Ok so for the past lil while now I've been building coils using fused clapton wire (premade on a spool). After a day or so when the cotton starts changing colors from use, one side of one of my coils turns much darker than the other three ends sticking out (see picture below). Since I'm new to anything other than micro coils, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this issue for me. My coils ohm out to .30 and I'm running it at 68w. (Also ik the coils look gross but it does it even when the coils are new.)
Something odd
- Thread starter Spyroklown
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Howdy and welcome
My personal guess is that particular coil leg is getting hot. Is it always the same post hole or does it change from coil to coil? Atty to atty?
I bet they don’t have the same ramp up time I.e. the left one glows slightly faster than the right one and over time you evaporate more juice than the other one.
Ps I think you vape a very sweat juice judging from the color
Ps I think you vape a very sweat juice judging from the color
I like this one better than mine. Higher probability. Not only is it more likely it’s easier to check. Definitely try this one before checking mine.
Howdy and welcome
My personal guess is that particular coil leg is getting hot. Is it always the same post hole or does it change from coil to coil? Atty to atty?
Well I'll have to check when I change my cotton (I dont want to waste what I'm using now).. but I was wondering if it had to do with one coil ramping up faster than the other.. wouldn't it have changed both ends of cotton sticking out of that coil? also the juice I smoke is a creamy flavor, not very sweet.
Unbalanced coils are the bane of multiple coil attys. The only advantage of single coil attys I know of is you don’t need to balance coils because there’s only one of them. With multiple coil mods the coils need to be the same. Not close to the same, but the same. One standard method is to cut the wires to the exact same length before you wrap the coils. If I’m feeling particularly persnickety I’ll cut 3 wires for a two coil mod, wrap all three, and then only use the two that are the most similar, throwing the other away unused. A couple millimeters of difference or a single bad kink is enough to mess things up.
Single coil has a lot more advantages. Half the work, half the materials/cost, half the juice consumption, and more battery life. Some might say that means half the flavor, but when you make your own juice, you can compensate for that.
How does that help? I mean once you wrap the coils and install them, you still have to trim the legs so nothing is sticking out. Even if you don't trim, what matters is the distance (path of electron flow) between contact points (screws) on the coil. So either way the original length becomes irrelevant.
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I have seen the same thing on single coil tanks. One end of the wick gets significantly darker than the other. I first thought one end was getting hotter but checking during a dry burn, that didn't seem to be the case. I now have two possible theories.
It might have to do with the direction of the flow of electrons through the coil that may be causing some sort of ionization of the liquid in that side of the wick. I haven't cared enough to make careful observations if which end of the coil this occurs on is consistent across multiple builds or not though, so I could be completely wrong.
It could also be that the wick is what is unbalanced and juice that has been heated under the coil but not fully vaporized seeps back down to one side more than the other due to this imbalance. That doesn't explain this only happening with one wick in a dual coil setup, unless it is this combined with unbalanced coils.
A third possibility could be that with the atty screwed onto the mod, that is the direction of tilt when you are vaping and the heated but unvaporized juice flows down to the wick that is lowest when tilted. Again I never really checked this to be sure one way or the other.
It might have to do with the direction of the flow of electrons through the coil that may be causing some sort of ionization of the liquid in that side of the wick. I haven't cared enough to make careful observations if which end of the coil this occurs on is consistent across multiple builds or not though, so I could be completely wrong.
It could also be that the wick is what is unbalanced and juice that has been heated under the coil but not fully vaporized seeps back down to one side more than the other due to this imbalance. That doesn't explain this only happening with one wick in a dual coil setup, unless it is this combined with unbalanced coils.
A third possibility could be that with the atty screwed onto the mod, that is the direction of tilt when you are vaping and the heated but unvaporized juice flows down to the wick that is lowest when tilted. Again I never really checked this to be sure one way or the other.
