Replacing a lavatube 510 battery connector / circuit board removal.

[hueyduey]

I was so stoked when I got my lavatube unfortunately a DCT carto didn't want to play nicely with the 510 connector. Being a noob I didn't think much of the wiggly tank, but over time it started to eat away at the threads on my lavatube. After 2 weeks only a select few cartos and atomizers would screw onto my lavatube.


The shop I got it from offered no support as it was "my fault" that I had stripped my lavatube. PO'ed I ordered a Provari. So once that came in I decided to attempt to fix this lavatube. I could have just fixed it instead I decided to dissect it.


The top cap is held on with glue. You need some good pliers, in my case, channel locks to get a firm grip and remove the plastic cap from the body.

Once you cut off the positive and negative leads you're left with the battery connector in the plastic top cap. It's not easy to pop out the connector because the factory gooped the whole thing with glue. I carefully use an xacto blade to chip away at the glue. From there you can twist the connector out from the plastic, as it's threaded in. I would recommend the back of a claw hammer. But before I knew it was threaded I just pressed it out like so.

2 sockets... 1 to push on the connector, and the other to support the plastic, and a clamp to squeeze it out.


I purchased a 510 to 510 connector originally to just glue into the lavatube. But it also doubles as a 510 battery connector. As you can see the connector is taller than the original lavatube battery connector. So you can either let it stick out or shave it down if you have a dremmel or rotary tool.

I had to mod the plastic cap to fit the 510-510 adapter. A little bit of scraping with a xacto knife and I was able to slide in the adapter. At this point you can just solder the 510 connector back on and glue the top back on.

 

[hueyduey]

BUT! Plans changed. I already had a working VV device, my provari. This lavatube would be just a backup. And I didn't like the protruding 510 connector nor did I want to go through the trouble to shave it. So I decided this would be a box mod. Here's the guts of a lavatube:

Once the top cap is removed. There's this silver insert. It's glued into the tube. There's not much room to grip it. If you were careful you could probably pry it out with a screwdriver. I just used a dremel and cut right beneath it.

Now this should expose the circuit board. But the circuit board is attached to a metal ring, which is also glued in the tube. If you're able to get the ring out then the only thing attached are the 2 wires running to the vape switch.

Front:

Back:

I was lazy trying to figure out how to extract the ring so I just use the dremel and cut it out of the lavatube.

To get to just the circuit board you need to remove the metal ring. Unfortunately a poor glue job had some excess glue on the circuit board attaching the ring. So I just couldn't solder the ring off. Once again I had to use the Dremel to cut the ring, then scrape the glue, and unsolder the contacts to remove what was left of it. So here's the lavatube circuit board.

Front:

Back:

I didn't bother extracting the buttons from the tube. As it wasn't necessary for my next project...

 

[coolbud01]

My lavatube's fire button is going out, thinking about using the guts for another project. Thanks for the walk thru, subscribing.