The magic of temp control

[HapticSimian]

I'm still riding the temp control hope train. It's such a boon when you want to switch flavours.

This wick has had about 4 tanks of @Paul33's Choffee and as many of a dark RY4 through it, but now I want to switch to something fruity. So, I vape as per normal until there's no more visible juice in the tank, then I incrementally drop the temp down to 200 degrees and choof the wick dry. That's below the temperature that cotton would singe, especially given the airflow, so I can keep going until there's only the faintest hint of old flavour before refilling. I don't get nearly the extent of terrible, mixed flavour drags I used to. Plus, have I mentioned, only the slightest of singed taste if I did a terrible wicking job. No full-on dry hits.

I'm lovin' it.

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[HapticSimian]

So, here's an interesting experience...

As mentioned elsewhere today I had this jobbie wicked as per the much vaunted YouTube vids by Morten Oen, which is to say tighter than a clam with lockjaw. It worked fine, except that my first DIY juices really didn't have the lip smacking goodness I had anticipated. The RY4 and Choffee were quite pleasant, but my creamy dragon fruit and strawberry tasted like a generic sweetish, fruitish knock-off chewy sweet. I had written it off to a simple overhyped recipe.

But then, on the way home tonight things got weird. Temp control was going cray cray, acting as expected for the first couple of seconds of a draw but then quickly shooting off the scale towards Burnsville. So, ripping the tank apart when I got home, it seemed that the coil had sagged just enough to touch the top of the 510 pin below it. I think. I'm not sure what happened, but it's immaterial to the rest of the story...

I yanked out my failed coil and, motivated by my thinking that it was really just too big for the build deck in the first place, proceeded to replace it with a 3.8mm ID coil rather than the 4.4mm that was in there. Coil twisted, toight wick through, trimmed to length and... well... not much of anything, really. I could not get the bloody thing to wick, not through 3 or 4 wicking attempts. I'd rewick, prime, fill, wait 10 minutes and proceed to be filled with disappointment, and some cotton fumes once the superficial juice was gone. Pretty much no flavour at all. Each time I wicked a little thicker or a little thinner than the last. Finally, out of desperation I figured I'd ditch the tight wick and revert to my old strategy of kinda eyeballin' 2 and a bit coils' width of cotton, and wouldn't you know it: flavoursplosion!

Here's where things get really wacky: the dragon fruit juice I had gone the day on tasted completely different. It went from a muted, generic fruity sweetie to a creamy fruit I'm not at all familiar with - having never tasted dragon fruit in my life - with just a hint of strawberry. As per the recipe. My first DIY juices taste sooo much better now.

I'm battling to wrap my head around the science involved, made all the more difficult by really not knowing the first thing about capillary physics. I can only assume that the thick wick and big coil combined through pure coincidence to give sufficient wicking that there was always something to vaporize, just as a product of sheer cotton volume. Once I cut the coil diameter this no longer held true, and I spent 2 hours vaping a flavour only one step less awful than Burnsville - Whisps of Cotton.

TL;DR: Whilst Mr Oen's experiment clearly works in isolation, and might even have merit in your average RDA application, the method fails in an RTA... or at least in mine. It's been an interesting week or so, but I'm back to just-not-loose wicks with peeled layers and combed ends. I need to mix more Choffee...