I wiped out the inside of the SB and got some black soot, this was when it was brand new, I used the lubricant and got a lot more black soot after a week. I looks like grit from the metal woring process. No complaints, it was like saw dust inside a new Amish made cabinet.
As far as the voltage, that is where the kick died. As you can imagine, I did not test the battery after every puff. Its interesting that you say that the kick should cut out at about 3.5, which mine is not doing. I am still thinking that I should ditch the smoktech and get an evolve one.
Thanks,
Derek
Kicks are intended to cut off 'somewhere between' 2.7v to 3.5v I think. Since we tend to pull the batteries out of the mod and test them (kind of difficult to test under load, while vaping, without some special in-line equipment)...allow some variation in there for several reasons.
They will usually stutter with higher settings at the 3.5v point...and might give a few more weak or stuttering drags to the 3ish volt mark under load...but this behavior can vary depending on your atty, the cell itself, and kick setting. With lower settings, you might not get much if any stuttering at all...by the time the kick decides to stop working the battery might actually still have enough juice to fire the atty at that setting with no 'boosting/bucking regulation' at all...in some cases, with 'lower settings' it has even been attempting to 'buck' voltages to something 'lower' than the actual battery voltage.
The thing is, they cut off 'under load'.
It's possible, particularly with higher resistance coils at higher wattage settings, to start a drag with a 3.6v idle battery charge, and end that same drag with a 3v charge under load...let the battery sit for a moment, and test it 'out of the mod' and get something more like a 3.2v reading. We must not forget that the Kick will actually attempt to boost a 3.5v signal up to as much as needed to make the coils fire at whatever watts we've set it for (Up around 5.5v or even 6v boosts are possible). That can mean it might try to draw a current from the battery up to 7 amps in extreme conditions.
AFAIK, most of the VW Kicks and Crowns out there monitor and adjust up to 10 times per second. They'll usually do a very good job of keeping you and your batteries safe.
So when you pull the battery out of a mod and put it on your battery tester results may vary a bit. If it's well over 2 volts at this point, you should be safe. Firing a 2 Ohm atty tuned into 12 watts can be quite different for the battery 'under load' from a 3 Ohm atty tuned to the same 12 watts. Also the efficiency of the mod itself can play some role in this. A better conducting mod will require less work from the Kick and the battery. A better conducting mod will also have more 'accurate' readings of voltages and currents when the whole thing is under load. Hence, there can be variations, even with the exact same Kick unit, same atty, and battery, when dropped in a different mod.
Also consider the drain pulled from the battery depending on how the Kick is set, the length of time you push the button, etc. The important thing is that the Kick does not let the battery 'over-drain' and reverse polarize (could be bad if you put a battery damaged like this on a charger, as the poles have reversed!). Two volts is considered the 'minimal' level for the IMR cell, and 4.2volts is the 'maximum', but due to 'under load' conditions, experts here on the forum stress that 3.5ish volt minimum head room (this is when the battery is out of the mod and tested...3.5v or lower...definitely time to recharge if you want the most charge cycles possible for the cell).
As a side note, if batteries come out of your regulated mod which is no longer firing, and test well above 2 volts...there's no need to panic if it's 'less than 3.5v'. It most likely hasn't been able to 'fire' and pull a hard/fast current from the battery since that last drag that took it below the 3 to 3.5v point while 'under load'. Its little monitors, beeps, whistles, and other sleepy functions probably don't even draw a quarter of an amp.
Also, in the case of the Crown...it won't fire anymore once it goes below a certain point, but it can still beep or play some tunes and stuff, which can take the battery down a tiny bit further before it totally shuts itself down. The beeping and monitoring things that might still work when the battery is low is an extremely low amp function that is not likely to damage the cell at this point.
The Kick 2 also seems to have a kind of 'by-pass' mode if you screw on something like a 0.5 Ohm atty.
Without a Kick in the picture...that's a 35 watt rig at 4.2v right off the charger, pulling more than 8 amps. A good deal higher than the Kick's max setting right?
Going Sub-Ohm with the Kick might change the rules somewhat. You'd still get over-drain protection, thermal protection, short circuit protection, and possibly some 'boosting' (with stuff closer to 1 Ohm, or barely below it) as the battery gets low, but I'm not sure it will 'buck' things down much, if at all.
Example (using an
Ohm's Law Calculator to do the math):
To make a 0.5 Ohm atty run at the top setting of the Evolv Kick 2 @ 15watts, you'd have to 'buck' the voltage to 2.7 volts, and the Kick 2 supposedly has a low voltage bucking floor of something like 3.5 volts. Also note that 2.7v is a bit lower than we'd like to take the raw unregulated battery as well. So...the Kick 2 is essentially just a bit of a 'safety cap' with an atty like this screwed on (no longer a VW device). My undersanding is that the mod would start working at the full 35+ watt potential when freshly charged, and would probably continue to vape into ranges from 18 - 20ish watts until the Kick 2 stops letting the mod fire.
Unless you intend to drive multiple coils and burn through ounces of liquid a day instead of milliliters...a 0.5 Ohm multi/parallel coiled atty is probably not of much interest. If you do go deep into sub-ohm territory...with or without a kick...proceed with much caution, and only use the best 20-30 amp high drain batteries you can find. Check everything frequently, and consider cutting the number of charge cycles of such cells by half before retiring/discarding them from vaping applications.
Sorry, I don't know the lowest Ohm atty you can put on the Artisan Crown. I don't see it listed anywhere. While I do own two of them, I have never tried to go below 1.5 Ohms with either one. I tend to make single coil rigs from 1.7 - 2.5 Ohms...so that I CAN actually experience VW or VV for what it was meant to do...give me a pretty wide 'RANGE' of temperatures to choose from.
