Serious vapers like to customize their pleasure. They find branded products ordinary or insufficient. The experience isn’t what they expect or want. And, they just enjoy tinkering with parts to create their own vaping mod.
Commercially available mod boxes are valued because they include many features you won’t find in the average e-cigarette vaper. Capturing that rich full flavor is the goal. But if you’re interested in building your own, duplicating those features is the challenge.
The things you need!
Vapers remain popular among adults. As Slate says, “The FDA is wary of discouraging adult smokers from switching to e-cigarettes, which many scientists estimate to be 95 percent safer for them.” So, you may want to build one that pleases you.
- Choose the battery.The battery powers your vaping mod. It fuels the heat to atomize (vaporize) the e-liquid.
- Lithium Manganese (IMR) offers the safest option. Made of nickel and manganese, they tolerate heat. It’s the manganese that allows the battery to remain “cool” while discharging at high current.
- ICRs (the 18650 model)are rechargeable Li-ion batteries. Less stable, they are more dangerous and require circuits to protect their performance.
- Hybrid batteries store as much energy as the ICR but enjoy the safety of the IMR.
- Pick a tank.The tank holds the e-liquid, the coils, and the wicks. You want a heat-resistant and safe one.
- Cartomizer:The Cartomizer cartridge houses a single or dual coil atomizer. This atomizer is designed to absorb the e-liquid at a volume reducing the need for frequent refills.
- Clearomizer:The Clearomizer is another cartridge carrying the e-liquid. Plastic or glass, it shows the e-liquid level, and it uses a wicking system to deliver the e-liquid to the heat.
- RBA (Re-buildable Atomizer): An RBA has removable decks where the positive and negative posts sit. Other modifications include RDA, RDTA, RTA, and genesis.
- E-liquid: The vaping mod atomizes fluid with taste and satisfaction. It comes in flavors from tobacco to milkshake at providers like eLiquid. Typically made of propylene and alcohol, it may or may not contain nicotine to wean you off cigarettes.
How to assemble!
You can choose and use almost any material to build your handheld mod. People have made them from wood, metals, and stone. It takes some talent to make the exterior attractive, and it takes some skill to allow snug space inside for the battery and wiring. The material of choice must accept the attached atomizer. And, it must be as easily disassembled as it is assembled to replace batteries.
The wiring is the real challenge, working as you must with fine elements and tools in tight space. You must wire two parallel batteries to the atomizer and an LED signal light. One battery’s positive post charges the atomizer and the current returns to the negative post of the parallel battery after passing through the signal light. The positive post of the second battery relays the energy to the negative post of the first battery.
To the top of the box, you insert and affix the tank base. And, to the base, you add a coil, tank, and mouthpiece in sequence. You are ready to go!
Keeping within your budget!
Quality box mods come at hefty prices. The prices on boxes alone have moderated, but when you add quality atomizers and tanks, you can be paying over $300. But by designing and creating your own palm-sized box, you can modify it at a saving.
Shopping and selecting from the components that make sense to you and your budget lets you build the deck producing the experience you have been looking for. Like Will Self, Editor-at-Large for Esquire magazine, you might say, “The more I vaped, the more I realized that the vape cloud was also beautifully expressive of the whole essence of vaping: for this was no crude organic process of combustion ending in ash and cremains, but a digitally-calibrated, electronic one, worthy of a brave new world!”
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