This is part of project I agreed to take on after it was pointed out that so many of the resources in sidebar and wiki are ancient. The idea is, rather than revising them myself, I'd post them here once per week to gather feedback on how to improve them. They belong to all of us, everyone should have a say in what they say.

What follows is a 4-year-old article in our DIY Beginner's Guide entitled "DIY Things You Won't Know You Missed Until You Need Them." This is what we're telling beginners they need to start mixing their own juice. Please give it a read and consider what's needs to be added, subtracted, or changed.

#DIY Things You Won't Know You Missed Until You Need Them

Your super vape mail arrived, you open up the package, and get right to work. You're not an idiot, so you put on your nitrile gloves, get a glass bottle out, and start breaking down your... oh, hmm, what's the best way to move this nicotine? A syringe seems safe, but they're all really small and it's slow. How about pouring? Oh, you don't have a funnel. That's ok, just be careful... oh, spilled some. It's on your gloves, so no problem. Wait, what do you do with the stuff on your gloves? And once you do all that and start mixing, where do you store all the samples you made? Crap, mixed them up. Which one is which? At least you saved one for that ripe banana/clove/caramel cappuccino/tiramisu... hey, why doesn't my syringe work anymore? And why does everything smell like burning tires?

There's always something you forget when you start a new project, especially one as big and complicated (and poorly documented) as DIY e-liquid compounding. With a grand total of one week's experience in this fine art, I now offer my advice on how to avoid getting caught short, mostly based on all the ways I got caught short. No doubt you will run into something else that's missing here; little details are as easy to miss as that one crucial flavor you forgot to include with the 30 that were in your order. This should, however, keep you a little ahead of the game.

Paper Towels

This should be a no-brainer, especially if you vape a lot. We're always going through paper towels. Do yourself a favor and get more than you think you need, and keep them close by. When you spill 100mg base on your gloves, you need to get it off your gloves before you accidentally rub it on your clothes or it drips onto your arm or it gets on the outside of a bottle you forget to wipe down... which is also why you need more paper towels. And to wipe out your atty/tank when testing. And to dry off the outside of bottles before you label them. I have rolls handy no more than an arm's reach from anywhere I might possibly need them.

Labeling

Label everything. Your nicotine bottles get the strength, solution base, source, lot number, maybe the number for poison control, and a big flashing THIS IS POISON IDIOT sign. Your test batches get at least a name you will understand, the nicotine strength, the PG/VG blend, and the mix date. You also put them on the little vials of Ethyl Maltol and Menthol solutions you made to save yourself some money, with the solution percentage and solvent. You might put them on your syringes and pipettes if you reserve certain ones for strong or reactive flavors. If you ever look at something you made or something you work with and say, "What's this?" you needed a label.

If you forgot your labels, at least put some masking tape and magic marker on there to keep stuff straight while you go to the label store. You can get professional labels made if you're entertaining notions of opening an artisan e-liquid shop with suggested food and wine pairings as soon as you opened your box of stuff, or you can use labels out of a labelmaker, or anything that lets you get the job done. I bought some return address mailing labels from Staples and downloaded an Avery Word template that matched the pattern and started printing. Wipe down all bottles or vials before affixing a label. If you think your label might come off, like you store your nic in the freezer without a bag over it, cover the label with clear packing tape to keep it in place. You do not want to pull a Box Elder when it comes to nicotine strength.

Record Keeping

You will make some good liquids and you will make some terrible liquids. You want to know what you did in either case. When you experiment with a new recipe, plan it out and make sure you know exactly what went in that batch. This is easy with software like [1] eJuice Me Up as long as you don't screw around during the mix. However, keep a log of what you did. I record the recipe and mix date so when I fumble around in my steeping drawer and see, "High Explosive Penis Custard v3 12mg Mix Date 8/4/2014" and find that it's steeped into some sort of vinegary sludge, I can go back and note it in the log. This also helps you with version control, in case you iterate on a particular recipe over time and need to keep things straight. Keep your log in whatever form you wish, as long as you keep one.

In case you're trying to control your expenses, you can also keep a log on what you spent, what you bought, and when. I do this to shock myself back to reality when it's late, I'm tired, and I think it might be a good idea to order the entire Capella catalog in bulk sizes just to see what they taste like.

Troublemaker Accessories

There are some ingredients that can be a pain to work with. The simplest example of this is straight USP Anhydrous Vegetable Glycerine, which stubbornly fights any syringe you use. You probably bought some 14 gauge luer lok blunts to deal with it, or just pulled the needle off.

