Welcome, Everyone.
This is your thread to chat about anything remotely DIY-related that might not fit into one or our other Weekly/Monthly threads or that you’re just not comfortable posting to the front page. If you’re a New Mixer check out the DIY Beginners Guide and the links below then feel free to ask about anything you’re still not clear on.
Current Weekly/Monthly threads (Archive of all weekly threads):
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Weekly ‘Suggest a Recipe for my Flavors’ Thread - You picked a bunch of flavors that either sounded good or were in recipes that looked good but now you want more ideas for what to do with them? Ask here and get suggestions.
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Weekly ‘What are you Vaping?’ Thread - Talk about the latest recipes you’ve mixed up whether they’re yours or someone else’s.
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Flavor of The Week - Every week the community gathers to discuss one flavor category and share recipes, notes, ideas, advice, pairings and more. After that the Noted crew (/u/ID10-T, /u/mlNikon & /u/CheebaSteeba) try as many flavors in that category as they can and discuss their impressions, opinions and notes.
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Throwback Thursday - The newest weekly thread/project to revamp and improve the resources in our sidebar with feedback from the community.
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FAQ Friday - Where I (and a few other contributors) tackle one Frequently Asked Question as comprehensively as possible.
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Monthly Recipe Thread - Share your recipes here with or without development notes.
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Monthly Clone Request Thread - Want a recipe or idea for how to mix your favorite commercial juice? This is the place to ask. Check out FAQ Friday: Clone Requests for some ideas on how best to ask and get closer to accomplishing your remix.
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Monthly Clone Challenge - A community driven effort to tackle one clone request at a time.
Highlights from last week:
Oh, boy. Everyone seems to enjoy a bit of title gore with their highly informative reposts! But when it comes to /u/ilikeycoffee’s writeups, it’s hard not to upvote the idea of more people being exposed to them. They’re fantastic reads, all of them, and I’ve highlighted them before but thanks to /u/xx2000xx I get to do it again. Check them out:
Vanilla. The world's second most expensive spice. Some history, what it is, how to use it.
WinterGreen. Maybe the Flavour You've Never Used. What it is and what it isn't.
And now that you’ve read all of those, we’ll jump back to last week with /u/MasterBeernuts’s post on Adding Juiciness to your recipe.
/u/GigaLumpinator shared Apple Custard a fine looking custard with a short steep time that I look forward to trying.
and /u/juthinc managed to stop talking about flavors they don’t enjoy long enough to write up a FAQ Friday post on Common Newbie Errors with a meta-write-up in the comments by /u/DarkJester89 our resident contrarian.
Speaking of FAQ Friday; Tune in this Friday for a write-up by none other than The Resident Tobacco Expert himself /u/ChemicalBurnVictim.
We have an official Discord server if anyone wants to join and chat: https://discord.gg/ufVTyAQ
Does anyone know if a particular FLV tobacco might be a good sub for TFA Western?
None of the FLV really give me any of those leather vibes that Western has. Closest sub would probably be Arabian. Classic Cigarette might not be a horrible option, and it’s easier to work with than the Arabian, but Arabian will probably be closest taste wise.
First time poster here, excited to get started! Just bought all of my starter gear, along with a couple of one-shots to get my feet wet into mixing. Once I try those out, where do you guys recommend going to purchase a variety of flavors (and of what) to start either trying recipes or attempting to create my own?
Depends where you are.
As to what, just find some well regarded/highly rated recipes here, on ELR, or alltheflavors and buy the ingredients that you need. To create your own you could use those last two sites, search for the specific flavour and find out the average used percentage, that can be a good starting point.
What is with people asking these questions and NOT telling where they're located?
My apologies, I thought it was assumed to be in the United States unless stated otherwise. That is a little ethnocentric on my part.
/u/newdrip where do you get your MF these days? I went to try ECX but they didn't have any of the ones in your recipe from the monthly thread.
u/NotCharlesManson
I saw you loved HA Italian cream at 4%. I have a bottle at 4% aged a month. Tastes like frumunda cheese to me. Should I toss it or let it age another month?
You're probably going to have to use a Ouija board to summon him.
I can't imagine what it's like at 4%. I've never had a reason to go much over 1% with it.
> HA Italian cream
The Angels are in the flavoring business now? Interesting.
Been out of the game for almost 2 years.
I notice the recommended vendors list has been removed from the sidebar.
Am I still good with my old stand-bys? Are there any new players that I should look at?
- Bull City
- EcigExpress
- Gremlin DIY
- Nude Nic (I am aware that this is a controversial one, but have never had a bad experience personally.)
