E-Cigarettes, as an industry and product, are moving at such a fast pace, I don't feel like this thread will be relevant in a year. As such, I've given it the title you see above.
ALSO: THESE ARE MY OPINIONS, I AM NOT A SCIENTIST, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, DOCTOR, OR OTHERWISE. BUT I AM ALSO NOT A MORANS, SO I'M COMFORTABLE IN WRITING ALL OF THIS UP FOR YOU ALL. IF YOU THINK IT'S WRONG, TAKE IT WITH A GRAIN OF SALT OR SOMETHING.
WHY?Feel free to skip this section if you're already vaping. This isn't for you. It's for people who want to know why the fuck people are tugging on ecigs in the most random of places. Or for people who are currently smokers.
Here's the skinny: Smoking is bad. Patches and pills either barely work, don't work, or make you bugfuck crazy and suicidal and shit. Vaping, however, completely emulates smoking minus the stuck-to-every-goddamn-thing-you-own smell and uh, the cancer.
THEORETICALLY, the shit inside of e-juice is less harmful to you than the air in Mexico City. For those wondering, it contains the following: Propylene Glycol (PG) or Vegatable Glycol (VG) - or a mix of the two, Nicotine, and Flavoring. Two of those three things are super safe to consume in any form. Though I wouldn't recommend drinking flavoring.
One of them, Nicotine, is one of the most poisonous substances on Earth when consumed in too large a dose. In short, don't ever make your own ejuice with undiluted Nicotine - you don't have the hardware for it anyway. We'll talk about brewing your own shit later, but for now, just understand this. There is a very good reason NO vape company sells juice over 30mg (that would be 30 milligrams nicotine per 1.0 milliliter of eliquid). That amount is absurdly high. The highest found in cigarettes is about the equivalent to 24mg juice. Your AVERAGE cigarette is the equivalent to 12mg juice. Though, your delivery of nicotine from ejuice completely depends on the method used to vaporize the juice. Anyway, why is it not above 30mg?
Well, nicotine can
fucking kill you. It skips the whole cancer bit.
That out of the way, nicotine is a
wonderful substance that I have no problem consuming. I'm sure my doctor would disagree, but, eh, fuck him. If you want to read more shit about nicotine,
click here. I'm not a doctor, I just know I'd rather not get cancer but still get the improvements I get from nicotine. One of the primary reasons I'm big on caffeine too. Obviously, I'm not a role model.
But schild, what about those studies that say ecigarettes have formaldehyde and fucking antifreeze and diacetyl-based flavoring? Well, reader. They're fucking buckets of lies. I'm not sourcing all this but it's pretty easy to find:
1. Diacetyl was found in a shitty Chinese liquid. Tip: Don't buy shitty liquid from China.
2. Formaldehyde was never found in actual eliquid. IIRC, it was found in the burning remnants of what was used as filler material. Why? Well, a fucking FDA study a few years back decided to burn through store-bought shitty ecigs using a machine and they amped it up to levels completely unreasonable for a human being to even hold let alone inhale. Frankly, the whole study was absurd yet newspapers keep quoting it because of THE RED SMOKING MENACE or something. Anyway, I blame big tobacco for not correcting these fuckers.
3. Antifreeze - oh fuckoff. Yes, PG is used in antifreeze. It's not the part of antifreeze that can kill you. That whole claim is made by morons.
LAWS LAWS LAWS. Yea, America is a shitshow right now. Lots of counties and shit are trying to just ban ecigs the way they banned cigs. These are misguided old fucks that will die soon enough. The young ones are shitheels whose disdain for the product should be met with rigorous hatred. People should be CELEBRATING an alternative that keeps people from smoking and isn't harmful to themselves or people around them. Yea, yea, the jury is still out on how much "harm" ecigarettes do to the person smoking it. Spoiler alert: It's going to come back so positive that it will be available right next to the patch on store shelves. Or behind the counter or whatever. Here's this:
Maximum Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamine Levels in Various
Cigarettes and Nicotine-Delivery Products (ng/g, except for nicotine gum and patch which are ng/patch or ng/gum piece)
Product NNN NNK NAT NAB Total
E-Cigarette 3.87 1.46 2.16 0.69 8.18
Nicotine Gum 2 ND ND ND 2
Nicotine Patch ND 8 ND ND 8
Swedish Snus 2400
Gitanes Kings 6369 1477 2965 354 11165
Winston 2200 580 560 25 3365
Newport 1100 830 1900 55 3885
Camel 3100 1400 2800 150 7450
Skoal 4500 470 4100 220 9290
Marlboro 4300 1800 4900 190 11190
I mean, the studies have basically come back, from multiple sources in fact. Just not the right ones. What you're looking at is a list of nitrosamines found in ecigs, cigs, patch, snus, etc. I made the chart look nice but I yanked it from here (
Click Me!). V2 was nice enough to link their sources at the bottom. Anyway, long story short - I am completely unconcerned. Compared to cigarettes, we're talking TRACE amounts of all substances. That said, maybe we're all looking at the wrong thing and instead of cancer it causes something else. Who knows. But I know I'm not smoking and I'm still getting my sweet, sweet nicotine. This is here (along with that link) so if someone gives you shit about vaping or you want a number-based reason to quit smoking - well, this is about as good as it gets. End fo the day, this shit is better than cigarettes. Most people want folks to say less harmful - nawwwww, that isn't for me. As someone who thinks nicotine is just fantastic, well, these little juice delivering devices are just straight better.
