Why do so many people squeeze and compress their coils?

[ErnieKim]

Hey Y'all,
Seems like a loose coil would have more surface area to vaporize fluid. When the coil is squeezed tight fluid can't get to a good portion of the surface area as readily.
I've seen builds where there are huge gaps between the wraps. So why squeeze it? I know it looks nice all even and everything but I care about flavor more than the appearance of the coil; all even and everything. Is it a wrapping skill thing?
OK, I may be a bit jealous of their eye-hand coordination and finger dexterity, but is there any real benefit?
Thanks in advance.
Kim

 

[Brettanomyces]

The goal with compressing is to make sure that the coil heats evenly(from the inside out), if there is gaps you will get hot spots and cold spots. There are also coils where the wraps don't touch each other at all but I'm not familiar with those.

 

[shuteng486]

Oh thats why..

 

[InTheShade]

It's also to increase the surface area of the coil - which in turn gives a lot more area for the liquid to vaporize, giving better flavor and vapor.

I know it sounds kind of counter-intuitive, but if it's wicked correctly, it works very well. Most don't use silica with this type of coil either as it's wicked after the coil is made and is difficult to thread the silica strand through it.

Try one, you might like it!

 

[Norrin]

Even coils work best, so pressed together is easier to get right. The coil also heats slightly quicker because it's heating itself ( admittedly this is heat lost to the vape) and it will cool slower so better for chain vaping. If using cotton it's much easier to rewick.
Loose coils are really only used for coils that you wind round the wick, so silica and SS mesh, these wicks last a while but when you need to rewick you have to recoil. Pros and cons to both.

 

[IMFire3605]

Nano, Micro, and Macro coils as you are talking about as stated above, they are easier to get firing evenly, and with the coils compressed together makes one large coil to wick contact area. Third thing is with the coils compressed together, a 1.5ohm micro- or macro coil can create almost the same amount of heat as say a 0.8ohm spiral coil (spaced) because the heat is focalized. Another factor is maintenace, especially rewicking, remove old wick, dry fire off gunk and rinse in water a couple times, dry fire off the water after final rinse, recompress the coil, rewick, prime, and bang, back up and running in under 5 minutes. Spiral coil have to rework out the hot spots and re-align the coils which can lead to 2 to 3 times more maintenance time.

Nothing bad to say that a compressed coil or spiral coil are good or bad, most of my day to day builds are micro and macro coils, my Genesis style tanks when I run them are generally spiral coils when wicked with SS Cable, SS Mesh, or SS Cable and SS Mesh hybrid config.

 

[ErnieKim]

I've always made my coils this way because I follow Rip Tripper's videos; a bit over the top but entertaining. I see the "hot spot" point and the speed of heating; you can see that happening as you compress it. I still question the overall amount of surface area but "if it works, don't fix it"!
Kim

 

[dice57]

squeezing and pulsing coils is also done to synchronize multi coils. One of the things effected by pulsing and squeezing coils together, is their resistance will drop the tighter, more uniform, and closer the loops are. So, before wicking up and juicing, if using more than one coil section, it's best to balance the warp core, and get everything pulsing in synchronicity, or at least on the same wave length.

Have one set up that uses dual // dual series coils, telling ya, by time everything is pulsed and balanced, it's time to swap out a new batt, recheck, than wick, saturate, assemble, fill and vape.

Some people don't care about wave harmonics, system balances, optimum purrformance tolerances. But heck, get to a point in understanding one tends to look on the quantum side of the equations.

Currently use tension wrapping on all my coils, often when pulsing a tension wrap, don't have to spueeze, it's purrfect the first time, and once in a blue moon, on the 30th of February, can do a tri-coil set up, and she's purrfect. Other wise, a fool and his un-pulsed squeezed wrapped coil, will find themselves non-optimized. Or something like that..!!!!!!!


Vape long and Prosper.!!!!

 

[SweeneyTodd79]

lots of good reasons listed...

For me, who just started in rebuildables it's about 50% the re-wicking issue, as it's way easier to get cotton through a cylinder than it is a series of spiral loops.

The other part of it is to avoid short-outs.

I have a small build deck on my rebuildable, compared to some other toppers. I have 28g kanthal wire and that means that I'm looking at 7 to 9 wraps to get in the sweet spot of 1.1 to 1.4 to work on my iStick (which won't fire below 1 Ohm).

If I didn't compress it the coil would almost certainly bump somthing in the build deck and short out.

The result is a monster compared to the protank I was using... single coil, sort of respectable clouds on a long pull...

 

[AndriaD]

I never compress my coils fully; I squeeze them a little to make sure the coil is uniform, and fits where it should, but in my finished coils, the individual wraps don't touch. I've always preferred coils like this, as I seem to get a lot fewer dry hits -- the heat is not so concentrated, but spread out, so there's less chance of burning the wick.

Just my own preference, since I'm not a cloud chaser, I don't want a really hot vape, or massive coolwhip clouds of vapor. They're not hard to thread, using cotton or rayon; you just twist one end to a point, and it goes thru very easily.

Andria

 

[DaveP]

When I look at most premade coils from Kanger and Aspire they are almost all loosely wrapped around a silica wick. When I wrap coils, I compress them but I'm making coils that need to be smaller in width to fit and allow a cotton wick to be inserted. They are larger in diameter than you'd see in a factory head, but not so wide in long.

It's also been my experience that larger 2mm/3mm coils with free standing turns develop hot spots as others described above. That's one of the reasons we keep leg length as short as possible. The hardest loops to keep compressed are the outside loops. They tend to pull away as you screw down the legs.

The main factor IMO is the fit of a cotton wick in a user made coil. Too tight or too loose in the coils and performance suffers. My method is to very lightly compress cotton into a rod shape that fits the coil without much shearing as I pull it through. The wick should slide through and fill the coil without the coil holding back material on the input side ( if that makes sense ). Once it's wetted by the juice it will expand, so you need something that barely fills the coil when dry.