I'm looking for some 100mg salt concentrate. I normally use nic riv but $25 shipping hurts. Anyone have vendor recommendations or is nicriv the best option?
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Can anyone help me figure out why my recipe is so dry, it feels like a desert without an oasis.
Apple Fuji FA 1.25% Raspberry FA 0.5% Double Watermelon CAP 2% Pear FA 0.5% Watermelon FA 3.75% Watermelon TPA 3%
Tastes great, but again. So dry.
The Fuji and the Watermelon are working together to dry it out. You can try to add a small percentage (0.25% to start) of INW Cactus or increase the FA Pear to 1% to add juiciness.
This is a great post on juiciness.
God my table turned out hideos, I need to learn the Reddit formatting if I'm going to ever contribute a recipe hahaha.
That's quite interesting (not doubting) but just because Fuji is a known one to make Vapes jucier, it's even in the juciness thread, also why I added the pear actually. That's why I was so confused haha.
Which watermelon if not both do you think is the main culprit?
Not a massive fan of cactus, it ads it's specific weird flavour which I'm not fond of, I'll give the pear a go and let you know.
Okay.... Didn't know where to post this but I'm interested in getting started with diy. I don't know where to buy the supplies or anything.
Your best bet is to get the stuff to make a well regarded recipe. What do you like to vape? I'll help direct you to some recipes that I like.
Since you're just getting started, you'll need flavors for sure. Most of the community buys flavors from Bull City Flavors and Ecigexpress. Start with small bottles, reorder larger as you find you use it faster.
You'll need nicotine, vg and pg for the rest of the base. Most people will tell you that buying them separately is best because it gives you more freedom, control and accuracy in your mix. Freebase Nicotine in a PG base is most popular because it's easy to mix with. I buy mine from Carolina Xtracts.
If you want to mix high nic salt juices, you'll need to buy your nic salts in a VG base.
Nicotine River offers nic, vg, and pg. I believe that they also have premixed bases that you can dump flavors into if you don't want to buy the 3 separately and keep things simple.
The other things you'll need:
-15ml and 30ml bottles to mix juice in
- a scale that weighs down to 0.01 grams with (a 500 gram capacity is nice). Most of us mix by weight.
- if you can't afford a scale, 5-10 1ml syringes, 5-10 3-5ml syringes.
- a calculator like alltheflavors.com or e-liquid-recipes.com.
A good strawberries and cream... Also like mega melons from cuttwood. As for flavors I noticed some say tfa? Does it have to be from flavors apprentice?
TFA/TPA (The Flavor Apprentice/The Perfumers Apprentice), is only one of many. We all try to use the best concentrate regardless of brand. For example, TFA makes a great Grape Juice and a terrific Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, but don't ever buy their Cheesecake. Unless you like feet. Capella New York Cheesecake would be a much better choice.
We all pretty much stick to TFA, FA, FW, INW, FE, JF, SC, HS, VT, WF and possibly MF. These are the most popular brands really.
For Strawberries and Cream recipes: God Milk, Mother of God's Milk, Sweet Strawberry Cream.
For Melon recipes: Meloniuos Funk, Melon Mix, My Melon Mix.
You realize it's impossible to make a decent suggestion without knowing where you're from, right?
That said, I'm gonna guess you're a 'merkin, so... Nicotine River. (If you aren't, chef's is probably best.)
Get your scale from Amazon or Ebay or whatnot. I got mine from tmart when they had a good sale on.
I like a good strawberries and cream
Hey guys, I didn't wanna make a thread for this but figured id try here. I've read the sticky and stuff, I'm trying to get start on a budget. Looking at nic River, maybe a 240 of vg, same size of pg, small bottle of 48mg/ml of nic. And a few flavorings, not sure how much I should get to make some basic juices. I have old bottles here I can clean out to use, and 2 scales although one isn't working atm but might be able to fix it. Is mixing by volume at first OK? Just don't wanna order if I'm cutting myself short. Got about 35 bucks to spend. Any advise is appreciated.
If you have a scale that is of sufficient size, and is capable of .01g accuracy, that's good. You don't want to waste money on supplies to measure volumetrically. You also don't need a bottle of PG anywhere near the size of the bottle of VG. Remember that nic base and flavors are almost always PG based, and then you also probably want to mix 70:30 or 80:20 anyhow. For 240ml of VG, 30ml of PG is almost certainly sufficient.
