Just occurred to me that everyone probably has different levels of needed accuracy when measuring, different acceptable margins of error, and different aims when making juice. When I make my own juice, I tend to be a lot more forgiving of pg/vg ratio mistakes or 0.05 extra or less grams of a flavour in a 100ml batch, but when I mix for other people, I follow recipes to the letter. What's it like for you?
Edit: changed 5 grams to 0.05 grams, 5 gram margin of errors would be ridiculous
I try to be as accurate as possible. Sometimes there's a little oversqueeze, maybe an errant 0.0xg or whatever, but it doesn't vary too much either way. If anything, I think I go a little "heavier" on certain flavorings depending on the recipe.
Unless I'm trying to recreate some recipe I've been given, then I try to be as pin-point accurate as possible.
But a little extra when I mix my regulars up? That little guy? Don't worry about that little guy.
> That little guy? Don't worry about that little guy.
This individual says it perfectly. Although, I have been known to flip my shit over 1L of TFA Cola.
New recipes that I'm testing I try to be exact as possible. If I'm mixing for my friends or myself I'm a little more lax. More precision really is important depending on the size. Anything smaller than 15ml you should try to be spot on.
I can understand that. I usually make myself 100ml batches of tried and true recipes - either original or proven by the community. I rarely make small batches other than when I'm working on one of my own recipes and like you said, that's when it's most important to be accurate.
This is what we do at all day vape collection. We use two bottles. Snapple bottles for glycerin and flavoring, and a 5 hour energy shot bottle for nicotine. You may be wondering...wtf? So here's the story.
We measured out everything one time on each flavor we were in the process of producing since the percentages are different. However, we didn't want to measure each time. We said F that. We wanted to know what cups, bucket, or flask we could use to just say, "for a 100 gallon batch, add 5 flasks of x, 7 buckets of y, and 10 cups of z and stir." You know keep it simple. Like, Sugar, Spice.....and everything nice. Simple.
So we needed a very specific bottle size for these tasks, so we went to just about every 7-11, liquor store, grocery store and cup store in a 50 mile radius.
And after about $100k in drinks, that nearly killed us from over drinking (we don't like waste), we found the magic combo. For our milk meee flavoring, it's about 10 snapple cups in total flavoring, 100 snapple cups in total glycerin and 3-6 5hour energy shots of nicotine depending on the dosage. This is our typical batch size which we don't know how many ML it is because we never measured it, but we know it works. We know because employee mistakes have been at an all time record low.
TL;DR - Spent $100k on random sport drink bottles to figure out what size bottle would fit our ratios perfectly for our formulas so we could save time measuring and just say, "7 snapple bottles of apple, 3 snapple bottles of peach, 1 snapple bottle of melon, 10 snapple bottles VG, 1 5-hour energy bottle nicotine." Employ mistakes have been at a record low. Thank you.
I'm so confused. There is this one site I discovered the other day, Google, it allows you to type in things and finds results based on algorithmagics. Anyway long story short, you can get a bottle manufacturing company to make any size under the sun. Why spend 100k then you can get every size for 1/100th of the price. So you can do shit like use 1 bottle that's the size of 5 snapples. As a result, you would have 5 bottles for a mix rather than 35 bottles consisting of a fraction of an ingredient.
Tl;Dr: hire someone next time instead of coming up low end solutions. Not going to call bullshit, but that's a horrible way to do it in comparison don't you think? And that's not even including the implied diabetes.
I have to believe that this post is one of two things:
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Complete and utter bullshit or
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Compete and utter bullshit and you looking to rile some people up to see their responses.
This terrifies me for our industry. How can you say "3-6 5 hour energy shots of nic" when you don't even know what strength the nic will be at the end of mixing? You do realize that nicotine is a deadly poison if not handled correctly, right? People are inhaling a poison that they trust you to mix properly so they get their buzz but don't die from nicotine poisoning.
Is it not our obligation as mixologists to know exactly what we are giving people? Are you okay with the consequences of someone getting sick from your juice? How are we to avoid FDA regulation as long as possible when we aren't ourselves taking it seriously?
I'm not saying your concentrations aren't within a safe range for inhalation, but the fact that you don't want to weigh your batches due to speed of mixing is honestly a huge disservice to the industry.
