SWELL by Vandy Vape

The TOTAL Mod?

RINCOE MechMan 228

BOX for RAMBO?

VooPoo X217

HOT SHOTS (of juice)

What 18650 battery for electronic mod?

Useful capacity of 18650 batts in electronic mod

Aegis SOLO

Geek Vape in GOOD SHAPE!

Monday 23 February 2015

Dripping for beginners

Dripping is one of the most popular ways of vaping, so there is a lot of questions like "how to start", "what to buy", etc. I decided to write SIMPLE tutorial for beginners.

A few comments for the start:

1. For me (and for the beginning) the sensible limit of coil resistance for dripping is 0.5 ohm (especially for mech mods - here you can read why) and that we stick to in this guide.

2. Sorry but there is no way to create the good set for dripping for 25$. Nor for 35 ... So, if you have the Spinner and you want to use it with dripper FORGET about it. Of course you can try but or you will damage the battery (and more or less yourself), or you will get effect worse than on Vivi Mini.

3. I always STRONGLY RECOMMEND TO USE GENUINE STUFF - especially for dripping the clones often are not able to take such extreme loads what subohm coils generate.

4. You use this guide at your own risk - generally dripping is not the rocket science but requires caution and attention.


WHAT WE NEED TO HAVE?

Something like that:

1. The RDA (rebuildable dripping atomizer) - best some recommended design. Good if the atty's posts have drilled holes for coils - it DEFINITELY makes easier to mount thicker wires. In this guide I use the CLT atty.
2. Mechanical mod - it is recommend to use hybrid connector to reduce the voltage drop on thread.
3. Battery - IT MUST HAVE reliable high discharge current. So there is no place for any SuperDuperFire 6800 mAh. Minimum continuous discharge current must be 10A but the more the better. So, purple Efest or Sony VTC 4/5 will be perfect.
4. 26 AWG wire (0,4 mm) - for example Kanthal D, buy a few meter ;-)
5. 100% cotton wool.
6. Ohm meter - standalone or embedded into some good vv/vw mod. You should definitely have it.
7. Things making life easier:
* flat tweezers,
* screwdriver or drill bit or other rod with a diameter in the range of 2-2.5 mm,
* wire cutters or nail clippers.

Really worth to stick the equipment mentioned above. If you say "eee, I don't have 26AWG wire, so I will take the 30AWG" you will fail - according to this guide you won't create good coil using 30 AWG wire.

TYPE OF COIL


On RDA we can run most of popular setups (including mesh). In my opinion the best one is microcoil with natural cotton (regular cotton wool or MUJI pads). So we will use it and we will start from one coil because it is absolutely sufficient for the beginning. Multi-coils setups are a little overrated...


LET'S START

1. Cut about 3" (8 cm) of wire and prepare "winding device":


2. Wind 6 wraps:

a) quite tight, but without much worry about it - later we will squeeze it hot,
b) at this stage it is worth to shape the coil suitable to the atty posts - I did it for CLT posts


3. Install the coil in atty (securely tighten the screws):
 
4. Now be sure to check the resistance:

If everything went well we should get resistance within 0.5-0.7 ohm range. Of course it depends on rod diameter and posts configuration in your atty. I got 0.7 ohm on 2.4 mm screwdriver.

Below you can see APPROXIMATE coil resistance in depends on the number of wraps and wire thickness for 2mm rod diameter:

 * - with such small rod diameter and thick wires multimeter often shows the same values.


5. Microcoil finishing - be careful not to apply the tweezers to the heater under voltage, so:
a) heat the coil - no worries, to the whiteness:



b) switch off voltage and after that squeeze microcoil by tweezers, few seconds:

 c) repeat 2-3 times to get compact heater:



6. Now cotton ... Take a piece, more or less as you see below:

and tighly roll - one end may be lubricated by water or liquid:



7. And drag the cotton by the coil:

This action is quite stressful at the beginning because there is no option: we always take too thin or too thick piece of cotton, but stay cool - it is a matter of practice.

8. Already close - now only put cotton in the atty.


9. Well! Apply the liquid:


Dry wool absorbs the liquid very slowly so do it slowly.

And FIRE! 


