Tinker

Yes. They are a good buy and many are made with natural flavorants. Most LorAnn flavorings use artificial flavorants. By natural flavorants, I mean the essential flavors. Like real vanilla v. imitation vanilla. They may contain added ingredients that are not natural. Anyway, good find. It took me several months to wander across them.

You ain't never used nothing like nicotine in your shop, "old buddy". Nothing in the same neighborhood of the same universe where nicotine lives. Anything in that universe needs a license to own it and an annual inspection of the storage facilities where you keep it. "Oh, I'll be careful about it..." This is it, I'm resigning this forum. You are all conclusive proof that human evolution has, indeed, ended. Moderator? Oh, moderator?

You're an idiot and I don't care if saying that makes this disappear from the forum! 2 drops of 100mg concentration on uncalloused skin and you better dial 911 (and drop the phone) before you run to start rinsing it off. Nicotine tolerance is an unknown medical phenomenon. Get yourself and all your buddies who claim to have developed a tolerance to nictone to the National Institutes of Health as research subjects. You're all bloody human mutants. Nicotine does not survive IN YOUR BODY long enough to form anything resembling a drug tolerance. You smoke 60-a-day and you still have the same internal nicotine level as someone smoking 20 a day - or one a day if you get to them at the same post-smoking time as the person with the 60-a-day habit. Your addiction just demands that you maintain that level more consistently than the one-a-day smoker. The stuff you say here is read by people who don' know any better. Jesus Christ! 100mg dilutions! 48mg dilutions! "Tolerance for nicotine!" How the he11 do you sleep at night if you claim you have to have 48mg of nicotine in you? You must wake up every 14 of 15 minutes to puff away. Idiot! I can't take it. The fu#king FDA is going to step in and regulate this whole industry in a heartbeat if people don't begin to think about what they're saying. Sir Walter Raleigh is spinning in his grave. Bah!

Well, you certainly have the right user name to ask questions like this! Are you insane? Nicotine is one of the most deadly organic posions on the planet, and it is more readily absorbed through the skin than any other route. 100mg is a lethal concentration if you spill it on yourself. You get any of that crap on you and you better have a Posion Control Center nearby. You need gloves, masks, protective clothing and an EPA approved fume hood just to handle it, and although I know the site that sells what it claims to be 150mg liquid, that site also lists all of the protective gear you need to work with it, and an unfortunately incomplete Material Safety Data Sheet for it. There is a reason the stuff is only offered at around 54mg - that's the legal limits set in Europe for any material containing nicotine. You don't need to kick-up whatever brew you're mixing. You need to get your a$$ to a Library and learn something about the materials you think you want to work with. And please, please, please! Just asking a question this stupid in a semi-public forum where someone else equally as naieve or stupid may try the same thing is truly dangerous! Get a grip.

Oil can clog the atomizer and needs to be cleaned with vodka or everclear. Lots of mixers use oils, nonetheless. On the other hand, using vanilla extracts with SUGAR in them will carbonize on the atomizer coils and damage it permanently. AND BTW, it's been my experience that trying to mix an e-liquid using only a vanilla flavorant creates a really surpisingly crappy flavor when vaped. A real ugh-er.

I do it the same way sometimes, but mostly I'll mix then in a little 3ml sample-size bottle and use that for a day to really check out the mix. Now I generally mix different flavored liquids as my personal "stash". Five parts RY4 plus one part caramel (or a stong toffee) seem to kink it up where I like it. But yeah, I like adding a drop of a different flavor directly to the cartridge when I'm wondering how a little of this and a smidgen of that might taste together.

