When should you consider rebuildables?

[Fizzpop]

I've had them in my cart more than once, but hearing how fragile they can be and how expensive they are, I never have been able to pull the trigger.

You have a link to your resource?

I get mine from Provape.com They are fragile and it sucks when you break one, but you learn to be careful. I don't find that wrapping them is when I break them, but when I am removing the "hood" of the Genesis tank. I'm getting better at not breaking them and they can be brought back to mint condition by torching them. Seriously, barring an accident, these wicks would last forever. Better yet, no hot spots, no shorts, and possibly the cleanest vape you could hope for.

 

[Kanj.nguyen]

In my experience, there are two ways of being good at rebuilding; which, really, means there are two ways one can get into rebuildables. After all, why get into it if you arent gonna be good at it (eventually at least)?

First is being patient. Very patient. I know some people struggle for months and cant get a good build going. There are so many variables in rebuilding that no matter how much you research, there will still be a problem you cant seem to fix right away. These problems will just pop up days after days until they dont - after just plain trial and error you can brute force your way into being good at rebuilding.

The second way, if you are not patient, is being relatively smart and a quick learner. Lets all be honest here: not all of us are fast learners, and not at everything. Some people have better observational and deductive powers than others - which would make rebuilding relatively easy for them. Some people are more mechanically inclined and have better craftsmanship - say a professional mechanic. With some people a light bulb just comes on.

So ask yourself if you fit into either one of those categories. I do not believe one can be a good rebuilder without at least one of those two qualities: even if someone without them happens to succeed first try, they will run into problems later on that they cant fix. They dont understand how it works - they have neither the experience from trial and error nor the quick mind to comprehend all that is going on.

No, rebuilding is not rocket science. But it is science, nonetheless; to some even an art. And as with all sciences and arts, no one can succeed with neither patience nor a sharp intellect. Sometimes you even need both; but always you will need one.

 

[Kanj.nguyen]

Double post.....

 

[SirSteve]

Lots of great advice and good points here.

I'll just throw this in, You can get around having a multimeter like others have stated by using a decent APV. But I have found it far more convenient to check battery charge on batteries used in mechanicals and to check the charge of freshly charged batteries off a charger with a multimeter. I don't check freshly charged batteries every time, just every few cycles to see how the charger and batteries are performing.

Plus I have found other household uses for the mulitmeter, testing outlets for example, lightbulbs for continuity, disposal batteries to see if they have any life left. Not a must, but they certainly come in handy.

Follow Baditudes link, lots of great stuff there. I used ehumans advise on SS mesh wicks, worked for me and Baditude has the link posted, along with a multitude of others. Be prepared for failure, takes patience and persistance, plus you will get better over time.

 

[speshiok46]

then i moved to drippers and said WTH this is cake!

lol I'm glad to hear that! I'm looking strictly at simple RDA's builds with wire and wick for now (no SS mesh quite yet).

These are the two I plan to pick up:
$6.16 Phoenix V5 Detachable Dripping Atomizer (1.5ml) - 1.0
$4.41 X1 3.5ml Detachable Dripping Electronic Cigarette Atomizer - 2.4ohm / gold at FastTech - Worldwide Free Shipping

I would like to concentrate on lower ohm builds (called sub ohm I guess?) My friend that got me into vaping is really into sub ohm builds, and I found mcvape's youtube videos to be very helpful.

Lastly, I know this isn't related to rebuildables, and I hope this question won't tag me as a noob. I've recently upgraded to a Smoktech Pyrex tank running on Boge DCT LR cartomizers. Since using this setup, I've noticed that I get a very tight pull when I start to chain vape. I'll get about two good 5 second pulls before the pull gets very tight, like sucking on a syringe. It goes away after about 30 seconds, but then starts back up after another couple of long pulls. They are not dry hits, as I don't get the nasty burnt taste, and the carto is reasonably moist. Also, the tank is always at least half full. I've dripped a couple into the carto directly to make sure. I doubt it's flooded as I don't get the gurgly noise, but I've checked the airway and wiped for good measure. I'm thinking it's an air supply issue, possibly due to pairing a Smok tank to a Boge carto or maybe the carto is screwed on too tight. I'm running on a K-101 with a freshly charged battery. Thoughts?

