Warning: contains spoilers. And it's for the hard-cores, not the people who are relishing their first XL vapes. Got a slim package today, a high value envelope, $45 for two atomizers, the 1.5 ohm atomizers to end all atomizers. Went through all the prescribed blowing out, adding 6 drops of my 90% VG yummy Macaroon, listening for the dry crackle, adding a couple drops more, got the right crackle, then mounted it on my Provari at 3.7 volts, and vaped ... a whole lot of PG. Yuk. OK, that's fair, it's the primer. As I dripped and dragged and dripped and dragged the PG away, the flavor improved, and got darned good. Niiiice. Thick vapor, great taste. Time to mount it on an XL. And that's when things got dicey.
Dicey numero uno. The o-rings. Yah, that's the XL's Achilles heel. Getting the o-rings to sit right for a new atty test isn't easy. OK, finally got it.
It seems the .357 can draw air from below or from the side holes, so it's not like the IKV atties, where the inner o-ring has to be out, lest you get no air. Good. When I squirsh, I can see juice come up, lookin' good. Try vaping. It's acting flooded. Vaped and gurgled and tried to find the way to get the coil just wet enough but not flooded, and couldn't. Switched to the 2.2 ohm Hybrid UNI, and it was cloudilicious mondo vapo and easy to feed. Why was the .357 so good dripping and so so-so on the XL?
I think I see the problem.
The .357 is optimized for dripping. It was modified recently to open the center tube so it could bottom feed. But from Mr. HH's comments it's clear that it's designed for long draws, so that "the pump" works. What pump? There's a chamber under the coil that gets filled from dripping say 6 drops. Then long drags pull juice up into the wick/coil. And, very important, excess juice easily seeps back down so the coil is wet but not flooded. In the XL, that whole mechanism already exists with the feed chamber, so now we're working with a double ante-chamber. The result is that it's very hard to feed it just right. The .357 is easily flooded, and juice doesnt seep back down as easily as when it's sitting on, say, a ProVari. It just kinda sits there. So it vapes wet, then vapes OK for a while, then when it runs dry, and you squirsh, you start over, and it goes flooded again. Meanwhile the vapor isn't great much of the time, being flooded.
There are, no-doubt, tricks to make it work better, maybe even very well (anyone?) (maybe as simple as taking the inner o-ring out?), but the initial impression is that it's not a match made in heaven, that dual chamber is gonna make it tricky. My one perfect 2.2 ohm Vapage Hybrid UNI runs circles around it, especially considering that at 1.5 ohms the battery starts dropping REAL fast, whereas the 2.2 ohm UNI vapes monster clouds twice as long on a charge. Even considering the need to take out the inner o-ring, and in the iO6 case, the need to find a thin-walled barrel/drip tip for it, the 1.8 ohm IKV atties work easier. And the simplest thing of all, just screwing a Boge 2 or "resurrector" carto in, well, that just plain works (for a few days anyway), or a plain Joye LR atty, and you don't need to go to Vmod U to figure out how to feed 'em.
So, yes, most atties, bridged or bridgeless, can be made to work, but there are going to be some that are a more natural match than others, and unfortunately it looks like the HH.357 is not one of the easy ones.
... and it's too bad, that .357 sure vapes like a train as a dripper, man oh man! Anybody figure out how to make it work as well on the XL?