E Cig Juice / E Liquid in Southport

So, its been over a year since I packed in the "analogues" and started vaping instead. My first device was a Kangertech EVOD which was very good indeed. In fact, I still use an EVOD when I'm out and about although nowadays it is the newer mark II version with dual coils and a glass tank. But when I'm at home or at work I use my Kraken (see earlier post), which is attached to an Astro telescopic mech running a Samsung INR18650-25R. Inside the Kraken I've got dual twisted kanthal coils running at 0.3ohms, and rayon wicks.

This is the set-up I've had for the past few months and I'm very happy with it. However, it does get through a rather large amount of juice. The tank on the Kraken holds 2mls and I can pretty much drain that in one 15 minute vaping session. Since that could amount to a fairly expensive habit, I also make my own ecig juice. In an earlier post I shared my DIY magnetic stirrer which effectively mixes the various ingredients that I make up in 200ml batches. And this brings me to the point of my post. My personal recipe for menthol ecig juice is actually pretty good and I've been toying with the idea of selling it. I have no shop and I'm not (at this stage, at least), interested in opening a webstore, but I thought I'd stick this post up on the off-chance that people in the locality might be interested in buying some. For the time being I'd only be interested in selling locally - Southport in Merseyside - whilst I gauge demand.

[Updated] Coming soon - my new juice shop!
[Updated] Nah, I couldn't be arsed.

More soon, no doubt....

D

Magnetic stirrer....

Well, I'm now mixing my own e-juice. It's dead easy but my preference for a 50/50 PG/VG mix means plenty of stirring is required. Even with the juice warmed up in a hot water bath, it is taking ages to stir. Having priced up a fancy "laboratory" style stirrer, I decided I'd save the £130 and make my own.

I had everything I needed apart from a box to put it all in. I settled on a high quality airtight sandwich box from Home Bargains which cost me 79p. The fan is a spare from an old computer, along with the fan speed controller. Power is supplied by one of the hundreds of 12v PSUs I have lying around.

Basically, I've glued two strong neodymium magnets to the centre of the fan blades. When the fan spins, so do the magnets. I then place my beaker of juice over the fan and put a steel bar in there which spins along with the magnets on the fan. For stirring e-juice, I've ordered a proper lab style stirring bar which is coated in PTFE which is inert and shouldn't taint the juice or scratch my beaker EDIT: I now have a selection of lab grade, teflon coated, magnetic stirring bars. Genuis.

More soon, no doubt....

D

Fogger V2 (version 2, 2.1, 2.2???)

This evening I have been mostly taking my FT Fogger V2 apart. I received this a few weeks ago and after a quick clean, rolled a 1.5ohm coil and set it up with a 2mm silica wick with a 1mm flavour wick across the top. This set up was hugely successful - at the time I had no mech mods and so was running on a Smoktech SID, hence the high-ish ohmage. The whole thing looked a bit odd but, as I say, it worked. My only problem was with the rather tight draw. A bit of research into that got me to Mawsley's review of the V2. Having read all that, including the apparent risk of a short in several different areas, I put the Fogger away until I had time for a full tear-down.

So, as I say, tonight I took it apart. Relevant pictures are below. As can be seen, the version I have differs from the one reviewed by Mawsley. It looks as though the main concern about the short in the base has been addressed. There's also an extra silicone pad in the base which will go some way to prevent the centre pin (live) from rocking in the post. I also noticed that the insulator for the centre pin is not delrin and instead is very squidgy and soft silicone. In one of the pictures below you can see how my first and only coil has already toasted the top of that. Anyway, I decided that this could go back together without any safety modifications required (but I do intend to do something about the soft insulators in the near future). I did however enlarge the four airholes in the centre pin. This has made a significant difference to the flow - its much airier now, although I think I'd prefer it even looser. Will have to have a think about how best to achieve that. Right now its ticking over on a new coil at 1 ohm with a nice cotton wick. It looks great on my PH22 and its all foggy in here ;) The flavour is far more intense with the cotton, too.

I've added the pictures below for reference. They are pretty self-explanatory I think, so I've not added any commentary. Any questions, just drop me a line.

More soon, no doubt.

