Anyone heat glass vapes with a home made heat coil? Just wrap the sucker in nichrome and hook it up to a power supply with alligator clips or solder? I assume if you pick the right resistance wire and put in the right voltage and current you can get close enough to the desired temperature. Doesn’t bakx and RBT Splinter work like this? Anyone got pictures of the inside of one to show what it looks like?
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It’s possible to make your own DIY coils. Please be always careful, watch out for shortcuts and fire hazards and make sure you fully understand the limitations of your system.
I make my own heater coils for a while now. I use stainless steal heating wire, if you don’t find it in the right geometry, you can cut your desired shape from a stainless steal sheet
(a wire can be quite unstable sometimes its good to have some mechanical stability).
it’s possible to use other materials, make sure you check the temperature coefficient of the resistance (tells you how the resistance changes over the temperature) and design the system accordingly. I choose stainless steal because i think it gives off less flavor then other metals but that should be up to discussion. To be honest i have no clue why metals release smell at high temps but i believe its a thing.
You can use alligator clips and a bench power supply that’s how i started as well, but its likely you will produce some shortcuts when using it. I recommend to at least get a bench power supply with a current limiter, where you can set the max current as a safety measure. Make sure you have a lower resistance at the alligator clips to not heat them up (for example by folding and twisting the heating wire at the ends). Solder is not a good idea to have anywhere near heat due to toxic fumes of soldering flux and potential lead if you grab some old solder.
The set wattage will correlate to the temperature you get for a given room temp if there is no wind at all.
The bakx works like that as well, that was a huge inspiration to me. I think there is a Troy and Jerry episode where you get a look inside on the coil.
To me the power bench alligator clip thing is not a good solution, that’s why i am currently developing a PCB to control my own heater coils.
Here is a picture of some early prototype, sorry you can’t really see the coil, i don’t have a better picture right now.
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I’ve seen people using stainless wire but I’ll have to look into it more. Thanks for responding. With the bench power supply requirement it’s looks like a premade PID and coil setup would be cost competitive, but for a custom build I guess there might be an advantage to the DIY approach. I’ll have to keep considering this.
You can be cheaper than a coil and a PID setup with DIY.
I started using this powersupply for 55€:
and then i switched to this Buck converter module for 4€:
https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005007015601997.html
but you still need a 12V power supply that can supply enough current (you can get it for 20€ or so).
The disadvantage in running the coil with a set power is that you have longer heat up time compared to a PID system.
The reason for me to build it myself is not to make it cheaper, but to be able to run it on battery.
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I’ve made a few DiY G43, glass symphony, highlighter, whippie and SSV baller style vapes with different low voltage heating elements, ecig heating wire, halogen bulbs and soldering iron elements in the middle of the balls. Which I usually power with a PWM controller and a laptop PSU or battery pack, or the soldering iron pid.
You can buy the Highlighter as a kit or Elev8 glass sell their glass heater covers and other bits to help get you started
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Thanks I’d heard of the highlighter but not the other types, I’ll look into them! I think working off an existing project is probably the right learning approach I should try.
You should think of whether you want to get this close loop temperature controlled, or just temp controlled by thermal equilibrium.
Basically, in a log, or Highlighter, G43, SSV/DBV/LSV, Atlas, Halo(Z), VaporBrothers, etc, you just have a heating element that you apply a fixed, low amount of power to. This will over time raise the temperature of whatever you are heating to a temperature where the heat lost to the environment is equal to the heat going in. At that point, an equilibrium is reached and the temp will stay constant (until you begin to draw).
Contrast this with a ball vape or enail, which has a coil with a thermocouple inside of it. The thermocouple allows you to sense the actual temperature that you are at. So when the vape is cold, it can apply the max power, and when it is hot, it can apply less. This greatly shortens heatup time. Also, when you begin to draw and the temp drops, more power is applied to compensate and correct for this temperature “error”. This requires something called a temperature controller or PID (named after the algorithm used - Proportional, Integral, Derivative), to do the math and control the amount of power applied. You could use a prebuilt PID or make your own temp controller.
as Jonas points out the main difference is heat up time. With a high-mass device like a ball vape, the heat up time with just power control can be very long, as all that mass needs to be heat soaked. To make things worse, the closer you get to the final equilibrium temperature, the slower it rises.
To answer some of your other questions:
- BakX is temperature controlled by TCR - temp coefficient of resistance - another way of sensing temp and forming a feedback loop.
- Splinter I believe was either power controlled or TCR controlled, not sure which. An unregulated vape is a different beast altogether, where the temperature is regulated by power applied, and draw speed.
Definitely get a bench power supply if you’re going to tinker. You can’t really solder to nichrome anyway, and alligator clips may get pretty hot. Crimping to copper wire is the standard way of dealing with it.
I can definitely recommend starting with a log, but it depends on what your goals are. Portable? desktop? approximate load size? Session or on demand? Glass or no glass? Heat up time OK or not? And be careful, you might end up selling them haha!
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The vape would be desktop/at home. Load size .1g-.2g. I prefer glass and a quicker heat up.
