Wick materials. Safe vs dangerous.

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Malduk

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My :2c:, Is watch the heat. make sure you don't put to much voltage to the cotton wick or it will scorch.

True that.
Being a (relatively) high wattage vaper, this bugged me a lot at the start. After playing a bit with different wire thickness and spaces between wraps, I found my "sweet" coil that worked well, but dual coils are definitely another way to spread the heat around and still get great vape. With other wicks, I consider them not worth the trouble (they drain the battery way too fast), but they work great with cotton.
Since some attys cannot handle dual coils, another thing to try is thicker wire, or 2 thin wires twisted together. This allows making more wraps, thus spreading the heating surface.
 

Cool_Breeze

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So far, so good.

I made a ~1/8" long, about three layer wrap of SS mesh. I didn't have any dificulty heat treating and dipping in water. I used a paperclip with a small hook on the end to keep it from sliding off. I then did a couple of burns with PG on it. I mostly unwound the wrap and rewound it around two pieces of cotton string. Winding the coil was the harder part. It didn't grip the SS mesh like it did the bare cotton string. It was difficult to pull tight and have it not slide around on top of the SS mesh. That made it a bit more difficult to keep the turns of the coil spaced and not touching. It took about 3 attempts at installation into the top of the center tube of the Echo Cyrstal Vision to get it to measure correctly with the Ohmeter. ~2.6 Ohms.

Along with the SS Mesh in today's mail was a contest winning of a bottle of Vanilla Tobacco from AwesomeClouds.com. I thought I'd put both to the test. The AC VT is 24 mg. with PG/VG not specified. I sense high in the PG range from the farily low cloud factor.

The coil assembly seems to be wicking fine. The juice is vanilla sweet. The juice color is an amber-orange. The color is farily intense and it is a little cloudy as viewed in the glass bottle. I don't know if it has any particulate matter in it, so it's hard to estimate how much it might clog the cotton portion of the wick. I'll vape this for a while and perhaps try some of my other cloggers and see if I can get it to the point of build up on the coil. Then I hope to find out if it can be dry burned and how much that might damage the cotton. I'm currently vaping at 3.52 Volts. That's as low as my vv mod will go.
 
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roadrash

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So far, so good.

I made a ~1/8" long, about three layer wrap of SS mesh.

I must say that I seem to be making more of those than the straight cotton wick. I pulled one apart today after some serious vaping with low MPG's and the cotton wick was in decent shape. Actually good enough to reuse.:facepalm: I didn't LOL. The results so far seem to be with the SS mesh wrapped around the cotton it really takes higher voltage (1.2 ohms @ 4.6 volts and almost 18 watts after some juice buildup) without scorching the cotton. The SS must be dissipating the heat.:)

Posted with my wireless keyboard, sitting in my easy chair having a few.;)
 

Quigsworth

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So far, so good.

I made a ~1/8" long, about three layer wrap of SS mesh.

I must say that I seem to be making more of those than the straight cotton wick. I pulled one apart today after some serious vaping with low MPG's and the cotton wick was in decent shape. Actually good enough to reuse.:facepalm: I didn't LOL. The results so far seem to be with the SS mesh wrapped around the cotton it really takes higher voltage (1.2 ohms @ 4.6 volts and almost 18 watts after some juice buildup) without scorching the cotton. The SS must be dissipating the heat.:)

Posted with my wireless keyboard, sitting in my easy chair having a few.;)

Ok, I've heard enough, I'm building a new Ody wick tonight with the oxidized mesh wrapped batton...I've been thinking that it may be a little easier than trying to find that not enough wickking/drowning the coil fine line...
 

Quigsworth

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So Quigsworth how did it turn out for ya?

Not to well I'm afraid...after 2 attempts and a 1/2 hour of screwing around (ended up using the cigarette paper method to get it to stop shorting) I finally got it to work...tasted nothing but burning metal...I can't seem to get enough wicking for juice to seep through the mesh to the coil and if I really opened up the flow control, it just flooded...then I started asking myself, why am I doing this again?...:unsure:

For Odys at least, there's just to much metal around the ceramic cup to have a high success rate that could be repeated over and over to make it worth while.
 

Cyrus Vap

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So i've realized what should have been obvious about CE2s, namely, juice viscosity is a huge factor in how fast your set up wicks and how hot you can run it

Silica stock fluxomizer #1, burnt hits left and right at 3.8 volts. Thinned my juice, vaping like a juggernaut at 4.5 volts.

Silica stock fluxomizer #2, burnt hits left and right at 3.8 volts.

instead of thinning the juice, I rethreaded with cotton yarn, vaping like a juggernaut at 4.8 volts

Yeah we already knew that, but I just like seeing it again and again :)
 

supervape

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Strange the quotes are messed up on the last few posts lol..Quigsworth : I have one quick suggestion and would appreciate if you tried it and let me or us know how it worked , before you give up completely with the SS mesh.. Take some silica and fold it in half so there is two in one row or take two pieces same length and wrap it tightly in the SS mesh BUT keep the ends of the Silica coming out each end of the SS mesh and use that rolled SS up with the silica.. I have did that with genesis mods and with the drip mode Ody and it works great for sure better than SS alone IMHO.. Now if that's already what you tried then forgive me for the long explanation ;)


OOPS MY BAD THAT'S WHAT A WRAPPED BATTON MEANS SORRY FOR MY STUPIDITY!
 