D

EGO CTwist (clone) broken wire repair

[UPDATE FEBRUARY 2017 - The fix below was done three years ago. The repaired battery ran fine with no issues until it gradually died, as all Egos do. Now we are in 2017. Egos are, these days, extremely cheap to buy. My strong recommendation is that if you damage your Ego battery you should throw it away and buy a new one. I'll leave the original post up for reference purposes only. D]

Well, this evening I've been mostly fixing this broken Ego CTwist (clone) battery. It was dropped, the end popped out, a wire broke off and there was a short which melted the plastic sheath on a couple of the wires. In particular, the green wire from the base of the battery was fried along its full length. The positive red wire from the top of the battery was also burnt. The wires themselves are extremely fine and I was unable to obtain a direct replacement. I therefore used the thinnest wire (7/0.2mm) I could find at Maplin. It was still about twice the O/D of the original stuff and refitting the battery into the tube was a bit of a squeeze, but it went in eventually. If you're still interested, the rotating dial on the base of the battery was a bit of a fiddle to remove but its only clipped in to place as you can see from the pictures. Finally, the actual battery has soldered tabs so replacing the wires simply involved soldering onto the tabs. If they'd have been soldered directly to the battery I would not have done the repair.

More soon, no doubt...

D

Kraken Clone Part 2

Just a quick one. With the Kraken running a basic 3mm silica wick and a 1.8ohm coil at 7 watts, I was getting a foul almost fizzy flavour. A bit of research suggested that the washers on the centre pin were not stainless steel. On inspection of my device, the washers were becoming scorched and rusty. I've replaced the washers with stainless steel ones. I've also replaced all the screws with equivalent stainless hex bolts. In my humble opinion its easier to fasten the coil in place using a hex bolt and key. It also looks pretty cool...

Before:

After:

More soon, no doubt.

D

Kraken Clone Part 1

Well, I said I'd probably end up doing something on here that was connected to vaping and so here it is! Having given up cigs back in September, I been spending most of my time "smoking" on a selection of KangerTech EVODs and mini-protanks. However, I've recently been getting an itch for something with a bit more grunt. So, I bought a clone of the ViciousAnt "Kraken" genesis-style atomizer. This cost me about £9 from a friendly chinese vendor and is a real work of art. It looks, feels, and vapes, just wonderful. However, it is apparent from the forums on the vendors website that all is not well. Some of the clones have a short which renders the device inoperative and dangerous. So, I opened mine up. This next photo identifies a problem in the centre post - its just not drilled out very well! Happily, once apart like this, the problem "burr" can be filed away and, as an added precaution, the centre pin can be wrapped in heat shrink or electrical tape, just to be clear. The video below explains how to remove and replace the centre pin.

More soon, no doubt.

D

Windows 8 slow file copy....

Not really something I've made or fixed but, rather, a problem I've solved.

A few weeks ago one of the 1TB drives in my Raid1 (Mirror) array failed. But it was OK because the remaining 1TB drive in the array was still working and my data was safe. I should say here that the OS (Windows 8 x64) is installed on a separate drive which is not part of the array. Then, more recently, I auto upgraded Windows 8 to 8.1. The upgrade went smoothly but when I came to update my media libraries in the Music App, it was apparent something had gone very wrong. For whatever reason, the upgrade had wrecked the partition on the remaining 1TB drive and the files (of which there were many precious ones) were totally inaccessible. Having tried a few data recovery programs, the only one which seemed capable of recovering the files in the original directory structure and with their original names was GetData's Recover My Files.

So, with a copy duly purchased and a fresh 1TB drive to hand, I recovered all my files - about 900GB worth. At this point I decided to make a new array using brand new 2TB drives. This went without incident and I now have 1.8TB of usuable space. But the main problem was with transferring the files from the 1TB drive to the new Raid array. The transfer would start ok with the drives in the array writing at about 70MB/s but after about 10 seconds the transfer would slow to a crawl or completely stop, although the Task Manager also showed that disk activity remained at 100%. A few minutes would pass and the process would start again, and then stop, and so on. At a rough calculation, it was going to take about three weeks to transfer the data. So, I Googled for a solution. I tried many of the different things suggested (switching off Defender, disabling indexing, disabling thumbnails, and so on). About an hour ago I was ready to give up but thought I'd have one last go, starting from fresh. This meant deleting and then remaking the array. In Disk Management, I received the usual message about the new "drive" and the option to make it either MBR or GPT. This got me thinking. When I first started this exercise yesterday I checked the difference between MBR and GPT and since the total usable size of my array was less than 2TB, I'd selected MBR. This time I picked GPT and the problem with the slow/peculiar data transfer is no more.

Just thought I'd share that in case it helps anyone else.

More soon, no doubt....

D