I like the loading convenience and air flow of 16mm OD glass, which is a TM2 stem. It might be convenient to design around that since there’s already a big aftermarket around that vape, including WPAs that could be used as a bowl on a water pipe.
Let’s talk about heater design, you mentioned in a message to me 19mm male-jointed glass might be too narrow to use with a halogen bulb, (typically 19mm joints are on 16mm OD glass tubing). What if I forget about the 19mm male joint and use glass tubing that has an ID of 16mm so I could slide a TM2 stem into it? Would that still work with the basic highlighter design? Of course now that I’m looking, I don’t see any boro tubing with exactly a 16mm ID (16.4mm is available: 20mm OD x 1.8mm wall) but I do see quartz tubing with a 16mm ID (20x16mm). I suppose I could make a spacer sleeve out of 0.2mm stainless steel for inside the end of the heater tube if the 16.4mm boro tubing is too loose.
What are your thoughts on this? Can a halogen log be designed to heat up faster using a PID or TCR, or is something like a ceramic cartridge element better for that?
OK cool. Your needs are a little bigger than mine, my standard DIY is a log taking a 12mm OD glass stem with 9mm ID.
19mm male would be a bit narrow for adding balls, but it could be done with a G4 bulb (8mm OD) and 2mm balls. Or no balls at all and a GY6.35 (10mm OD). You can get 19mm joints on 17/2 tubing as well (13mm ID). A heater cartridge gets you more room for balls at 6mm OD. For reference the highlighter uses an 18mm FEMALE joint, which is 22mm ID and typically 1.8 or 2mm wall, so that’s a bigger ~18mm ID. That gives plenty of room for 3mm balls which are sort of the standard, with a larger GY6.35 bulb.
I really like the idea of using straight glass tubing. With standard glass tolerances you should expect maybe +/- 0.3mm on size anyway, so 16.4mm ID might be just right to fit every time. You don’t need a 100% perfect seal anyway. The 16mm ID will open things up a lot compared to the 12mm minimum ID of the 19mm joint. Would also be able to use a standard 19/26 as the stem instead. Also consider flame polishing which will tend to curl inwards and reduce the ID. If you cut and polish your own tubing you can do it lightly. That can be a bit tricky. Would be great to use TM stems since there are a lot of good options.
I also haven’t found a great way of retaining balls from the bottom. You need something that is a high heat electrical insulator safe for airpath. The Highlighter uses a ceramic bulb socket and O ring to do this. I believe it would just work with the 16mm ID tube, but the airflow is a bit restricted through those.
If a perfect seal is very important to you, a standard Highlighter build is right in your size range. You pack the male joint, using a 1/2" or 12mm basket screen. You might be familiar with those from some TM stems. Gets you more room for balls and you can use a 19/19 or 19/14 male to male adapter for water pipe use. Tapered fit means that you get 100% no air leakage. But again, I find that this is not so important.
On halogen PID, I have done that once before. One annoying problem is, you don’t want the halogen to blink or flicker. The standard ball vape PIDs have a cycle about 2 seconds long, so the bulb would be blinking on for some percentage of 2 seconds, which would be really annoying. So you need to run the PWM at a higher frequency, where it won’t visibly flicker. But that puts you up into the audio range, where you can hear a buzzing or whine! So now you really are going to want to run it at 20kHz or faster. That way, you won’t hear anything. You will have to build your own PID or dimmer controller to do this. But if you do this it will greatly decrease heat up time, from about 15 minutes to more like 1, and it will also help with getting more power out when you start drawing. The halogen can be very responsive. With a heater cartridge you can use a more standard PID, and you won’t hear noise or see flicker.
TCR won’t work for halogen, as the resistance of the bulb is related to the filament temp, not to the temp of the glass or surroundings. And the filament temp is white hot.
Happy to elaborate on any of this but I think that’s enough for one post lol.
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Hey thanks I really appreciate the detailed reply! That info about PIDs on halogen is clutch. It makes the ceramic cartridge heater a lot more attractive, although I like the idea of the bulb too and building or programming a PID would be an interesting project.
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Bulbs are fun and I like the glow they have. I think they may have some benefits for a traditional log with maintaining even heat. With balls I think cartridge may be the way to go. The 6x20mm ones for 3d printers are convenient and have a stainless steel shell.
Building/programming a PID is indeed a fun project. There are also controller algorithm options other than PID. You would need a way to sense temp, a way to apply the PID or other algorithm, and a way to modulate the power. In my project I used a k-type thermocouple with a MAX31855K thermocouple interface, an STM32 microcontroller, and a MOSFET with PWM. I only ever built this prototype though.
Haven’t tried a standard prebuilt PID but would be interested to. They have some that can run on 12-24v DC that might be convenient.
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What are we doing for power supplies with log vapes?
Bench supply?
Cheapo 8-10A variable DC power supply?
Project box, DC 12V 8.3A slim transformer, buck booster module, and all the jacks and wiring?