THE STATE OF ECIGS IN THE US (AND THE WORLD, REALLY, OTHER THAN CHINA):The USA is WAY ahead of the game in terms of ejuice. We have lots of suppliers of pharmaceutical grade nicotine, among high quality flavoring, and good PG/VG. We also have exceptionally good engineers making exceptionally good product. A lot of ex-manufacturing folks have turned ecigs (read: mods, atomizers, and juice) into full-time jobs. I'll get into that when I talk about specific product. But suffice it to say, the US is fucking
crushing everyone else.
The Phillipines have taken their Pinoy-labeled shit and sort of dumped it on the US market. I don't care how many fans it gets, the quality is straight inconsistent. Their customer support is nearly non-existant. They're doing too much, too fast, and trying to be relevant. They're not. I would recommend just ignoring them.
Asia (not China): Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia has some interesting things happening. I'm going to keep watching them, but they are certainly getting there with their product. On average, it's NEARLY as good as America. But not quite, not yet. Some of the stuff however, is the best in the world.
Central/South America: A dude named Pedro makes something called the Caravela. It's really nice. There's a handful of other shit coming out of these areas but, they're no better than the stuff coming out of America or Greece. Speaking of...
Greece: Whoa, fucking Greece. I know right. Anyway, they have some spicy shit coming out of there. In fact, my current main vape is a combination of German and Greek produced product (with eliquid from America - I ONLY vape eliquid from America - not even going to give other countries a chance. Fuck'em.). Anyway, Greece has a couple exceptional mod-makers (Atmomixani for one).
Germany: The Kayfun is made there. That's really all that's relevant. More on this later.
Europe (outside of Germany and Greece): There are modders, and a handful of them are very, very good. I'll talk about them, but I feel no need to separate them out right now.
GREAT, WHAT IS AN ECIG?You know, I have no clue why websites are so shitty at writing what an ecig is or how one works or otherwise. EVERY single e-cigarette consists of the following three parts:
1. Battery
2. Tank
3. Atomizer
That's IT. A battery to power an atomizer that vaporizes eliquid from a tank. It's one of the easiest things to use on the planet.
Is that too confusing? OK then, it's a flashlight that has a thing on the end that you suck vapor out of. Now I'm going to skip straight to breaking down each part of the ecig (broken down further into each type), IN THAT ORDER. Because frankly, this shit should be easy to understand. There doesn't need to be a
Vaping for Dummies.
1. BATTERIES:IN CIGALIKES: The battery generally starts where the top part ends. It's typically noticeable. For example, in the
NJoy King, it runs from the tip (think of it as the lit end of a cigarette) to where it starts looking like a cigarette filter.
IN EGO STYLE: In
eGo-style batteries It's everything from below the button to just north of the bottom (or sometimes to the bottom). It is what you're going to screw your tank onto. It is a self-contained battery that can power a lot of shit. It is generally charged through an adapter that looks
like this. They come in both long and short varieties and each one has a different mAh rating (milliampere-hour) which is a rough indication of how long it will last before needing to be recharged.
BATTERIES: Uh, they're batteries. I use
Efest IMR Button Top batteries. Some mods call for other ones. They work like a battery. They run out and you recharge them. Fin.
2. TANKS:Well now, there's a whole lot of fucking different tanks. Let's cover the popular ones first.
1.