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Quigsworth

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Strange the quotes are messed up on the last few posts lol..Quigsworth : I have one quick suggestion and would appreciate if you tried it and let me or us know how it worked , before you give up completely with the SS mesh.. Take some silica and fold it in half so there is two in one row or take two pieces same length and wrap it tightly in the SS mesh BUT keep the ends of the Silica coming out each end of the SS mesh and use that rolled SS up with the silica.. I have did that with genesis mods and with the drip mode Ody and it works great for sure better than SS alone IMHO.. Now if that's already what you tried then forgive me for the long explanation ;)


OOPS MY BAD THAT'S WHAT A WRAPPED BATTON MEANS SORRY FOR MY STUPIDITY!

That's what I tried, although not with silica (proud to say I don't even have any silica :)), I used cotton batton (I've also tried it a while ago with ceramic, which was a complete disaster because the ceramic is way too fragile, it just disintegrated when I tried to roll the mesh on)...but ya, in an Ody the wick doesn't just dangle freely in juice, it's encapsulated in the juice flow control...the cotton legs where nice and juicy but not enough to soak through the mesh...there's other guys over on Vapor Wall that have also tried the coil over mesh over silica method on Odys with little to no success...but really for me, shrug the shoulders, rip it out and go back to my beloved batton...cause it just works :D
 

Bmays

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The "small" silica wick thats used in the clearomizers etc... Whats bad about those? Serious question. I get the bigger fiberglass wicks ( I have some ) that the strands tend to break off and stick out and could be a problem but, whats the deal with the smaller stranded silica?


I'm asking because I use SS, and tried the cotton etc. I am just thinking about using the silica to rebuild the ViVi's that I have. Thanks
 

Dr.Jerryrigger

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The "small" silica wick thats used in the clearomizers etc... Whats bad about those? Serious question. I get the bigger fiberglass wicks ( I have some ) that the strands tend to break off and stick out and could be a problem but, whats the deal with the smaller stranded silica?


I'm asking because I use SS, and tried the cotton etc. I am just thinking about using the silica to rebuild the ViVi's that I have. Thanks

Silica isn't that bad in that amount. But it's still not good. That's really all people can say, there isn't any data on this kind of exposure level. Though most experts (I suspect) would agree that it isn't a good thing.
 

Charlz

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pure speculation. Inhaling silica fibers leads to a nasty long term untreatable disease. The speculation is whether or not it's happening.

The plus is, the coil doesn't gunk up like it does with silica. Silica gets as hot as the coil and crusts up the juice. I don't have that happening with cotton or bamboo. I've gotten bamboo working nicely but prefer cotton. The minus is that the cotton takes some time to break in and mutes flavor until it is. It's not a long time though. And those who vape at higher watts may have different results to post. I personally can use the cotton for a long time and mostly vape under 7 watts.

The other BIG plus to cotton is that when it's time to rewick, you can just pull out the old cotton and push through new cotton. It's soft where as the silica/fiberglass/ceramic wick it too stiff and brittle to push through.
 

Cyrus Vap

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That's pretty much how I feel about it. The health hazards of silica as we use it, well, its an educated guess.

But the bottom line is cotton beats the living crap out of silica in terms of taste, wicking, price, accessibility, ease of manipulation and juice friendliness. 2 mls of juice through silica and my coils are already black. 5 mls of juice through cotton and my coils still look like coils.
 

Bmays

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We'll maybe I need to give the cotton another go. I re-wick anything that can be re-wicked without problem. When I tried cotton I got a terrible taste with it. Maybe it was the oil from my hands as others have mentioned. I did roll the heck out of it in my palms. If so, I taste very bad :)

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk
 

TomCatt

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pure speculation. Inhaling silica fibers leads to a nasty long term untreatable disease. The speculation is whether or not it's happening.

The plus is, the coil doesn't gunk up like it does with silica. Silica gets as hot as the coil and crusts up the juice. I don't have that happening with cotton or bamboo. I've gotten bamboo working nicely but prefer cotton. The minus is that the cotton takes some time to break in and mutes flavor until it is. It's not a long time though. And those who vape at higher watts may have different results to post. I personally can use the cotton for a long time and mostly vape under 7 watts.

The other BIG plus to cotton is that when it's time to rewick, you can just pull out the old cotton and push through new cotton. It's soft where as the silica/fiberglass/ceramic wick it too stiff and brittle to push through.

Not sure what is meant by "Silica gets as hot as the coil". Do you mean during a dry burn? As long as adequate wicking is taking place, the wick (no matter what it's made from) shouldn't get "as hot as the coil". If it did, that'd make for one monster vape - coil and wick vaporizing the juice.
 
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