10. Now we can put the top cap (air hole MUST BE in line with coil):


and vape! Carefully, to not fall of the chair :-)


ONE IMPORTANT NOTE
After coil finished, when you put cotton to the atty ALWAYS BLOCK THE MOD (or better remove the atty from mod). If you won't do it mod will start with 99% probability. And then everything depends on where do you have your fingers... One time I had it on coil and then my finger looked like this:


The TRUTH about sub-ohm vaping on mech mods

For a long time I've been vaping on mech mods + drippers with single-coil setups at 0.5 - 0.6 ohm resistance. So the power was about 25W and everything was cool. Then I wanted to try some stronger configurations. The easiest way seemed just to add second 0.6 ohm coil and get twice lower resistance and hence to double the power. I did it but did my general vaping impression also  doubled? ABSOLUTELY NO! So I started to wonder why? Below I try to explain this phenomenon.

Let's start from the experiment:
* I take the Sony VTC4 battery fully charged to 4.2V,
* and the RDA with "easy" 1.1 ohm coil:


 

* then I connect the mech mod and measure the voltage on atty's posts by use of multimeter:



Hmmm, there is not so good: we get almost 0.7V voltage drop, and it means that instead of expected 16W we get only about 11W. Only 70% of expected power.

And what will happen if  I connect coil with approximately twice lower resistance?



Will I double the power? Let's check the voltage:



Now we have 0.9V voltage drop, so we get only 18.7W of power INSTEAD of expected ~31W. Only 60% of expected power.


WHY?

Generally due to the parasitic resistances of our circuit. In slight simplification it would look like this:



So we have:
* battery with internal resistance 0.03 ohm (optimistic assumption) and 4V (for calculation simplicity),
* the rest of the circuit "on the way" to the coil: threads, contacts, screws on posts, etc. - and also optimistically assume that everything has 0.05 ohm,
* an example coil with 1.5 ohm resistance.

And through it all the CURRENT flows. And it causes voltage drops wherever it can. So:


Not bad - only 10% difference from theory - nice.
And what if we do the coil with 3 times less resistance? Will the power increase 3 times?



As you can see NO - we get only 70% of expected (theoretical) power! 

Almost 30% of the generated power is wasted on heating elements other than the coil!

And then it gets worse - just look at the graph of power (calculated according to the above scheme) for decreasing the resistance:

As you can see at 0.2 ohm half of power goes into air !!


And WHAT ABOUT VV/VW MODs??

I repeated the test using vv mod based on GE Naos Raptor chip, at 4.23V:

And what the real voltage on posts was? 


As you can see is MUCH BETTER: 
* for 1.11 ohm we get ~95% of expected power (on mech mod we got ~70%) 
* for 0.57 ohm we get ~88% of expected power (on mech mod we got ~60%)

Thursday 19 February 2015

What 18650 batteries for electronic mod?

Saturday 14 February 2015

What 26650 batteries for MECH MODs?

There is a lot of 26650 batteries in the market. Cheaper, more expensive, originals, clones, etc... But which one is THE BEST for my mech mod??
During last 2 years I've been testing it in various ways. Finally I found that the best way (as close as possible to reality, actually worse then reality :-) ) is continuous load test. Preferably at quite low "coil" resistance, lets say 0.5 ohm. So, I constructed test setup described here and started to test...

13-06-2015 UPDATE We have a new leader: the green Efest 4200 mAh:
 
 
Till 23 minute it has a little bigger voltage drop than KP4200, but then lasts longer.

Below you can see all the results:
EQUIPMENT UNDER TEST



The RESULTS



Having the voltage level during whole test and knowing the load resistance we can easily calculate the useful capacity of tested batteries. I emphasize the useful word because it is capacity calculated exactly for the conditions described in the test: for battery discharging from 4.2V to 3.3V at 0.5 Ohm load. In a different measurement methodology the total capacity will differ from this, BUT in my opinion presented methodology is the best from point of view the users of mech mods!


What 18350 batteries for MECH MODs?

There is a lot of batteries 18350 in the market. Cheaper, more expensive, originals, clones, etc... But which one is THE BEST for my mech mod??
During last 2 years I've been testing it in various ways. Finally I found that the best way (as close as possible to reality, actually worse then reality :-) ) is continuous load test. Preferably at quite low "coil" resistance, lets say 0.5 ohm. So, I constructed test setup described here and started to test... Below you can see the results for 18350 batts.
EQUIPMENT UNDER TEST



 The RESULTS


Having the voltage level during whole test and knowing the load resistance we can easily calculate the useful capacity of tested batteries. I emphasize the useful word because it is capacity calculated exactly for the conditions described in the test: for battery discharging from 4.2V to 3.3V at 0.5 Ohm load. In a different measurement methodology the total capacity will differ from this, BUT in my opinion presented methodology is the best from point of view the users of mech mods!

