Would it be that unsafe to simply do a "test" with unboiled cotton?

[GoodNews!]

Hey guys, I managed to find an old PTII head (or so I think... it may be an Aro one, but I don't think so, since it actually comes apart and goes back together ), and I have some old-fasioned, off-brand, regular cotton balls.

There's probably bleach and no telling what in them. I don't have enough money to go out on a safari looking for organic cotton, nor do ever mess with an oven with my twitch, so I'm not boiling them. Would it be all that unsafe and/or nasty tasting to put a strip of this cotton as a flavor wick on this head? You'd think since I smoke that I wouldn't be scared of it, but this is bleach we're talking about.

Ya'll can probably see why it took me so long even decide to want to rebuild...

 

[Funk Dracula]

CVS Cotton Balls - CVS pharmacy

 

[Asbestos4004]

Get your neighbor to boil it for you. You'll sleep better. ,

 

[devauto]

I don't know about safe, but for the fractionally small amount of cotton you will be using, it will probably be okay to test. I don't boil mine, far more work than I want to put into it, but you will have to be your own judge on it's safeness. As always though ... YMMV!

HTH

 

[Ref Minor]

Personally I buy all my clothes two sizes bigger and boil them vigorously just in case.

 

[Asbestos4004]

I don't boil mine either...and they're not organic. But they were bought new and not just lying around. Plus, op has bionic taste buds

 

[Boiler]

People seem to be using unboiled cotton with no ill effect. Organic cotton is not bleached white but can have its own unsavory components. Better to boil, boil it all, I say!

Try to at least make sure it is 100% cotton. You can burn a small piece and if all you get is ash your good. If you get a lump of black ooze then it has synthetic fibers mixed in.

 

[Portertown]

Yes, it is ok to use them without boiling. Just make sure they are 100% cotton and do not have any manmade materials in them.
I boil my cotton as I get a cleaner taste when I do. I am sure boiling is a good thing long term, but not required for a test. I have done the same test.

 

[GoodNews!]

So I just made a small flavor wick, and tested it. It could have been because I had just rinsed the head, but I put a little juice in the tank, and really wasn't getting much vapor until I got up in the 4.5V range (totally unimaginable for a PT head...). I tried making the smallest flavor wick I could while allowing me to "roll" it, and I left the rubber cap upside down. I'd have said, just by eye, that the flavor wick was ever so slightly a tad to thick, but nothing unimaginable. Anyway, seemed to wick really well from the looks of it, after pulling it apart several times to sort of test it and see how fast the liquid traveled.

So results? For this particular first test, again, it seemed to have trouble giving me vapor. When it did reach that bigger vapor point however, I wasn't tasting a dry hit, but I was tasting a texture from the cotton. Sadly, while it seemed to be giving me clean hits, the juice flavor just wasn't there at all, and tasted more like powdered sugar than anything. After about 4 hits or so, with the working vapor, I got the tiniest hint of like a negative cotton taste, so I put the device down and decided to figure out what I can do to improve it. For what it's worth, the cotton didn't have a single darkened spot on it, though the silica in the coil looks 4X rougher than it did just a minute ago - looks kinda slightly cooked and shriveled up right in the coil (the PT heads always seem to do this...)

What direction should I be headed in? Thicker cotton? Thinner cotton?

 

[Orb Skewer]

Ingredients for boiling:

1: Electricity
2: Electric kettle
3: Water

 

[devauto]

Hmmm ... hard to say on thinner or thicker ...

I don't know about your flavor results ... I have never mixed cotton and silica wicking, I always replace the coil wick with cotton as well, and seem to get very good flavor results. At least better than the stock coils produce.

As always though ... YMMV

HTH

 

[Portertown]

So I just made a small flavor wick, and tested it. It could have been because I had just rinsed the head, but I put a little juice in the tank, and really wasn't getting much vapor until I got up in the 4.5V range (totally unimaginable for a PT head...). I tried making the smallest flavor wick I could while allowing me to "roll" it, and I left the rubber cap upside down. I'd have said, just by eye, that the flavor wick was ever so slightly a tad to thick, but nothing unimaginable. Anyway, seemed to wick really well from the looks of it, after pulling it apart several times to sort of test it and see how fast the liquid traveled.

So results? For this particular first test, again, it seemed to have trouble giving me vapor. When it did reach that bigger vapor point however, I wasn't tasting a dry hit, but I was tasting a texture from the cotton. Sadly, while it seemed to be giving me clean hits, the juice flavor just wasn't there at all, and tasted more like powdered sugar than anything. After about 4 hits or so, with the working vapor, I got the tiniest hint of like a negative cotton taste, so I put the device down and decided to figure out what I can do to improve it. For what it's worth, the cotton didn't have a single darkened spot on it, though the silica in the coil looks 4X rougher than it did just a minute ago - looks kinda slightly cooked and shriveled up right in the coil (the PT heads always seem to do this...)

What direction should I be headed in? Thicker cotton? Thinner cotton?

You may want to try less cotton. This cotton really swells a lot when it gets wet. You will use what you think is a correct amount, but when it swells it is too much. I learned the hard way on my Kayfun Lite builds. The cotton can swell and cut off the flow of juice.

The cotton/textile taste is what I get unless I boil it in distilled water. However, if you get it working right with the unboiled cotton the taste will come around after about a tank of juice.

 

[InTheShade]

People seem to be using unboiled cotton with no ill effect. Organic cotton is not bleached white but can have its own unsavory components. Better to boil, boil it all, I say!

