes down to money with our government and that regulations / laws / statutes (whatever you may want to refer them to) are only enacted to either make an official and or his supporters richer or to pave the way for the same to make money in the future. I have no doubt that if regulations are imposed on vape mods and juice that we will end up paying dearly for this wonderful pleasure. However, without some kind of regulations imposed, mistakes like sending out a liter of pure nicotine to someone and or maybe the next T5 that decides to self fire and lock, will explode, causing someone or some people serious injuries.