 

[Baditude]

@ speshiok46

I don't have experience with the new Smoktech pyrex cartotanks. I've just been too happy with my 12 IBTanked pyrex tanks to try anything else. However, just a couple pieces of information or opinions if you will...

Your idea of airflow around the connection between tank and battery device is a wise one. If the tank is fitting too flush, there may not be adequate airflow for the cartomizer. However you said your issue was intermittant, so I'm guessing its something else.

Cartotanks don't suit vapors who are chain vapors or have improper vaping techniques. There's a fine line between adequate feeding of juice from the tank to the cartomizer and flooding the carto with too hard of a pull or too frequent draws. Typically, people who vape too hard of a pull forces too much juice into the carto, and the air hole can be plugged off, causing the stiff pulls. Eventually, if your lucky, the juice gets reabsorbed into the carto, or if not lucky the juice drops down the air hole onto your mod's connector.

I've trained myself to do long, gentle, patient pulls of 4 - 6 seconds of length. I tell people to imagine sucking on a straw in a thick milkshake.

My suggestion is to have two tanks set up, and alternate between the two. This will give one tank time to recover while you vape the other one. You know how slow Boge cartos can be to fill; they likely are just as difficult for the tank to fill after each vape you take.

Speaking of Boge carts, they are known to have a more dense polyfill which takes up juice slower than other cartos do. You may want to give Ikenvape or Smoktech cartos a try if my other suggestions don't work.

 

[Fizzpop]

I would like to concentrate on lower ohm builds (called sub ohm I guess?)

I would highly recommend against this. Using a sub-ohm coil (resistance < 1 Ohm) means you are basically shorting out your battery. The batteries used in vaping are no small joke, they pack a lot of power. Shorting them is a dangerous game.

Mods with protective circuitry will simply error out with resistance of less than 1 Ohm - they rightly sense this as a short.

 

[Kanj.nguyen]

Sub ohm vaping is a total myth. Yeah, i said it.

Going low ohm on a mechanical just means you are drawing out more power from the battery. Without specifying many other details of the build (air flow, wick wire contact, coil configurations etc.), more power output means nothing. Power input is what counts; more specifically, heat input. How much heat from all that wattage is actually being used to vaporize how much juice in what manners? At what temperature? Is the air flow optimal for that level of heat input and dynamics?

There is no winged unicorns popping up in your vape as soon as you hit 0.999 ohm in your build; no laws of physics dictates that anything behaves differently under 1 ohm. Its not like 1 ohm is the threshold for another world. If it is, then it is first of all the world of danger with batteries waiting to blow off your teeth.

And yes, i do use sub ohm builds (more specifically sub ohm multi micro coils). The low resistance is not the goal of my build - it is merely an addition, a plug-in to give my micro coils faster response time.

Phew, rant over. I need to write a rigorous analysis on this soon so uninformed rebuild beginners wouldnt fall into the world of also uninformed rebuilders bragging about how low their resistance is to make their vape sound impressive.

I didnt mean to sound condescending; if i came off that way it is not my intention. But if i have to blow up on someone about this issue it might as well be a beginner that can be shunned away from this unnecessary danger.

 

[Thrasher]

drill out the airhole on that V5 just a touch and wow what a fog machine. the other one works well but not what i hoped for its pretty much an octopus clone except for the screw on cap. but i love the V5. another one there that smokes it is the yk1, again open the hole just a bit and holy cow the vapor from such a little atty is incredible.

with the v5 you can go one wick but it will take some adjusting of the coil. you need to make the legs a little longer to get the coil closer to the air hole not alot just cant be right up on the posts when you attach it. i have 2 of them.


I

didnt mean to sound condescending; if i came off that way it is not my intention. But if i have to blow up on someone about this issue it might as well be a beginner that can be shunned away from this unnecessary danger

better that you blow up on someone instead of their battery

 

[speshiok46]

Thanks Batitude. Now that you mention it, I do take pretty hard pulls. It definitely does not resemble the way I drag on an analog. I find that it's worse when I'm pulling on less nic (12mg - 18mg) compared to 24mg. With 24mg, it feels a lot more nature, more the way you described how it should be. Does this mean the less nic is too far of a step down compared to my analogs(newports half pack/day)?