Jason - Non-PG, or glycerine - cleverly called VG ("vegetable" glycol, but more on this later) - has no approved use in inhalents. It is USP grade only for use in over-the-counter drugs and cosmetics. It's principle pharmacuetical use is as the base binder in toothpastes and as the thickener is cough syrups. That's one big difference. Glycol costs roughly one-half what propylene glycol costs. Propylene glycol (PG) has US FDA approval as a humecant for tobacco. Every tobacco product is drenched with PG before final processing into cigareetes, snuff, chew, pipe-tobacco or whatever. It is generally regarded as safe (GRAS) for use in inhalation. Glycerinel is - interestingly enough - seldom obtained from plants or vegetables anymore. It is almost always synthetic, and petroleum based. Be mindful that Kosher grade has to do with the manufacuring and handling process and not with the nature of the product. "Organic" in the US is nebulous at best and inapplicable to pharaceutical-grade products. Natural glycerine is available, but it is rare and expensive and is significantly more viscous (thicker) than synthetic glycol. As I said above, most glycerine is cheap compared to PG, and glycerine marketed as "vegetable gycol" never costs less than products made with proylene glycol and also VG products never cost more than PG products, although natural glycerine would cost several times more than PG. Calling it VG is good marketing... Propylene glycol is seldom synthetic anymore. It is a natural byproduct of modern distillation processes and is becoming abundant as a byproduct of bio-fuel production. You'll see many people worrying about allergic reactions to PG, and while allergies are certainly possible, it seems an odd concern for people who have smoked tobacco and have, therefore, been sucking in PG for however many years they smoked... As if they are suddenly going to break out in a rash after all those puffs over all those years. Still, allergic reactions are a valid consideration. I see the differences as being technical: PG is approved for use as an inhalent, and has been approved in tobacco products, world-wide, for most of a century. "VG" has no known approval for use as an inhalent anywhere on the planet. Is one therefore better for us than another? Dunno. I do know that with one, we're using it within it's constellation of historical uses, and with the other, we're charting unknown waters. - Tinker

OW! OW! OW! Good lord, it's going into lungs! And there is a huge difference in grades of PG. There's technical grade and pharmaceutical grade. Never use technical grade for an e-liquid. Never, ever! Order some pharmaceutical grade (usually called "proylene glycol, USP/EP" online and ask Mom to be patient...

Oh yeah! And Buck - the thing you want to watch out for is a description called "throat hit". Your Light cigareetes have very little "throat hit" compared to my He-man Marlboros, so when you get to shopping for e-liquid to refill cartridges, you might want to shy away from stuff described as having "great throat hit". But balancing that, the vapors are never close to the same temperature as a suck on a cigarette, so even powerful "throat hit" might not seem too strong for you... - Tinker

Soory, Buck, you probably have all the information you need, but I gotta get my five NEWBIE posts in before I can post in other forums... You asked question the way I asked them when I first waded into the shallow end of the e-smoking pond. You've made a good choice with a Joye 510-style kit. I'm a 20-year 2+ pack, Marlboro 100's addict. The manual battery 510 worked for me, the automatic battery 410-style (Blu) didn't work at all, not for a minute. But like me, you got sidetracked by authentic vs. non-Joyetech OEM. My first kit was just the cheapest 510 starter kit I could find, from Cignot.com for $35 plus $5 shipping. That was six months ago. Of the original two batteries and atomizers, both batteries are still working, and one atomizer just quit this weekend. I've never asked the ladies at Cignot to assure me they were sending authentic Joyetech equipment; the rig worked and continues to work. You can get round- or flat-tipped cartridges for the 510. I started out using the whistle (flat) tips, but recently changed to round-tips. The only reason I changed was that I caught myself trying to hold the whistle-tips in my mouth while typing stuff like this, and was starting to bruise my lower lip... Duh! The round tip is slipperier and I don't try holding it in my lips with them. I didn't want to be reminded of cigarettes in any way, so I dumped all of the tobacco-flavored cartridges right off. But I think the Winston flavor is probably closer to what you want than the Marlboro flavor. Don't go lower than 18mg nicotine strength to start with, and I'd actually recommend going with a 24mg liquid for refilling your cartridges. There is a difference in how the body takes in and uses nicotine when comparing cigarette smoke to e-smoking vapor, and while a cigarette - even your "lights" - are considered to deliver 16 mg, to me it took the 24mg liquid to give the smae relief from cravings. (If that sounds scary, six months into e-smoking, I now only use 6mg nicotine products...). There's probablky a bazillion other questions you're asking. I ran across this the other day and find it a very good read, even if you're not new to it: http://www.awesomevapor.com/page/397873360 Welcome to the forums - you're my fifth post so now I can go sit a the same table as the adults - and congratulations on a wise decision to try an alternative to tobacco. Good luck, hang in there, and don;t give up without talking to us some more! - Tinker

I agree that the Janty Ego/Totally Wicked Tornado are very good options for equipment. But for a lower price - as much as half the cost - the Joye510 will get you into e-smoking, and the atomizers and cartridges are compatible with the Ego/Tornado. I tried to start off with a 401-style e-cigarette (equivalent to the Blue you mentioned) and 3 hours later, deep into a nicotine fit, I was down at the 7-Eleven. Two days later I was given a 510 starter kit, with the manual battery, and I have never looked back. Not once, not for a second. I can go into a 7-Eleven and not even glance at the cigarrete display. That was six months ago, and I am way down on daily nicotine fixes from my 2+ packs a day Marlboro 100's addiction to - well, I;ve never stopped to count my puffs-per-day, but I'm using 6mg nicotine liquid now, about 30ml per month - I order once a month. There are vendors that sell the 510 starter kits for less than $35 (plus shipping). Buy a good liquid - if you think you want tobacco, I'd suggest a small (10ml or less) bottle of Dekang RY4 to try out this e-smoking stuff. I wanted away from cigarettes. I hated them, hated the grip they held over me, was embarassed because I smked, mortified because I had tried to quit (and failed) so many times. There was nothing about smoking that I liked, but I still could not quit. I made it six months without a Marlboro once, and my addicition returned with a force that shocked me. Gum, patches, lozenges, prescription inhalers, couseling, hypnotism. Nothing worked. These did. I'm still an addict, but my maintenance dose is much, much, much lower now. And the day I went to 100% e-smoking I still had three packs of Marlboros in the house. It took me a month before I tossed those packs in the trash. Everyone is careful to point out that e-cigarettes are not a smoking-cessation product and are not marketed with any claim that they are smoking cessation products, so I will point it out too. But I also have to make clear that my ingoing purpose was not to quit nicotine, but to quit cigarettes - and these have worked. These are the only thing that have ever gotten me off the pack and separated me from my Zippo. I can't imagine going back.

This ain't right... this is an urban myth. There are "old-style" and "new" authentic atomizers from Joyetech, the "old style" usually, but not alwasy, that have the coil "ring"; none of the new style have the ring. The only real difference is the height of the coil/wick. Joyetech atomizers use a shorter (height) loop for the wick. But more importantly: what difference does it make? I've had genuine Joyetech atomizers fail in a couple of weeks and others last for several months - and I have yet to see a quantifiable difference in lifespan between Joyetech and non-Joyetech atomizers.

CLEAN THE WADDING. Especially if you're using a VG liquid. I find the atomizer coil/wick makes a depression in the cartridge material when the liquid has gunked the filling material. When that happens, the liquid cannot soak in and wick out. Take your tweezers, pull out the filler matierial, rinse it well in water as hot as you can stand it, blot it dry with paper towels (I prefer unscented Keenex because it shows the least moisture and I know it's really dry), shove it back in and fill the cartridge. It will only last a puff or two after cleaning before you have to add more liquid, but on the second re-fill/top-off it starts behaving again. AND ALSO: take long, soft puffs, not the short, sharp "barks" we made with cigarettes. Sharp hits can couse enough negative air pressure in the cartirdge that you are pulling the liquid out of the filling material faster than it can wick up from the bottom.

Someone mentioned that isopropyl alcohol can damage the adhesives in the atomizer - but I don't have a clue if that's true. Seems it should be an epoxy, in which case alcohol won't bother it. I use very hot water and just rinse it from the cartridge side and use a soft woll felt to clean the threads, and once each week I use a fine jewlery sonic cleaner to do all the atomizers at once. READ THE REVIEWS of sonic cleaners and hunt for a gentle one for fine jewelry. I also don't know if a cemmercial or an aggressive home-use sonic cleaner could damage an atomizer, but I figure why take a chance? The coil/wick is easy to clean - cleaning the threads by hand takes a bit more effort.