Your DIY Juice: Do you tolerate, like or love it?

[somdcomputerguy]

I don’t steep at all. I just shake and vape. Super super lazy mixing. The way I do it it’s actually less effort to mix juice than to go out and buy it ignoring any cost savings (which are big).

I only use one flavoring. I have three, and they all taste good (to me) mixed together, but I have never used all three together, except once for that taste test. Sometimes I'll use two of them together, but 99.9% of the time it's either unflavored or one flavor added. I've inserted a picture of my 'mixing station'. I fill up the 125 ml bottle (far left) with unflavored, put up to 2.5 mls of flavor in the little cup, dump that in the bigger cup (which I've already put 10 mls or so into), swirl it around, then add more unflavored to the bigger cup to bring it up to 30 ml. Then I dump this mix into my 'filler bottle' (far right). Or I'll just fill up the 'filler bottle' with unflavored to what I think is ~30 ml. As bombastinator said in his post: no steeping, just shake and vape. I'll bet there's more than us two in the 'super lazy mixing club'..

 

[Sugar_and_Spice]

I began to DIY back in 2010 when the industry was brand new and everyone was just trying to figure out how to get a better vaping experience. At the time there were almost no e juices mixed for us to purchase except some horrid type of cigarette flavors that were usually sold with whatever cig-a-like you purchased. I bit the bullett and tried 1 ejuice from China. Made my mouth and throat numb so down the drain it went.it was then I started hearing about mixing your own so i jumped in with both feet. Early on i mixed just single fruit, drink, and gum flavours. They were easy and quick which was perfect for me since i was still working at the time.
DIY can be as easy or as complicated as you wish to make it. What counts is that you like your mixes cause if you dont you are not gonna vape it.

Smoking was nevah this much fun. Lol

 

[greek mule]

bombastinator said in his post: no steeping, just shake and vape. I'll bet there's more than us two in the 'super lazy mixing club'..

Add me in the club!

 

[smacuser]

I'll bet there's more than us two in the 'super lazy mixing club'..

Yup.

I mix about 3-4 times a year. Even when my ADVs are gone, I'll dig into the basket and start combining my sfts together in a tank. I usually mix bigger batches of my single flavor tobaccos, then drip other flavors down the drip tip; and when I'm in the mood for a treat, I'll drip the Boba's Bounty.

 

[DaveP]

I mix mostly unflavored juice. Along with that, I usually mix up several other flavored bottles and use those to add a little flavor here and there to a tank of unflavored mix.

There was a period where I bought lots of flavor concentrates to use in my early DIY experience. After a while, as my tasted buds began to recover, I began to lose the desire for highly flavored juice.

 

[zoiDman]

...

I’ll start, I rely solely on my diy, which I rate as good or better than commercial. I haven’t mastered cloning every juice I’d like to, but I’m confident I could, in time.

You could probably Count on One Hand the number of bottles of retail e-Liquids I have bought in the last 7 Years. And those were just because I was in a B&M and I wanted them to give me DIY Ideas.

I would place my DIY e-Liquids against Any Retail e-Liquid.

As to making Clones of Complex Retail e-Liquids...

Well, that can be a Trial in Patience and Perseverance. And can get down to just How Close you want a Clone to be.

If you want something in the Ballpark, that can usually be done Relatively quickly. If you are Not Satisfied with close, and has to be almost Identical, that can take Time. And Many (Many) Workups.

But if you Quest is for a Perfect, Can't Tell the Difference in a Blind Taste Test, Perfect 1-to-1 Clone, that can be Hard. Very Hard. And it can Test your Will and Determination.


Here is something I posted awhile back about embarking on an Exact 1-to-1 Clone Odyssey ...

When I switched to e-Cigarettes, I was lucky to find an ADV pretty much right off the start. Tasty Vapor's TastyFinger.

And since I was kinda into DIY already, by adding Flavorings or Sweetener to make Retail e-Liquids Stronger and or Sweeter, I decided to Clone TastyFinger. I mean... How Hard could it possibly Be?

LOL.

I spend 1/2 of 2010 and most of 2011 doing Dozens and Dozens and Dozens (and Dozens) of work-ups. It was Maddening. And became a Borderline Compulsion. I had full box of 3-x-5 Cards with Recipes and Cryptic Batch Codes like 17F or 21AB written on Blue Painters Tape on too many 30ml Glass Bottles to count.

I would get Soooo Cloooose at times. So Very Agonizingly Close. Only to Add or Subtract a Flavoring or Change a Percentage which would then push it away from where it should be.