Clearomizers: These are the MOST common tanks you'll come across. They run the gamut from CE4 plastic kinda-shitty tanks to a little better but-still-too-airy-a-draw Kanger Protanks. These have replaceable atomizers, which cuts down on cost. The plastic ones can crack when you fill them with a citrus, cinnamon, anise, or mentholated juice. Actually, it's not that they can crack. They DO crack. They also fog. No one really knows what happens when this occurs. In fact, the first thing I try to do is to get people off clearos if they aren't VERY aware of the juice they're dumping into it. Then there's the glass ones that can take any type of juice. I recommend them (Kanger Protank, Dbox Puritank, etc) to beginners because they can go hog-wild with whatever sort of caustic-towards-shitty-plastic juice they want. Anyway, nearly every "first-time" vaper starts out with these... or
2.
Cartomizers: In short, these look like the filter of a cigarette. Most are longer than a filter, but they emulate that filter feel unless you put a driptip on them. Effectively, they're a combination atomizer / tank. There's a filler material (oh the source of so many problems for ecigs) that soaks up ejuice and sort of sits there waiting to be vaporized by a coil near the bottom (or sometimes the middle, or wherever). When used correctly, these things are awesome. I'm a fan of slotted Boge 2ohm cartos that can be found
at Kidney Puncher. What a sweet domain name. Technically not a tank but the juice has to sit somewhere. A lot of people start on cartomizers (which is basically, like, stone age technology at this point). I'll talk about the atomizer more in next section.
3.
Everything Else: You know, there's a shitload of things with tanks on the market, but the rest fit firmly under atomizer. So let's go!
3. ATOMIZERS: THIS IS WHERE WE REALLY GO DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, BUT THIS SHIT IS AWESOME, SO LIKE, READ IT OR DON'T WHATEVERFirst of all, what is an atomizer? Well, it's the element that heats ejuice to create the vapor. Ok, then why the fuck are some of them so elaborate? Well, those are rebuiladable atomizers (RBAs). Lots of very smart dudes make very good RBAs, and frankly, this is the ONLY part where things get a LITTLE complicated. There are lots of sources on the internet that get into them, but I'll give you the VERY brief version.
An RBA consists of, really, 4 parts:
1. The thing you build the coil on.
2. The thing that plugs into the battery.
3. The thing that we call a "driptip."
(sometimes) 4. The thing that is really just a specialized tank.
There are 4 styles of RBAs:
1.
Genesis Style: These have a positive and negative post to wrap your coil onto. The coil heats a wick. The wick feeds from a tank below the posts.
2.
Kayfun Style: This isn't what these are called, but effectively, they range from simple sort of Kanger Protank style things to vacuum sealed channel-delivered devices. They're rad and they're what I primarily use myself, specifically the Kayfun Lite.
3.
Dripping (RBDA - Rebuildable Dripping Atomizer): These are what people use when they want to blow big ass clouds and refill their shit ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Basically it's anything from a single to quad coil setup that has a bunch of wick material and you apply the juice directly to the wick. I hate these. Lots of people love them. To each their own, they're still not smoking, so yay!
4.
Everything Else: There's all sorts of different designs out there from Mojo's AIOS-D/T (basically a complex dripper with tank system that costs 200 duckets) to the vertical coil bizarre dripper. I mean, these technically fall into the other categories, but they're JUST complex enough that they fall into their own category. Generally, I don't dick around with these. Hell, I can't even tell you how to rebuild the
Piculisci from Scientist.
So, my personal styles of choice, are genesis and Kayfun. They're very, VERY easy to build and aren't TOO finicky. Those two points are IMPORTANT to me. I don't want to futz around with my stuff every time I need more juice or something arcane has happened inside a stainless steel shell. My Kayfun will go 4-5 tanks without needing any sort of dry-burn or clean and my genesis, well (I'm on an iHybrid Pure atm), that thing has gone through 8 tanks with nothing more than a wash and wipedown of the deck and glass (which I did by choice because I've been filling it with a green juice that taints whatever it touches - Mad Murdock's Radiator Pluid for those wondering).
Now, let's get down to the nitty gritty of why "high-end" ecig shit SEEMS complicated. Coils. Let's break those down. They consist of two parts:
1. Wicking Material
2. The actual coil
So, generally, there's a handful of accepted wick materials. They are as follows:
1. Stainless Steel Mesh - Generally used in Genesis style atomizers. This stuff is great and super easy to use.
2. Silica Wick - the sort of standard up until recently. I don't recommend this.
3. Sterilized Cotton - as in fucking cotton balls. A handful of people have decided this is a good idea. They're also a handful of idiots. Don't use anything notably flammable. Yeesh. I shouldn't have to spell this out. Unless of course, you know what you're doing. In which case, any problem you run into is your own. I advise against this shit.
