Agreed.
I agree, but I don't understand your point BlkWolfMidnight. Of course testing outside of a mod will not yield the same results as inside a mod, but what does this have to do with the relationship between thermal runaway and dead shorts? A dead short is one situation that can cause thermal runaway or battery venting. Done deal.
As I've said before, we can take all the care needed and do all the maintenance needed and something out of our control can still happen to cause a dead short in any mod. One of the things that can happen is that we make a mistake. We might consider this as in our control, but humans make mistakes, so being able to eliminate this eventuality is impossible. Regulated mods have more protection from this scenario than mechanical mods so there is less risk with them, but mechanical mods rely on us alone to be safe which makes them more of a risk.
I've spent a good number of years designing production machinery. Operator safety is one of the most important things to consider when doing this. If there is any way the device can hurt someone, you have to understand that process and minimize the risk to the point that it is negligible. If you don't do this from a design standpoint, you as the designer are at fault for not doing your job correctly.
I vape mech mods 24/7. I know the risks I take and I do what I can to mitigate those risks. I also count on making a mistake eventually. As I've said in previous posts, my last failsafe is using batteries that will not burn or explode if I make that mistake.
Mech mods are more risky than regulated mods and IMO there is nothing that will ever trump that.
Dead short may or may not cause an exothermic reaction enough to bring the battery to superheat and vent, there are several ways to cause a thermal runaway to include taxing a battery beyond its amp limit, dead short is not the only way here to do that. Also not all cases in a dead short will result in a thermal runaway, if the connection is solid enough it may cause internal meltdown of the carbon rod inside the battery which would result in only a minor temperature spike, also the battery may not even do that depending on if any of the internal workings are instantly damaged and fail abruptly. You are right though one can lead to the other, I was just posting definitions for anyone new reading this thread to understand some of the terminology being tossed around. I wouldn't expect everyone to know high level tech talk if I started that up so I figured on the same here. Just was trying to be nice is all.
Testing in the environment that the battery would be in will yield a more accurate result is all I'm pushing here, if the battery is inside the mod when your using it then the same should be for testing it as well. I know in the lab the idea was to produce the same result twice and then document it, we surely didn't change the parameters or in the case of cultures type of petri dish used and temperature it was cultured at in the middle of the experiment and call it a successful find. That is really my point on that one that the data collected on an open air dead short experiment is incomplete.
I've used mechanical mods for 5 years myself, and in those 5 years I may have had one incident that concerned me however nothing much came of it. My fear is that people new and some experienced will walk away with this "Fear of the unknown" happening with their mechanical mods. It really isn't like that and please don't take away that from this thread, just understand what your getting in to and what "Could" happen at the worse case, the OP had the worse case happen to him but that does not qualify a constant pre determined failure for ever mechanical out there. My harping on taking precautions has never said "You'll eliminate 100% possibility" nor would I ever state that in fact, you have to understand that it is still there and may still happen, you can reduce that possibility though by taking some time out to check and verify is all I'm saying in that.
I fully understand what your saying about relying on us to ensure the safety of the operation which by default is a failure point as no one is going to be 100% able to prevent the accidents and general mis steps. Yes knowing what your getting in to and education will greatly reduce the chance of the common issues happening and in reality this feedback that everyone posted that is "Helpful" will hopefully advise some of the newbies on the things to look for and some general maintenance tips and tricks. Together we all learn and this is the truth of life, learn from others mistakes will advance everyone as I'll admit it there are a number of things I learned from this thread that I was doing wrong myself. For that I'm grateful for everyone that posted advice, thank you.
