I would like to switch from mixing by volume to mixing by weight. I have a scale. At the moment my VG, PG and nicotine base are in large bottles. I don't know how I'm going to pour a precise amount of liquid from those bottles into a unicorn bottle. I'm thinking that I need intermediate bottles. I would like them to be refillable. What do all of you use? It would be nice if I could adjust the flow from the bottle somehow, so I can add a lot, watch the scale, and switch to adding a little once I'm close. Or is that a bad way to do it? Mixing by volume with syringes made sense to me, but I feel like I'm missing something with mixing by weight.
I use multiple bottles for VG. A 1l with a flip top cap handles getting within a gram or two, and I use a 120ml unicorn bottle to get the last bit in. For PG and PG alternatives, I just use the 120ml ml unicorns. Nic, a 30ml bottle like most flavors come in works perfectly.
What you miss by measuring by weight is the inaccuracy of losing unmeasurable amounts to the walls of your GC or syringe, and the ignominy of being a cleaning lady as much as being a mixer.
I love that word. Ignominy. It’s just so much fun to say.
Ignominy.
Yeah I could do without the cleanup. Also drawing up room temperature VG requires a lot of patience.
My early attempts involved measuring by volume... but I never used a syringe for VG. Having a really steady hand, and experience measuring VG in a GC in a lab setting, that's how I tried. Of course, the problem of VG left in the GC was a nuisance. If I could only reverse one mistake I'd made early on, it'd be the measuring by volume one.
Go to Nicotine River and look for 4oz/8oz/16oz Cylinder Bottle with Twist Top cap. They're dirt cheap - get a few.
Plastic pipettes/syringes for nicotine. Don't know how large your PG and VG bottles are, but the liter bottles can make use of Yorker caps. If you have larger than liter bottles, transfer some to a smaller condiment bottle. I do that with my PG cause I'm not trying to have that shit flow everywhere.
Basically, don't overthink it. You're dropping straight into the bottle that's on the scale, tare, add next ingredient.
Go to Walmart or the dollar store and get some empty condiment bottles
This works. For VG, I used an 8-oz barbeque sauce bottle for a while then bought 16-oz HDPE bottles. I can turn it upside down and squeeze the hell out of it with no leaks around the cap (unlike the seeping from my cheapie bottle). The bottle opening is a little small but I have no trouble with refilling it from a gallon jug.
For PG, I use a 250ml laboratory-type wash bottle. Works great, and no funnel required to refill this one either. No leakage around the cap because you don't need to invert it.
For nic (PG base), I use a setup like this 2-oz LDPE bottle with Luer Lock cap and 14-gage dispensing needle. One squeeze gives about 1 gram delivery and gravity-only flow is about 0.1g /second. Easy to use.
Putting in another vote for condiment bottles. You can get them at Walmart or the dollar store and they work great. You might go slightly over the target (by like a few tenths or hundredths of a gram) but it's not usually a significant enough amount to matter much, and with practice you'll get better at hitting the target weight. It's fun to see when you get the exact amount you were shooting for.
Generally i use a funnel to transfer nicotine from a large bottle to a 30ml working bottle. intermediate bottles just sounds like another way to blow some cash.
30ml LDPE half filled for working nicotine, the rest in the freezer.
120ml LDPE boston round for VG and PG. some caps are adjustable but it's not a huge problem if they're not. a little extra PG or VG in the mix won't ruin the whole thing. thinking like .5g or so over-fill.
Heartland sells their 4oz flavorings in a squeeze bottle with an adjustment nozzle tip. (Think of the orange screw cap on the liquid Elmers Glue)
This helps when youre topping off an ingredient because you can tighten it and make it so only tiny droplets come out. You also can loosen it and make it so liquid flows out faster, that way it doesn't take forever. I can usually get my mixes down to the .01g pretty accurately with these.
Just make sure you slow the flow on whatever you're adding to the mix when you get close to that ingredients full amount in weight.
I’ve found that these work great. I’d highly suggest them.
I just started out but I'm liking my system. I use a 16oz condiment bottle for VG. I don't use PG but I would use a 120ml unicorn. For nicotine I put some of my 1 liter bottle into a 240ml amber Boston round and I use a pippete to transfer into the mixes. I like doing this because I can get a close measurment in milliliters on the pippete before weighing it into the mix. This prevents me from being able to accidently over nic the mix if I don't put much more in the pippete than I know I will need.
I like this idea for small batches. I haven't been making my own juice for very long, and I'm still using single ingredients most of the time. Once I start experimenting with creams and custards in small batches, I'll do it your way. For big batches I'll just use condiment bottles.
Yeah the pipettes are for nicotine only. I use condiment bottles for the VG. Even in larger batches we're using what, 6-12ml of nic solution? Less if you grabbed 100mg nic where I bought 60mg. Pipettes just act as a double safe for me to not add too much. If I was making 240ml it's would basically be 2 full pipette. Syringes would have the same effect.
I buy bases in gallon containers. I transfer that to 500ml ldpe cosmo bottles with yorker caps. I also keep a 60ml ldpe unicorn of pg, for when I only need a little bit. With VG, I don't find precision matters much, +/- 3g on a 240ml batch doesn't matter for me. I use so little pg in my mixes that I'm still on the first gallon I bought 4 years ago, and I mostly dispense it from the unicorn bottle, so precision isn't an issue.
Condiment bottles for the VG/PG as others have said. Depending on how big your batch is, this isn't something that you need to worry about getting all measurements down to the .01 gram or anything. The smaller the batch of course the closer you want to be to your mark, but when I'm making 240ml batches, I'll just pour directly from the big VG jug, as I'll never notice a difference if I pour in an extra 10 or 20 grams.
But anyway, get the condiment bottle, and you can control the flow by pressure, you'll get the hang of it.
I'm by no means an expert but I just mix up 60ml max. I cut the top off of a 120ml bottle, stick it on my scale, tare it, then pour pg and vg in with twist spouts on my bottles, nic with a syringe, and drop in from my flavor bottles. It is very easy but sometimes I do overshoot vg because the scale isn't updating as fast as I'm pouring and it can go a bit over.
When I get my vg and pg from nicotine River they come in capped 500ml bottles and there is a twist spout in the bag. The nicotine is the only thing I'm super careful about but even then I just dip in a syringe and measure it out by quick squirts and then drops.
Make your scale is accurate enough to measure .01 grams.
Then I sort of give the mixing bottle a little swish and dump it in a bottle. I probably ought to have an actual beaker but this works for me.