Some organic cotton has been treated with peroxide to bleach it. I found some in Walgreens that was labeled 100% organic, but when I checked, it had been bleached.

Personally, I would boil it, but I am too laz...er busy to do so. If you are going to boil it, use distilled water and not tap water.

 

[Christopherja]

For what it's worth, I've found, with cotton, that if you twist your wick too tightly, it consequently has a higher surface tension and thus allows less juice saturation. This obviously leads to worse wicking. Especially if you're using just a cotton flavour wick, just be careful not to roll it so tightly - no need to.

Although I would recommend, as another poster did, slipping out the silica wick and replacing it with a cotton one.

 

[GoodNews!]

So that cotton did leave some odd textures in my mouth even after I vaped - I still taste like a slight powdery feel in my mouth. Dunno how I feel about that.

Anyway, right now, I'm rolling up cotton strands and just dropping juice on them to visually see just how fast cotton wicks. You know what, just doing that sort of test, what I'm seeing is, without all the extra variables of gravity and suction and stuff, that this particular cotton isn't really wicking much diffrent from silica. It's a little faster of coarse, but still slow to the point that it's not instantly just soaking into the cotton upon contact like water would on a paper towel. In that sense, it really only seems to be slightly faster in the wicking.

And with that, really, what I brought up on other threads is that silica shouldn't be the problem here. My Cisco atty has silica as a wick and it wicks extraordinarily well, and virtually, the innards work like a PT head, more or less. There's a juice cage and that cage sort of flows juice onto the wick, the juice never just seems to sit on the wick or in the Cisco or else it floods out. By all tests I've done, the silica in the PT heads actually wicks really well; I can put the tiniest drop on the outside of the wick, take the head apart, and a second later, it's soaked. So really, I don't know what's the deal with these heads.

All I know is that the coils in these heads seem to cook silica in a bizarre, insane short amount of time. It's happened with all of them. Brand new head, and I'll be looking at a large, healthy strand of wick inside the coil. Vape it a couple times, and look at it, and it looks a bit like it's been slightly cooked, shriveled up, and such. If the silica in these is really fire-resistant, heat shouldn't have that type of effect should it? And if it's not the silica, and just cooking juice having sort of that effect, then I don't see why that's happening as I use 2.5ohms for these and always start with 3.3V's, that's not really the type of power that would IMO just fry a juice on contact.

It would seem that the coils would get a lot darker before the wick would start shriveling up...

 

[InTheShade]

Silica cannot burn at the temperatures we use in our devices. Take a lighter and try to set one on fire - take a blow-torch if you prefer and try again - the silica will glow red and not burn.

I don't know why it's shriveling up, that is strange.

As for cotton not wicking faster than silica - it should (and it usually does). As Christopherja said, if you roll that cotton too tightly it will not wick very well. Keep experimenting with it.

I've never tried the silica wick with a cotton flavor wick either. I suggest you pull that silica out of there and try all cotton. Just remember, too much cotton will give wicking issues, too little and you are in gurgle-flooded land. It's probably the trickiest part of any cotton build IMHO, getting the exact amount of cotton right.

 

[GoodNews!]

Hm, tried the test again, with less cotton (I had to do the tiniest of twist to make sure it sat down in the slot) and visually, even looking at the wick as it's saturated, it doesn't look any bigger than the flavor wicks that were originally in there. I'm really trying to make it very small.

But on the second test, same result - once the distilled water sort of vaped out, I'm getting an extremely light, sugary taste with a juice that is supposed to have a very heavy, rum taste. It tastes like sugar with the slightest sweet tinge of the juice. Generally a good amount of vapor though, so it's a bit confusing... if it wasn't getting enough juice, it'd probably taste dry as all get-out or just wouldn't be giving off a good old cloud.

Not getting burnt hits at least, but really, the texture of the cotton and all that - it's definatly not something I'd vape so far. I'll try and see if I can get the silica out of the coil next, and so far, no mess as of yet. I don't know, this juice I'm using, it has had a weird effect in a lot of atomizers - I don't know if it's the ohm's or what, but in some, it tastes sweaty, in some, it tastes just like sugar, and in my Cisco, it tasted like I had a real plum on my tongue, the flavors were unreal and so moist and full - it was almost as though I actually drank the juice! (No juice on the tongue though...)

 

[GoodNews!]

So, I figured what the heck, and I dry burned the coil to see what turns red - of coarse, I'm impatient and didn't let the wick dry for hours, but I figured you know, surely the thing will finally turn red regardless. Come to find out, in this head, there's a hot leg that turns bright red, and one side of the coil doesn't even seem to have power to it. Kanger for ya.

Edit: Oh wow, I was just gently pulsing my coil along, and my battery got HOT around the connector, even the button did! That seems dangerous as heck!!! Maybe there is something odd with my battery, or is this how they generally do if you dry burn too long?

 

[Empi666]

I recently started putting an extra cotton wick in my Protank2 heads from cotton balls. I did thisto reduceflooding. Didn't boil them. Taste fine to me. I think it's actually working way better than stock. More vapor, flavor about the same.

 

[bluecat]

To really get the benefits out of the cotton you need to do a full cotton wick. Having the flavor wick be cotton doesn't do much. I have tried silica with cotton flavor wick and not much different than plain silica. I tried a cotton and silica wick combined. I did not like that one at all, hard to explain.

I tried cotton with a silica flavor wick. This one isn't bad. Then I did cotton with a cotton flavor wick and it is really nice.

Metal gets hot when heated. Metal transfers heat to other metal parts when heated.