Top 5 Tips for Building Better Vaping Coils
There are plenty of benefits to building your own vaping coils. You’ll enjoy vastly improved vapour production compared to using a sub-ohm tank with pre-made coils. You’ll also save money because building a coil from wire and cotton costs almost nothing compared to buying a pre-made coil for a tank.
The one thing you won’t save by building your own coils, though, is time. If you enjoy tinkering with gadgets, you’ll find that coil building is a rabbit hole of almost infinite depth. Just when you think you’ve built yourself the perfect coil, you’ll find some small problem that’ll send you back to the drawing board. You’ll never stop coming up with ways to improve your technique.
Building vape coils
The only law in coil building is Ohm’s Law, and the only limit is your own creativity. That being said, there are definitely a few guidelines that can help you along if you’re new to coil building, and that’s what we’re going to discuss in this article. Are you ready to get a head start on building better vaping coils? Let’s begin.
Watch your cotton usage
If you want to build great vaping coils, your wicking technique may actually be more important than your coil building technique. Do your coils occasionally have hot spots or give you dry hits? You’re probably using the wrong amount of cotton. Remember that cotton expands when it’s wet.
If you use too much cotton, your wicks will choke off the flow of e-liquid to the coils. If you use too little cotton, your coils will develop hot spots in the areas where the wicks don’t touch them. You should use enough cotton so that you feel slight resistance when threading the wicks through the coils. If a wick slides through without grabbing the inside of the coil at all, you’re not using enough cotton. If you can’t get a wick through without pulling the coil out of shape, you’re using more cotton than you should.
Spaced coils vs. contact coils
If you look at vape coil building tutorials online, you’ll find that most of them recommend that you use a pair of ceramic tweezers to push the coil wraps together. When you push the wraps off a coil together, you’re creating a contact coil. A contact coil is great for a smaller tank or RDA because it allows you to fit a coil with a greater number of wraps into a tight space.
However, today’s rebuildable atomizers tend to have such large build decks that space isn’t at such a premium. Instead of compressing your coil wraps together, try tugging them apart gently with your tweezers to create a coil with a bit of space between each wrap.
If the number of wraps is the same, a spaced coil has a greater surface area – and should thus generate more vapour – than a contact coil. In addition, many people find that spaced coils can operate more reliably than contact coils – and at higher wattages – without wicking issues. Eliminating hot spots is also much easier with spaced coils.
Buy a box of pre-wrapped coils
Building a new coil can be great fun when you’re in the mood to tinker with your vaping device. There are going to be times, though, when you simply want to replace a gunky coil and get back to vaping without the work of trying to wrap a perfect coil. A box of pre-wrapped coils is a great alternative for those days when you don’t feel like doing so much work.
To install a pre-wrapped coil, all that you need to do is take the coil out of the box and trim the leads.
Clamp the coil down, check for hot spots, wick the coil, and you’re ready to go. Building with pre-wrapped coils eliminates several minutes of effort and gets you back to vaping quickly. What’s even more fun is that pre-wrapped coils often use exotically twisted and braided wires. In a typical assortment of pre-wrapped coils, you’ll find Clapton coils, alien coils, juggernaut coils and more – and the vapour production of those coils is often incredible.
Build your own twisted coils
The surface area of your coils means everything if you’re on the hunt for vapour production and flavour quality. You can build a coil with a greater surface area simply by using a greater number of coil wraps, but that’ll only get you so far because you’ll eventually run out of space on your build deck.
To turbocharge the performance of your coils, try making a twisted wire. Cut a long length of wire and fold it in half.
Put a chopstick or pencil through the loop in one end of the folded wire. Hold the other end in your hand or tie it to something stationary. Rotate the pencil or chopstick to twist the two halves of the wire together. After a bit of effort, you’ll have a twisted wire with a surface area that’s drastically increased compared to that of a single wire. Trim the wire and use it to build coils as you normally would.
Trim your wicks carefully
After you’ve threaded your cotton through your coils, you’re almost at the end of the coil building process and are nearly ready to vape – so it’s tempting to rush through getting your wicks set up. Don’t rush through this part; getting your wicks just right ensures a consistent flow of e-liquid to the coils.
Remember that the e-liquid will flow along the grain of the cotton, so leaving the cotton too long will only prevent the wicks from delivering e-liquid to the coils efficiently. Trim your wicks so that the cotton just rests against the bottom of the build deck.
Fluff the fibers with your ceramic tweezers to create plenty of surface area. Gently tuck the wicks under the coils, making sure that the cotton doesn’t have any kinks or tangles. The ends of the wicks should trace gentle curves from the build deck to the coils. If you do it right, you can chain vape to your heart’s content without fear of experiencing a dry hit.