Thanks. So is the smallest bottle of nicotine enough for a while? I bought a micro grams scale on ebay a few months back, recently it stopped working but maybe the contacts are rusted, haven't checked. My other scale only measure to . 1. I'll see if I can get the micro gram scale working. So with those 3 bottles I should have to enough to grab 10 flavors or so. Are surringes easy to find locally? I'll have more funds as the supplies arrive I just wanna get the basics otw. Thanks again for your assistance. Also, I like custard, sour flavors, blueberry etc. Trying to decide which flavors to get, probably just use the sticky with all the top rated one and order ones that appears they will pair well together?
Well, assuming standard usage, a 30ml bottle of nic base should be good for ~1.5L of juice.
fasttech has a 600g/.01g scale that's USB powered and less than ten bucks. You don't need syringes.
Sour flavors... not really something for mixing. Bitter citrus flavors, no problem. You could also use caffeine to increase the tartness...
For blueberry, your want the four following flavors:
FW Blueberry
TFA Blueberry Extra
FA Bilberry
INW Lemon Mix
(mix them all together. I'm drawing a blank right now on the percentages for some insane reason. search "blueberry trinity")
Go check out the flavor reviews from the sidebar. Read the review of any flavor you're thinking of getting, and decide if you really want it after doing your research.
Edit: fixed math after noticing nic was 48 instead of 100
This evening I'm playing with a bunch of blueberries and VT Fizzy Sherbet and VT Lemonade. That Lemonade sure is tasty at 1% with about 3% CAP Lemon lime to give it body. I could vape it all day just like that. It's like a carbonated lemon/lime/ade.
Whatever it is they're using in these 2 concentrates gives that tingly/tart dry tongue kind of thing that carbonation and pixie stix do. The effect lasts for a pretty long time. Even after drinking water etc. It kind of leaves the same mouthfeel as eating too many smarties or chewy sweetarts. My best guess is some sort of acidic ingredient or one that increases acidic perception. It also seems terribly difficult to get fruit to ride on top of it unless you keep it around 1% or less.
I seem to find some excuse to put Fizzy Sherbet in every other recipe I’ve messed around with over the summer. And even though I keep buying the VT I see people recommending and random ones at the same time, I somehow never already have the one being touted as being awesome. Always one more to add to the list.
Anyone know where I can get black for pipe? Sold out on vaperstek and not available direct, apparently.
u/ChemicalBurnVictim
Hmm. This has me concerned. I sent Inawera an email to see what’s going on. Looks like inawerawinkel has some available. I might have to order 100 ml just in case.
I need good fruit flavors to use with peppermint and menthol/koolada.
For the last three years (pretty much since I started vaping) my ADV is a mix of peppermint, menthol, koolada and lemon-lime. I would like to vary it a little by changing the fruity flavors.
I like it a lot but I stick with it mostly because I can't make anything else taste good. Every custard recipe I tried ended with a strong chemical aftertaste, really displeasing.
Were you steeping the custards?
FA Forest Fruit
CAP Harvest Berry
CAP Sweet Watermelon
FLV Wild Melon
JF Honeydew
I'll make sure to order these, thanks!
About the custards, yeah, 2 weeks minimum. The only thing I never tried is letting the bottle breathe because the one time I tried everything went mute, like, no flavor.
This may seems like a dumb questions.
When you already mix your juice and let it steep, and it turns out the flavorings or nic isn't good enough, can you add it more and then mix and steep again?
If you need more nic, it's certainly possible to add more and assuming you have a high enough concentration of nic base (e.g. 100mg/ml) it won't dilute your flavors or throw off your VG/PG ratio by much. But if the flavoring isn't "good enough" that's a different question and you'd need to share the recipe and what specifically isn't good in order to get advice on what, if anything, might improve it.
Hypothetical I want to make a strawberry flavor liquid, and I add 5%, flavorings, steep and it doesn't taste strong enough, so I add the existing liquid 5% more, mix and steep again, will it work? Or no?
Kinda.
You'll change both the nicotine concentration and the VG/PG ratio in so doing. And you need really good records to determine how much flavoring to add to the original batch, less whatever amount was used in the sampling process. And your steep times will be off somewhat.
And then it still (hypothetically) still wouldn't be any good, because... strawberry.
You can always add flavor, but you can never remove, and sometimes adding isn't always a good thing.
However there are times when I'm developing a recipe or testing flavors, I start very low with a flavor (or flavors) and increase in very small increments. This helps to get a better feel for how strong the flavor is, where the off notes start, how it balances with others in a mix and if it might be shy or a bully.