I Finally Got It. It was a Absolute 1:1 Clone. And a Very Complex Multi-Flavor Recipe.

My Advise is if you want to Clone a Complex Retail e-Liquid is to have Realistic Goals. Because you might be able to get it Close relatively quickly. But going the Last Mile can be Murder.

BTW - Even if I told someone the Individual Flavors needed to Clone TastyFinger (which I won't), without their respective Percentages, you would only be about 40% Closer to making it.

The Percentages are what can make the Last Mile so Tough.

Reverse Engineering a commercial E-Liquid

 

[Jebbn]

Yeah, Im always happy with how the mix turns out. My ADV goes with everything.
Unflavoured.
I mix for a couple of others, I dont enjoy it while Im doing it but I always feel good at hand over.
Theyre too polite to tell me if its crap. Thats a bonus.
I mix bigger batches to avoid wasting time. Theres a whole big internet I have to sit and stare at.

 

[DeloresRose]

@Jebbn my SIL is solely dependent on my juice. She’s too cheap to tell me if it’s crap. I often think I could make her bacon flavor and she’d vape it.

 

[stols001]

MAKE HER BACON flavor and find out!!!!!!!!!!!

Report back LOL.

Anna

 

[susieqz]

for me, mixing is a pain,
my mixes are very simple n are fine.
i refuse to buy mixing stuff.
my measuring cup has mls on the back n i have normal measures, from 1/4 teaspoon to 1 tablespoons.

if i had to mix your recipes, with 1% this n 2.5%that, i'd go buy cigs.

 

[DeloresRose]

for me, mixing is a pain,
my mixes are very simple n are fine.
i refuse to buy mixing stuff.
my measuring cup has mls on the back n i have normal measures, from 1/4 teaspoon to 1 tablespoons.

if i had to mix your recipes, with 1% this n 2.5%that, i'd go buy cigs.

The point isn’t how fancy you do it, the point is you’ve found a method that works for you. You’re making juice you can vape. That’s a win!

 

[tw33k]

when i first started vaping, i was getting my juice from China and it was pretty bad so i started DIY. the results weren't the best but vape-able. after a couple years, i got tired of mixing and started buying commercial juice form the US (selling e-juice with nic is illegal here) I was buying a lot of juice, sometimes spending over $300 a month looking for a few good juices (but mostly getting crap or barely acceptable juice).

i came to my senses a couple months ago and started DIY again. My aim is to copy the 6 or 7 commercial juices i really like. Right now I'm vaping a smores juice I mixed a few weeks ago. i vaped it side-by-side with the commercial juice and mine is better. I have a couple more ready to try and a few that i'll leave steeping another week or 2.

i use the ejuice me up app when calculating the ingredients. it has a bunch of recipes included that i have been modifying and if all goes well i'll never buy commercial juice again

 

[Millions81]

Only diy, mixing for 6 months now. Love it.*
For me personally it was pretty quick from wanting just clones clones clones to good diy mixes to 4 ingredient personal mixes to having the confidence to mix whatever we feel like having to ......mit I have a lot of single flavor tests to do.
Went down the rabbit hole, built a ventilator to pump fresh oxygen, then kept going.
If you take the time to do some reading (how much depends where you want to go) you can go far. Lots of great info out there.
There's also lots of great mixers who put out quality recipes. I know plenty of people who just make other people's mixes exclusively as well.
Mixing by weight is the only way to do it for me. volume mixing is too inaccurate when you deal with brands where .25% matters (flv lots of flavors, fa\inw a good amount, even tpa has blackberry). Vg\pg\nic\flavors are all constant weights (no need to get into specific gravities of flavors if you treat them all the same) so even if I didn't use an online calculator I could still mix with pencil & paper. Your mixing vessel is your empty bottle. The aws lb-501 scale is highly accurate & $25 in the US.
"$10 for 100ml of commercial & that's on a good day? That's 30-120ml of concentrated flavoring!"

 

[somdcomputerguy]

Went down the rabbit hole,

You're just daring me, aren't you? Oh I see you're a newish member and you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, just do a search on threads that I've posted in that have the phrase 'rabbit hole' (use the Search Forums link on the top left instead of the search field on the right) and you'll get it. I have reason now (in my unreasonable mind) to post a different rabbit pic here..

eta: here's the search results link so you don't have to do any typing that you really shouldn't have to do anyway. I did the search myself just to see how many times I posted that other rabbit pic. I was quite surprised that only 8 results were displayed. I was thinking more like 8 hundred results would've come up..
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