What 18500 batteries for MECH MODs?

There is a lot of 18500 (18490) batteries in the market. Cheaper, more expensive, originals, clones, etc... But which one is THE BEST for my mech mod??
During last 2 years I've been testing it in various ways. Finally I found that the best way (as close as possible to reality, actually worse then reality :-) ) is continuous load test. Preferably at quite low "coil" resistance, lets say 0.5 ohm. So, I constructed test setup described here and started to test... Below you can see the results for 18500 batts:

EQUIPMENT UNDER TEST



The RESULTS



Having the voltage level during whole test and knowing the load resistance we can easily calculate the useful capacity of tested batteries. I emphasize the useful word because it is capacity calculated exactly for the conditions described in the test: for battery discharging from 4.2V to 3.3V at 0.5 Ohm load. In a different measurement methodology the total capacity will differ from this, BUT in my opinion presented methodology is the best from point of view the users of mech mods!

Wednesday 11 February 2015

MESH in microscope

Some time ago I bought a toy microscope as a gift for my godchild. Of course it had to be checked :-) and it turned out that it is very well suited for investigation of different vape-stuff. For the first one went the vape mesh. I bought a couple of sheets from The Vape Mesh Company (TVMC. formerly The Mesh Company - TMC) and checked what exactly the strange symbols mean...

MESH #200
(quote from TVMC: #200 mesh - 200 wires or holes per linear inch)
200 wires/inch = ~8 wires/mm


MESH #325
325 wires/inch = ~13 wires/mm


MESH #400
400 wires/inch = ~16 wires/mm


MESH #500
500 wires/inch = ~20 wires/mm


As we can see everything is correct, only #200 has one wire per mm more than it should. But it is not a big problem.
At this moment you might say SO WHAT? Why did you write this topic?
So, I write it because there is a total mess in the vape mesh market: you never know if you get what you paid for. I bought a lot of different mesh from different shops and maybe half of them kept the specification. Even those purchased in reputable shops sometimes were mistaken ... Fortunately, you can initially recognize it organoleptic:
* #200 is DEFINITELY the most gentle and softest to the touch, almost like a synthetic clothing material,
* #500 in touch and stiffness is similiar for something like a thin sheet of aluminum.

Tuesday 10 February 2015

YiHi SX350 vs GE Naos Raptor


For some time now I've been looking for powerful electronic mod with support for the resistance about 0.5 Ohms. But I made the assumption that it must be powered by more than 1x18650 battery (in my opinion the equipment stronger than 20W should be driven by something stronger) and it was quite big limitation because most of mods on the market is powered by one 18650 battery. Finally I found two offers, both handmade by Polish modders:

 

* Wooden box with YiHi SX350 chip by Taxi (1x26650),
* Steel box with General Electric Naos Raptor by p33t-r (2x18650).

Both mods were made perfectly and I’m using them since 3-4 month. Appearance is a matter of taste so I will not elaborate but what chip is better? Is it possible to indicate better one? Let’s see.

1. SPECIFICATION
Exact specification is available in manufacturers sheet so I will describe parameters the most important from the point of view of vapers:


General Electric Naos Raptor:
* Resistance range: 0.3 - 1.5 ohms,
* Voltage regulation (only voltage): 3.4 - 6V (10A current limit).

YiHi SX350:
* Resistance range: 0.2 - 3 Ohms,
* Power regulation: 5 - 60W (after upgrade).

Of course the SX has some more advantages:
* built-in display
* protection against low resistance,
* protection against excessive discharge,
* built-in USB connector for charging,

But obviously its price is much higher than Raptor.

2. VOLTAGE SHAPE
Measurements were made with a load of 1 ohm, in my typical setup with power resistor, shown here.



As you can see the voltage of Raptor is more stable, but in general both shapes are OK.


3. PERFORMANCE
These measurements were made with a load of 0.5 ohm for power 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 Watt.  In case of SX350 I set the required power and measured the real voltage on terminals of atomizer. For Raptor I set the voltage required to achieve a given power and again measured the real voltage on terminals of atomizer.





4. VERDICT?
As you can see the power delivered by both chips are slightly lower than we see on display - the Raptor is here a little better than the SX350, but actually WHO CARES?!? Both chips VAPE GREAT, within the entire range of settings!