However, there are flavors and additives that cause different kinds of trouble. Some flavors are just so pungent and strong that they can mess up your other flavors if you double dip your needles. Examples of this are things like tiramisu, some caramels, some tobaccos, most coffee flavors I've tried, acetyl pyrazine, and clove (eugenol). I've encountered one flavor, TFA Ripe Banana, that actively pursues an age-old vendetta against syringes by destroying them through interaction with plungers (isoamyl acetate doesn't play nice with soft polymers). For these flavors, and especially syringe destroyers, you will want disposable pipettes and/or glass eyedroppers.

When you work with pipettes or droppers, you will need to know about how many drops to use. The default answer is "20 per ml" but do not trust this. It's always different. When I got a cheap glass dropper for this purpose, it had a 1ml line halfway up the pipe (which I also did not trust). I filled the dropper to the 1ml mark, pushed the water into an empty syringe (you can use a graduated cylinder here of course) and verified it was in fact 1ml. Then I filled it again and repeated, going drop by drop. I got 58 drops/ml out of that eyedropper. Drop size will vary by liquid, of course, but water and propylene glycol flavor base are similar enough in viscosity to use this way.

If you want to avoid all this, just get one syringe per flavor, label them, and get some glass burettes for flavors like Ripe Banana.

Bottles and Such

This is obviously an essential, and you obviously got some. You probably did not get enough. Get more bottles than you need in utility sizes for breaking down your nicotine and storing PG/VG in something more convenient than a gallon jug. Get more medium-small bottles for storing the mixes you like. Get way more than you need in sample sizes for test batches and crystal solutions. When you've burned through the ten little vials you got on two additive solutions and eight test batches you have to leave alone to steep, you will need more immediately to keep experimenting.

You should also get some funnels, small enough to fit into your most-used bottles. I have a little bag of plastic funnels for standard bottles and a stainless steel one for larger bottles. You don't need them very often, but when you do you will be happy to have them.

For little test batches I use glass vials with polypropylene caps, found at lab supply stores at cheap prices. I bought eight at a surplus store before I got my first package, another 20 the next day, and I just bought a dozen more in a slightly larger size from a lab supply store in my area. I like them because you can check your color easily and they stand up to speed-steeping methods that deform and outgas plastics. Which brings me to the next thing.

Steeping Stuff

When you're mixing up a bunch of 5ml test samples, your old purist notions about leaving stuff alone for 3-5 weeks may be sorely tested. There are some speed steeping methods that work to a greater or lesser degree. I won't judge the comparative effectiveness of each, but briefly they include hot water baths (crock pot method), ultrasonic cleaners, hot rice methods, and streathing, sometimes used in combination. When you want to try one of them, make sure you have the little things you will need.

For hot water bath/crock pot/UC with hot water, you want to make sure you're using glass containers, even if you later transfer them to plastic for aging. You probably also want some baggies to put the vials in. I like to put several vials into a baggie, adjacent and right-side up, and suck the air out of the bag before sealing it like a ghetto Sous-Vide chef. This minimizes contact with the water while also distributing the heat more evenly. It can, however, also wreck labels through condensation or leaks, so you might also want to get some tiny color-coded rubber bands so you can tell which is which when you open up the baggie.

For the hot rice method, you obviously need some rice and a microwave-proof container big enough. Derp.

For streathing, which I do with a $2.50 IKEA milk frother, you need the frother (derp) and a wide/tall enough glass to mix in. I used low and wide beverage glasses for this, although I just got some Pyrex Griffin beakers to use because I like having the spout for decanting.

Nicotine Test Kits

This really should go into the safety section of essentials, but many people decide to skip this. I would not. First, you may be faced with a lousy vendor who does not test their nicotine and you wind up in a Box Elder situation, or cheated because you ordered 48mg and they send you 24. You might think you can just sniff the nicotine and tell what's going on. First, if you open the nic and can smell it right away, CLOSE IT UP BECAUSE SOMETHING MAY BE TERRIBLY WRONG AND YOU MAY PASS OUT SOON AND SPILL THAT CRAP ALL OVER YOUR SOON-TO-BE-COOLING FORM. Second, first-time DIYers can't tell what smells "off." Third, if you break down your nicotine yourself, maybe you didn't mix it carefully enough in your excitement. It won't hurt to titrate out 1ml of the stuff to discover whether you're making tasty juice, weak sauce, or poison.

I forgot something!

You will probably say this. Don't panic; you can usually find whatever it is you forgot at a local store of some sort. Don't think you need to go find your coupon code and calculate shipping from across the country because you forgot some masking tape. I have bought my supplies from DIY-specific vendors, a farm supply store, pharmacies, a lab supply, a supermarket, a surplus store, and a place where they sell self-destructing furniture and horsemeat meatballs. And if you do have to wait, then... wait. DIY is a patience game. I'm not going to have something I think is amazing for weeks at the least, more probably months. You can wait.