Atomizer woes…

Probably the biggest frustration there is as far as personal vaporizers (E-Cigarettes for the buzzwordy types) – is the method of actually turning those bottles of tasty nicotine into vapor.  It’s a simple enough concept, the cartridge has wicking material that holds the smoke juice, and the atomizer has a smaller wick that runs across a heating coil.  Hit the button, heat the coil, create wonderful vapor.  Problem is that for the most part I very rarely get consistent vapor across refills.

The stock cartridges I get use wool for wicking material.  This works already for a few fills, but eventually needs to be replaced as it simply stops wicking.  A common replacement is poly-fill (pure polyester, looks like cotton) that you can get at any pet store.  That works well too, for a while.  The one I’ve had the best luck with so far is this blue filter foam for fish tanks by Marineland “Rite Size U.”  Now while I went pretty mad scientist with my 510 carts, using a cut ball point pen spring and the blue foam as a plug – with my Ego vaporizer, the cartridges are about twice the size.

Looking online, there are plenty of really nice videos on how to use the blue foam as a wick, but none were specific to my model of vaporizer.  If I cut the foam at the exact width – it would wick OK but it also left gaps between 2 of the 4 walls of the cartridge, allowing the juice to leak out of the cartridge, flood the atomizer, and get all over the outside of my vaporizer.  If I cut the foam at double the width, and then folded it over so that it completely filled the surface area of the cartridge (looking like a C in the cartridge) – it would absorb the fluid but not wick well at all.

So my latest attempt, I trimmed the wicking material to just long enough to fill the cartridge, but 1.5x as wide as the cartridge… it still fills all the gaps in the cartridge but does not appear to leak, and is wicking very well.

Hopefully this will work consistently as I’m tired of going back and forth between wicking materials, atomizers, cartomizers… etc… LOL

This entry was posted in Vaping. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *