I've been wanting to start making my own juice and was wondering if anyone knew of a good "how to start" type guide or post. There's alot online and just want to know I'm doing things right.
I already found the calculator from http://www.ejuice.breaktru.com/ and that is pretty helpful.
And I've seen alot of things saying to start with 5% flavor and see if thats good before you add way to much to it. So if I was using 3 flavors in my juice, I would use like 1.666% of each flavor so the total amout of flavoring would only start at about 5% of the total juice. Is that right?
Thanks for any advice you got for this DIY noob
DIY is really not as hard as it seems. That calculator is a really good one and one I use myself. It by the way comes with recipes go to file> open! Read over and study the those recipes and play around with them on the calculator it helps you understand I find.
For me I find it easier to have a bottle of nic base (mine is 100mg 50/50 pg/vg) a bottle of VG and a bottle of PG.
Start out with juices containing only 1 flavor as that is easier until you get the hang for mixing stuff up. The 5% people talk about is for any 1 flavor and it is a good start point to figure out if you need more or less. When I mix a juice that has more that one flavor I don't go over 15-20% total on the flavorings combined as a rule.
When you start out or are trying a new recipe for the first time make SMALL like 3-5 ml batches!
Another tip I find that helps is to NOT and nic to your liquid until you know you are happy with it. Mix up the pg/vg and flavors set it in a hot water bath for 30 mins to a hour shake it offten then sample a few drops on an atty...if good add nic.
Take notes! Write down how much of everything you put into a bottle! That way if you accidentally nail it first time out you can repeat forever and if you don't you can look back and figure out where to adjust!
Last tip..be safe and have fun.
I recently just bought a whole mess of shit.
So far my first three mixes ended up blowing total ass. We can learn together :p
So far I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, I've varied percentages and mixed at different nic levels, still shit.
Currently I'm mostly doing 70% PG 36mg + 30% VG 0mg, and then I'll use that as my base, add in flavor. I've added in 10-25% flavor and none of them seem right to me, but it might be the types or whatever I'm using. I'm literally a few more tries away from giving up entirely and sticking to "tuning" other liquids I buy rather than brewing from scratch. Tuning flavors is how I got into the whole thing. I bought a single lychee flavor art bottle and loved putting lychee into everything, so I figured why not. Well, it's sucked for me so far but I'm not giving up yet.
This tool you linked should provide some valuable assistance.
I've recently learned that steeping can change everything, that's my plan next.
I would recommend a combination of a hot steep then letting set for a few hours after the mix cools seems to work wonders for flavor consistency... Trial and error is all we can do, as long as we learn from our errors, but honestly spending .08$/ml versus the .50$ plus buying branded flavors is where it is at for me! went from a 20$ a week hobby to under 2$ great!!!
I'm looking to get into DIY as well. Did you buy a starter kit like DIY Artisan Kit? Is it even worth getting a kit like that?
I just bought some stuff from Wizard Labs, honestly I didnt even think about looking for a kit. I ordered:
60ml 36mg Nicotine 100%VG
60ml 0mg VG
60ml 0mg PG
5 3ml dropper bottles and 5 10ml dropper bottles
1 5ml syringe, 1 1ml syringe and a tip for them
1 50ml beaker
and 7 different flavor concentrates 8ml each
the whole thing with shipping was $36.63 so i think that was a pretty good deal to test it out