Please please, for the love of vaping, be careful.
depends on how much of a flavor is in a mix, I generally try to stay within .02-.03 grams unless I'm being lazy, but if it's a really low percent, nic, or a small test batch I take care to make it as exact as possible. with pg and vg I just kind of get it within .1g, but never under.
See, I rarely add PG to juice that I vape, so I'll measure my flavour as accurately as I can, but it isn't the end of the world if i go a little overboard - then I measure my nic by volume, then just fill the bottle to the top with VG. If I do add PG, I'll add it by weight after flavourings and nic, and then fill with VG to the top.
I use a kayfun so I don't really have a choice, it doesn't do well with anything under 30pg.
I just have a small hdpe dropper bottle I use for nic and make sure not to go over more than .01 on it.
I follow my recipes closely, but will sometimes let the numbers bounce around. It helps me decide on where I want to take the recipe in the future, and I make sure to mark down the latest iteration in my notebook, so I can choose which one is the best.
So what you're saying is the blood price really may not have been paid and you may have only vaped 9.9% honey? I call for a redeux
Honestly, I just do it all by eye.
+1 for honesty and being relaxed about how it turns out
I try to get it right on the money but .01 to .03 differences happen.
With nic I generally am lower than what it calls for. If I need to put in 1.24g and I'm at 1.20 I just don't add more. I'm sure everyone has had it where the scale sits at a number for a drop or 2 and then suddenly jumps higher with the next drop. I would rather be light than heavy with the nic.
THIS.
I hate when my American Weigh 501 does this. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Thought I may have had a janky scale!
Yeah that's the same one I have and I'm sure a lot of people here. It's a weird issue because it is so random. It usually weighs just fine and goes up with each drop.
If I accidentally over flavor something by like .02 and I'm just mixing for myself, I just deal with it and make a little note in my recipe book that I accidentally over flavored. But if I'm mixing for a friend, or if I'm working on a recipe I'd like to post here one day, I will try to be completely accurate with my %s
I used to go for perfection, but now I'm within .2mL on the nicotine and flavors, and just fill the bottle with however much PG and VG as I feel like in order to make it look full. My final mix, if I'm shooting for 6mg/ml nic can be anywhere between 5 and 7, and I can't tell the difference.
My syringes all have the lettering worn out, so i eyeball it in the syringe. I use all fruity flavors, 100%vg, and im totally fine with anywhere from 5mg-15mg nic, so I'm not too worried about the accuracy. I really just plop everything into a bottle, shake it up, and drip it.
As a budget DIYer, I only have one 10 mL capacity graduated cylinder and one 50 mL Erlenmeyer flask for measurement and mixing respectively.
Since I only make 15 to 30 mL worth of e liquid per session, a single 10 mL graduated cylinder is adequate for my measuring needs.
In order to minimize human error, I portion the less viscous solutions in thirds when making 30 ml bottles. (e.g. if adding 30% PG, instead of pouring all 9 mL at once, add 3 ml PG and more viscous solutions each time) This practice thins out each pour that goes into the mixing flask and minimizes residual fluid staying in the graduated cylinder.
Also, make sure to look at the graduated cylinder ticks from eye level and measure from the bottom of the meniscus. If viscous liquid gets on inner wall of the cylinder while injecting it with a pipette, wait until most of the fluid makes to the bottom before further measurement.
Or disregard everything above and just buy a damn scale.
I'm pretty relaxed about it. I try to follow others' recipes 'closely' but don't get bent out of shape if it's not exact. If I'm testing my own mixes for something I've been working on, I try to be as exact as possible in order to make sure I understand minute flavor differences.
I'm precise-ish. I have yet to convert to mixing by weight, but I do my best to measure volume as accurately as I can when it comes to flavors and nicotine. Then I fill the bottle almost to the neck with VG and call it done.
I have yet to receive more than two complaints about my juice (granted, I make it for only three other people), and those were because there was too much coconut in one (like, way too much. More than the margin of error) and the other was that TFA Strawberry tasted too candy-like. I've since switched that flavor to TFA Ripe Strawberry and that ticket has been closed and marked 'solved.'
Once I decide to order a scale and switch to weight measurements, I'll probably pay more attention to precision.