@ Fizzpop & Kanj - I was thinking around the 1 ohm mark for my builds. This is what confuses me regarding "shorts".

Hypothetically, let's say I'm using my K-101 (mech) with a Panasonic CGR18650CH (10A) with a 0.5 ohm coil. Going strictly by the math:
watts: 35.28
volts: 4.2 (absolute max)
amps: 8.4
ohms: 0.5
At a worse case scenario of a 4.2 volt spike, the battery should be able to accommodate the 8.4 amps? Am I missing something? Are there other constraints that need to be considered that might result in damage of a mech mod? Let's ignore the atomizer build quality / air flow / vape quality for now and just concentrate on the theoretical/math for now.

Also, I don't understand why people become fixated on resistance and do not recommend sub-ohm building. A 0.6 ohm running 3 volts has the same exact current (5 amps) as a 1.2 ohm running 6 volts. Again, let's ignore the practical applications for these numbers and just look at the theoretical. I guess at the end of the day, isn't the current, in amps, the measure in which we determine if a setup is safe when weighted against the batteries that are used?


Also, I came across this post on fasttech inventory: http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/fasttech/440614-quick-reference-shopping-guide-fasttesh.html

I know everyone has their own opinions on batteries, but are all the ones listed in the Batteries and chargers section pretty good choices for the purposes they are listed for?

 

[speshiok46]

drill out the airhole on that V5 just a touch and wow what a fog machine. the other one works well but not what i hoped for its pretty much an octopus clone except for the screw on cap. but i love the V5. another one there that smokes it is the yk1, again open the hole just a bit and holy cow the vapor from such a little atty is incredible.

with the v5 you can go one wick but it will take some adjusting of the coil. you need to make the legs a little longer to get the coil closer to the air hole not alot just cant be right up on the posts when you attach it. i have 2 of them.


I

better that you blow up on someone instead of their battery

I'm glad to hear that the V5 is good choice, and I have to admit, vape levels that are characterized as fog machine, sounds awesome. I'll need to save that build info for later; I'm still wrapping my brain around the theoretical first. I figured I would play around with some simple single coil setups with the X1 (octopus clone) before attemping the actual octopus setup.

 

[Thrasher]

need any help let us/me know. on my provari with the yk1 or V5 my boss says "go outside with that damn thing you look like your on fire or something" lol

when you exhale and cant see the monitor you know its all good




one of the fasttech attys at 1.2 ohms on a mech with regular 3mm silica. cant remember which one this day. (can see the octi on the vamo in first pic)

fog machine is possible just takes some getting things right youll get there.

 

[speshiok46]

I didnt mean to sound condescending; if i came off that way it is not my intention. But if i have to blow up on someone about this issue it might as well be a beginner that can be shunned away from this unnecessary danger.

better that you blow up on someone instead of their battery

No worries at all, I'm here to learn. As a long standing gun owner, I appreciate safety and not wanting something blowing up near my head

 

[speshiok46]

my boss says "go outside with that damn thing you look like your on fire or something" lol

lol,you're lucky, here in NJ vaping is treated the same as smoking in public. Thanks Corzine.

 

[Kanj.nguyen]

Yes, i have done the math. Heres why i dont recommend sub-ohm vaping:

- First of all, like i said, it is a myth. Do the calculations: the math, and therefore the physics, behaves exactly the same way at 0.9ohm and 1.1ohm with difference only in numbers (and not the calculating process). So there is no such thing as "sub-ohm vaping". Get my point?

- Second: it is not that vaping at around 0.5ohm is dangerous by itself - it danger lies in the fluctuation, which, anyone who has experience in rebuilding will tell you, is inevitable. A jump of 0.1 ohm is to be expected - one slight nudge on the coil, one particle of dust or solid remains of juice, and it can jump. More significant fluctuations include hot spots: a 0.5 ohm or full 1 ohm drop is possible if you have hot spots, which can develop during use - as in, you can iron out all the kinks and have it running perfectly before vaping, and then a week later it just pops up with no warning whatsoever. These are not "lightning in a bottle" kind of chance: it happens on a regular basis on every build.