Anyone know of a reliable variable DC power supply? (Not bench power supply type)
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I used a bench supply for a while. All those cheap variable DC supplies use a potentiometer directly in the feedback loop of the buck converter, to adjust the voltage. This is hard to adjust precisely and also susceptible to drifting over time.
The best solution I have found is to use a small buck/boost module which has a lab-style interface. This is immune to the drift issue and also easy to adjust in voltage in small increments, which is handy, and they display the wattage which is more linear with temp than voltage. The ones I have gotten are panel-mount, so I put them in a 3D-printed case, but you could use a project box too. I use them with an external AC adapter, with a 24V input. But you can use almost any supply, it just needs to have enough voltage to have some margin over the log’s voltage requirement. You can find tons of 20V adapters for old laptops etc and reuse them. This is still a lot more compact than a lab supply.
Dual unit I made. The module is called SK60S.
Credit for this concept goes to Red Eye Flight Control which introduced this concept and called it the Advanced Telemetry Module or ATM.
Also 12V 8.3A is pretty high power for a log, mine use less than 2A.
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That’s a nice double setup. I have begun the process of building a vape of my own design, I ordered a few things to see if I could modify them to fit together. If so then I’ll proceed to ordering more parts or abandoning it for something premade. I’m going to try a 50W G4 halogen, sort of a modified highlighter design.
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Currently working on a ceramic vape with 3mm ceramic balls and a hand wound inner coil. Going good so far 
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Looking good so far! What did you make the coil out of?
I received a piece of stainless steel tubing and had intended to slide a glass mouthpiece into it, but the dimensions of the ss tube was not accurate to the listing and the parts didn’t fit together. The wall thickness of the ss tubing was overkill too, which I didn’t know until I got it in hand. Now I’m going to send that tubing back and get a different piece to try out. If these tubes also have imprecise diameters it looks like a manual adjustable reamer will be necessary if I really want to get this to work.
Thanks 
I made the coil from Kanthal A1 wire.
A lot of science happening tonight. I just tried a coil and enclosure half the size at only 6.5 Volts, which smacked really hard 
About your metal and glass tubes, is it important that they fit tight? There will always be tolerances, also both parts expand differently under heat. Can’t there be a little gap?
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That does look like it’s working well! Where do you source the ball media?
When I started this thread I was interested in making a coil to wrap around my quartz cap, but I’ve since switched my thinking to making a halogen log style vape that uses tinymight stems. I have a TM2 stem that I was messing around with, putting the heater from my 18mm quartz cap on it, I like the diameter and the glass screen. I should just buy one of the many vapes that are already available, but I can’t help myself I like tinkering.
Yeah there can be a looser fit between the ss tube and the glass, but the glass is supposed to slide inside the ss tube and the diameter of the ss tube was too small for the glass to fit in by a pretty large amount. In theory the metal will expand more than the glass and loosen up when it’s hot but it should still fit together when it’s cold. I made a mock up of what I’m thinking, the two wood bodies show potential different power jack placement (based on off-the-shelf 2x2 S4S oak boards). The cylinders would use aluminum tubing as the body, showing different diameters and lengths, the taller wider one could use a DC surface mount jack, the other would require a pigtail jack or cable wired in. I want it to be small so I’m leaning toward aluminum body with pig tail.
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I have dealt with that issue as well.
The metric seamless stainless steel tubing I have bought has generally been pretty accurate on inner diameter and roundness. Maybe +/- 0.2mm. I use 0.5mm wall ss tube. The glass straws and glass tubing is probably about the same tolerance. The problem is that the tubing and glass generally comes in whole mm sizes, so you end up having to use the same dimension of glass tubing OD and stainless tubing ID, with no clearance built in, lest you have a gap of 1mm which is too large for my liking. If you are simply unlucky and the glass is larger than nominal, and tubing smaller than nominal, it won’t fit, of course.
One way to get around this, and what I did for a while, is to simply “bin” the glass. Within every batch there is a slight variation, if you pick the smaller glass which is e.g. .1-.3mm undersized, it will fit. Too close, though, and thermal expansion can be an issue, where the glass will fit cold but stick when it gets hot, as you alluded to. Glass can be cheap enough to do this, and you can always use the extra straws for their intended purpose.
I ultimately solved this by getting a chucking reamer which was 0.2mm larger than the nominal size of the tubing, which for me is 12.2mm. I will ream the top 1/4" or so of the tubing to 12.2mm, and this is enough to fit almost all of the glass I have tried, with the 0.2mm nominal clearance. I also experimented with flaring the tubing slightly using a steel ball and an arbor press, which works OK but gives a looser fit. With the reamer, the hole is a nice cylinder, so you get a good tight fit but loose enough to remove.
A perfect seal is not the most important thing in the world when building these, but it is aesthetically nice. The reamer solution has been going well for me.
Mockups are looking cool. I did my first ones using the 2x2 S4S as well. It got a little small for me. The aluminum tube idea is cool but I wonder if it will provide enough insulation.
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Yes, it works great, I got real lit last night. Especially the 6.5V version kicks serious ass.
For the ball media I use ceramic polishing balls which I got from goldsmith supplies.
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