4. Ekowool - Now we're talking. Temperature resistant, highly durable. Wicks like a boss. MASSIVELY heat resistant, let along temperature resistant. This stuff is *the shit.*
5. Ceramic - Some people like these. They break easily. They're highly porous and wick very, very well.
6. Stainless Steel Cable - whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, what. Cable? Yup. Cable. Apparently it wicks really well. Sometimes too fast. Crazytown. I don't fuck with this, yet. So I have no opinion. It's a relatively new development. Fucking vapers will use anything for a wick. I'm just waiting for someone to break their tank with the end of the cable. Bound to happen sometime.
I'll be talking about 1 (SS Mesh) and 4 (Ekowool) because I believe those to be both the easiest, and most tolerant to the end user totally fucking up.
Stainless Steel mesh is some of the easiest shit on Earth to deal with. You basically, well, fuckit, here's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGUN0sgYCoI don't do all that torching and shit though because, uh. You don't need to. Also, my wick is MUCH shorter than that. You know, I'll just post pictures next time I rebuilt it. Needless to say, I assure you, it's daunting and weird to work with at first, but man I could do it blind now.
Ekowool. Uh, you like, wrap wire around it and put the wire into some posts. Here's a video of Pbusardo reviewing the Russian - which is a clone of the Kayfun. It really is dead simple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to0oHiETyAgNOW NOW, I know what you're thinking - that doesn't look simple. Well, it is. So, like, there. Source: Me. Who has been vaping for 6 months who happens to like to do research.
With that out of the way, here's the deal with coils. They don't have to be perfect, they just have to heat evenly. Well, how do we achieve that?
Carefully.
Seriously, wrapping a coil isn't like an art or anything, but you want to make sure the leads (ends of the coil) coming off of the posts (where you screw the coils down) aren't touching anything and wind into a somewhat consistent coil around whatever you're using as a wicking material.
That's, like, about it. I use 32AWG Kanthal wire. A 4/5 wrap (can see 4 coils on one side, 5 on the reverse) on 2 layers of Ekowool yields about 1.2ohms.
Whoaaaaaaaaaaaa. Ohms. You know, some people understand them, some don't. I just understand the results. Ohm rating dictates the resistance of the coil. Even on shit like Kanger Protanks (where the head is replacable), there's an ohm rating. If you're not using a mechanical mod (COMING UP NEXT), but rather a variable wattage/power mod, the ohm rating will basically tell you where you want your power to be set. Wait? What? Oh, this part is easy - just
click me!BONUS - MECH(ANICAL) MODSBasically, these are elaborate flashlights, most commonly featuring a 510 connection on the end so you can thread nearly any atty (atomizer) onto it.
The build quality is relevant. You don't want shit breaking, or shorts happening. You also want proper vent holes in case a battery decides to go ape shit on you. In the post after this one, I'll be talking about my own equipment, but in short: These can get expensive, but in recent experience, I have found them to be worth the money (and still less than smoking).
BONUS - HYBRIDSThese are cool. Basically, they are all in one units (just add wick, wire, and battery!) that give you an advanced setup in a pretty cool design. They come with both dripping and genesis style atties on the end, but the deal here is you're stuck with whatever the atty is.
What happens here though, is they remove 2 points of contact for the atomizer, effectively reducing the voltage drop from the pin transfer at the end of the battery. Basically, cleaner, more consistent power.
I can and plan to elaborate further on all of this, but feel free to throw questions at me about any particular part (or ask for recommendations). The second post in this thread will contain juice reviews/comments and hardware reviews as I plow through shit. As a hobbyist industry, the whole thing is really in an interesting space at the moment while corporations move glacially to enter it.
ADDENDUM - SO WHAT ABOUT CHINA ANYWAY?Well, China is just cloning shit and putting out really fucking shoddy devices (comparatively). Frankly, I'd rather no one support them, but they do put out the easiest to understand products at the base level. Their mechs - even the 1:1 clones (except in VERY RARE CASES) - tend to be crap. Though, sometimes, they knock it out of the park. For example, there's a clone of the Electric Angel mod that's apparently simply better than the original. Unfortunately the EA is kind of an ugly dog of a mod and no one cares about it anymore as it's so outdated. Also, there's the clone of the Kayfun (The Russian) and Kayfun Lite (Russian 91%). The latter is actually BETTER than the original, adding airflow control. Nonetheless, its' still too much of a crapshoot. There are like ten new products a day from China, and out of every 100 of them, 99 of them are total shit. I don't gamble with shit that can explode, electrocute, or leak juice all over my shit.