Now, lets do the math, shall we? A run of the mill, of-course-it-happens, zero-warning drop of 0.1 ohm brings your build to 0.4ohm. On a fresh battery running 4.2volt, you are now drawing 10.5amps. Boom goes the dynamite. Literally.

If you think about it, thats no different than sucking on a grenade with the safety pin already pulled. It will blow, any second now.

Just because you battery can push 10amps doesnt mean you should push it close it that. Think of the extra current capacity as a safety cushion for when things change, which it will. Like a car: yeah, i know your car can go 120mph, but dont do it.

No, i am not an overly safety-conscious geezer. Im a 20 year old math major (so yeah i can do the math) and have done more reckless things before i was 15 than many do in a life time. But there are risks, and then there are unnecessary risks born out of lack of knowledge. Sub-ohm vaping falls into the latter.

 

[floridaBMW]

Thank you very much for your post Kanj, great info many don't realize or appreciate.

Ken

 

[Baditude]

I'm also NOT a proponent of sub ohm vaping. The benefits can not be worth the risks. Even PBusardo has warned about sub ohm vaping, which is not the kind of thing he's known for. "Sometimes just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

I do tend to be a safety conscious person since I had a battery blow up in a mechanical mod about a year ago. User error, but then it generally is.

 

[Kanj.nguyen]

I actually like the fact that you care first about the theoretical: thats my language too. And i find that once you figure out the theoretical you can do anything much better with less effort than one who hasnt.

 

[Thrasher]

i too feel the same way when i can get choking vapor through regular means as well as thickening it up with other tricks like certain wicks, ribbon wire etc i see no reason to push the boundaries of battery tech.

and sooner or later that one flawed battery is gonna make it out of the factory, someone will splinter half their face off and then the vaping ban hammer will really come down.

 

[speshiok46]

Yes, i have done the math. Heres why i dont recommend sub-ohm vaping:

- First of all, like i said, it is a myth. Do the calculations: the math, and therefore the physics, behaves exactly the same way at 0.9ohm and 1.1ohm with difference only in numbers (and not the calculating process). So there is no such thing as "sub-ohm vaping". Get my point?

That I get. I'm not obsessed with getting down to below 1.0 ohm for the sake of it; I'm just entertaining the idea. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to understand the ranges I need to working within safely.

- Second: it is not that vaping at around 0.5ohm is dangerous by itself - it danger lies in the fluctuation, which, anyone who has experience in rebuilding will tell you, is inevitable. A jump of 0.1 ohm is to be expected - one slight nudge on the coil, one particle of dust or solid remains of juice, and it can jump. More significant fluctuations include hot spots: a 0.5 ohm or full 1 ohm drop is possible if you have hot spots, which can develop during use - as in, you can iron out all the kinks and have it running perfectly before vaping, and then a week later it just pops up with no warning whatsoever. These are not "lightning in a bottle" kind of chance: it happens on a regular basis on every build.

Now, lets do the math, shall we? A run of the mill, of-course-it-happens, zero-warning drop of 0.1 ohm brings your build to 0.4ohm. On a fresh battery running 4.2 volt, you are now drawing 10.5amps. Boom goes the dynamite. Literally.

Like I said this is just theoretical. This is just how I process information. I will be working around the 1 ohm mark, realistically starting at 1.5 ohms and working my way down.

OK to summarize, so I don't get further confused: Amps in a setup should not exceed the amp rating on the battery to operate safely.

Now that we're done with that. It does make me a little concerned about my current setup. Like I said I have a stock K-101 kit. The ICR batteries that came with it are 2.5A at best. It sounds like I shouldn't be using the SmokTech DCT LR cartos (1.5 ohm) without getting a new battery? I'm currently using Boge LR cartos which I believe are 1.7 to 2.0 ohms.