Another theory of mine is the imbalance of the cotton...eg. it's different on either side of the coils whether it's a dual coil or single.
The way the air flows through the deck will effect the temperature unevenly at different points causing this uneven burn/accumulation.
The way the air flows through the deck will effect the temperature unevenly at different points causing this uneven burn/accumulation.
My guess is that they are slightly off, but over time as you can see from the state of your cotton and coils the left is working more than the right one. You can also tell by the residue on your coils.
Is the coils being unbalanced what causes one to be working more than the other?
Half the work: true
The rest get more variable though depending on how big you make the coil. I always compensated for the other halves by making really big single coils because if I didn’t I’d also get half the vapor, which I didn’t want. If you do a real fatty of a single coil you can get it back to “almost as much vapor”
It doesn’t unless you make sure that what you cut off is the same as well. You’ve got to also have equal length tails. This means for me shrouding the deck with a Kleenex so the wire clippings don’t go shooting across the room when cut so I can compare them. It makes more sense with postless decks I guess. Might explain why I prefer the aromamizer. One of the very few advantages of having done life drawing for most of my life is I’m pretty good at measuring relative lengths by eye. Perhaps I’m making assumptions. Come to think of it it may also be how I get away with not measuring juice. I use tube bottles, and a tenth of the way up a tube by eye may for me be a lot closer to an actual tenth than it might be for others. I hated dual coils until I started building them on the aromamizer. I built single coil only on the aromamizer too until pretty recently. I only went dual at all because I had to get my ohms down to reasonable levels for those ghetto radiator coils I was messing with and I didn’t want to wrap triple parallel single coils for a real radiator coil. Needed more coil length space than I had for one. Plus they’re so fragile and I wanted to wrap spaced coils because they were so hard to keep even.
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could possibly happen. It’s going to be a really really small thing if it does though. I would suspect it would be overwhelmed by other too touchy to control things though. Liquids follow the easiest path. One path is always going to be better than the other even before you start dealing with molecular level forces. A double tail wick is never going to wick totally evenly. As a wick dries out from heat and fills up with juice and funk, the less preferable path is going to become better and better the farther away that part of the coil is from the other wick so I assume it will wind up wicking from both sides if never quite evenly. The OP’s problem is pretty extreme though. More than would be explained by that. Heat would have to be pretty uneven across the coil.
Capillary action should beat out gravity. I vaguely remember someone measuring capillary action’s capability to lift liquid as being something like 13 feet in the air before the pull of capillary action finally equalized with gravity and the weight of the liquid. Old high school science crud. I got no link for it. Leave a roll of toilet paper on top of your toilet tank with the paper end dipping into the bowl overnight. In the morning the whole roll of TP on top of the tank will be sopping wet.
That brings up another possible but maybe unlikely. Really heavy stuff isn’t pulled by capillary action as fast or as far as light stuff. That’s how paper chromatography works. You can take black ink and separate out it’s component colors by molecular weight using paper chromatography. Turns black ink into sort of a rainbow. A cotton wick would do the same thing if it was long enough. Separating out the different components of juice. I’ve always assumed it wasn’t, generally being only a fraction of an inch.
Beautiful arcing this great single build (outside and inside, blind)…
Ah, the wonders of contact physics. Not so odd.
Good luck.
p.s. Arcing is not the cause, it's a feature.
Ah, the wonders of contact physics. Not so odd.
Good luck.
p.s. Arcing is not the cause, it's a feature.
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Beautiful arcing this great single build (outside and inside, blind)…
Ah, the wonders of contact physics. Not so odd.
Good luck.
p.s. Arcing is not the cause, it's a feature.
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You sound like it's rocket science to build dual coil atties. It's not.
Sure, the coils have to be quite similar, but not 100% equal. That's a feat noone could ever accomplish. Slight variances do not matter, be it leg length, spacing or slightly differing ID.
What did they look like when you dry burned them? Did they both glow from the middle out and simultaneously?
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