So I've been DIY for quite a while, and saved a ton thanks to you guys!
I got bored of my daily vape of blackcurrant menthol and decided to go back to some of the initial fruity flavors I tried out such as the blue voodo clone. The reason I never took to them was the throat hit, which I believe comes from flavors such as TPA Raspberry Sweet.
After trying them again the throat hit was still unbearable for me but after a night on the town in my drunken state I decided to try adding Koolada to the mix. Boy did this make a difference at 1% it has taken away the harshness/throat hit completely and barely dulls the flavor. I feel like this one discovery for me has opened up a world of flavors I didn't know existed!
Do you guys have any success stories regarding your experimentation in DIY you'd like to share?
Mixing by weight instead of volume is easier, faster and less messy.
I've been mixing by volume forever. Weight requires referencing spreadsheets and calculating conversions, while volume requires .01xtotal_volumexflavor percent. Faster? Unless you're a robot, or have robot arms, plunging a syringe is infinitely faster. Less Messy? You got me there. I took the drip tips off of my flavors to get my syringe in and rubber banded the syringe onto the bottle. Shit leaks everywhere when I put the caps back on. I've got mixing a 60ml down to 10minutes, including recipe references and digging up my selections out of a jumbled box.
Sounds like you need to give mixing by weight a shot, with proper bottles. Take the cap off, squeeze, put the cap back on, that's it. You can assume everything weighs 1 gram per milliliter, it's accurate enough, except VG which is 1.26 g/ml.
You literally just go on ELR, punch in the percentages and it tells you how much of each ingredient to add. I do know how to do the calculations but I let the robots handle it and enjoy a faster, easier, cleaner, more accurate mixing lifestyle. Get on it dude.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.6099
> What is this?
He's referring to the specific gravity of concentrates which can vary by a few percent, so if you just assume 1 g/ml and a recipe calls for say 3% of a flavor, you might end up with 2.9% flavor. If you can tell the difference, maybe you need the charts, but for the majority it's irrelevant. Especially since most concentrates are pretty close in weight, so while they're slightly off, they're all equally off, meaning that the ratio between each flavor is a lot more accurate.
It's also pretty easy to mess up by a few percent with a syringe unless you use super precise ones and account for what's in the needle tip and surface tensions and the temperature of the liquid and and.. you get the drift.
LOL. 60mls in 10 mins is in no way faster then mixing by weight. Not even close. I can mix 4, 120mls bottles in about 4 mins flat with my current arrangement. Not being a dick, just saying...u/thejoelslack
Then again, I do have robot arms
Agreed. It might take four or five minutes to mix an extremely complex recipe with more than a dozen flavors, but for a five or six flavor recipe, I can mix a batch in under two minutes when mixing by weight. And that is taking my time, it can be done in under a minute with practice.
Zero mess and not having to wash syringes after each mixing session is just a bonus.
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Mix by weight
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Even though you mix by weight, having some syringes and pipettes are a real spill saver when you order 4 oz of a flavor and the bottle doesn't come with a tip.
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Get a larger vessel for VG and PG, such as a condiment bottle. Make sure to get ones that don't leak. I can say from experience that all the ones I got at Wal-Mart leak through the threads in the cap. Check the sidebar or use the search because I'm feeling lazy right now and this has been brought up every other day here since I can remember.
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Pre-mixing your concentrates can save you a lot of time. If you have a 7-12 ingredient recipe that you love, use www.alltheflavors.com or a similar app to figure out how to make a concentrate of it. I think signing up is free with a limited number of recipes. If you are decent with math, you can even do this yourself with a piece of paper, a pen, and maybe a calculator.
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If you mix something shitty, let it sit a week. If it's still shitty, wait another week. Repeat until the mix is gone or it becomes good. Hate vape your shitty creations to ingrain into your mind not to do anything like that again.
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Don't ask newbie questions or shit post in the main part of the sub. There are weekly/monthly threads for that, plus an infinite amount of information in the sidebar and search history. Plus people here are mean and will probably hurt your feelings.
Adding to point #5, don't make large batches of recipes or tweaks that you haven't tried before. Chances are it'll be shitty and now you have a large bottle of shitty juice. When testing, keep it small.
This is important. After gaining some experience, you'll probably be able to look at a recipe and think, this is going to be good. You will not always be right.
Resist the urge to make a large batch. Make a small batch and see if it actually is good before making the large batch.
Yup. I always mix new recipes or recipe tweaks in 10 mL bottles. If there is a flavoring which is used at less than 1%, I'll mix 15 mL of it, as my scale is not super consistent with weights less than 0.1 g. 30 mL or larger batches are only for recipes which I already know to work well.
I use the method I didn't see it here I like to mix in large bottles at least double the size of my batch, with plenty of head space for shaking, drastically reduces the amount of time I have to take to completely homogenizes the liquid.And of course after that you have to put it into smaller bottles so volatiles do not evaporate into the headspace.
Good idea.
This is the method I use if I'm mixing in a bottle with little headspace and a 70-80%VG mix. It seems to wipe a day or three off the steep time.
Add nicotine, PG and flavourings. Shake.
Add half of required VG. Shake.
Add remaining VG. Shake.
Simple but effective.
@ Low %'s of Cheesecake (LA) adds a bit of sweetness and mouth feel to custard and creams.
Time is your friend and your worst enemy, if you dont mix enough.
No other curing method is better than time, a subject i have tested thoroughly.
Oft times a simple recipe is a delicious recipe, if you know your flavorings strengths and weaknesses.
Im sure there are a bazillion more that i could post but right now i am too high to remember them, sorry.
The best thing I have is to wait to make all your bottle on one day rather then every now and then. It's much easier and quicker to do it in bulk.
VG in clear plastic doesn't last very long in a warm sunlit room. Keep it fridged or your mixes will start tasting like vomit after a few months.
Mix by weight. Get squeeze bottles for VG and PG. Get lots and lots of 30ml glass bottles. Look for acrylic storage spaces to keep flavorings. Find a few recipe profiles that you like and buy flavorings for those instead of spontaneously purchasing random flavorings. Keep your ingredients simple at first instead of attempting to reach for something complex.
Single testing flavors so as to really get to know them. For example, the throat hit you are experiencing in the Blue Voodoo clone is most probably from TFA peach juicy. I found out when single flavor testing, every single peach flavor just killed my throat so now I know to use them very carefully. According to this subreddit, it seems to be very common to be sensitive to peach flavors.
Layering flavors not only to make them more complex but for longevity through the aging process.
Care to elaborate on that one? I hear Koolada dulls the nicotine over time so it should not be used in bottles that require a lot of aging but aside from that I'd love to hear about your uses of layering.
For example strawberry- there's a lot of different strawberry flavorings ranging from more realistic to candied, adding more than one brings in dimension and a more well rounded flavor. Also strawberries are known to fade over time, with added support from other strawberries I still get great flavor weeks later.
I might be the only one to do this. I mix my vg pg and nicotine before hand usually to 70vg/30pg 3mg. I make about 500 mls at a time. So when i mix i start with my flavorings then add my pre-mixed base. My nicotine varies depending on how much flavoring I'm adding but i cant tell the difference.
I find that it's a lot quicker when mixing. I never had a hot spot. And i dont open my nicotine as much reducing the amount it oxidizes.
This is really a great way to go. If your base is 70/30 3mg/ml and flavorings are in PG, then:
- at 2% flavor, your mix will be 69/31 2.9mg/ml
- at 10% flavor, your mix will be 63/37 2.7mg/ml
- at 20% flavor, your mix will be 56/44 2.4mg/ml
The nic concentration doesn't change too much, but the VG/PG ratio changes a lot.
When mixing 30ml flavors for testing I use 1 and 3mm syringes. I take a small pair of embroidery scissors stick them in the end and turn them to widen the tip. I can then stick the tip of 15ml flavor bottles into it and extract the exact amount of flavoring I need by pulling back the plunger on the syringe.
This subreddit is cancer
There's a certain irony to your post considering smoking is estimated to cause 80% of lung cancer cases, exactly what vaping is trying to prevent.