The information I'm going to present here is already readily available within these forums and from various sources like Rip Trippers, PBusardo on YouTube. I'd like to share what, in my personal opinion and preference, has been the perfect setup for my current clearos; two Totallly Wicked Tornado RCS's and two Totally Wicked Mini Tornado RCS's. I did this build on all four of them with only a slight variation that I will discuss below. I mention the VapeOnly BCC because these two devices and their atties are basically identical from what I've been able to gather. Furthermore, this should apply to most BCC style clearos but I'm going to share one or two tips that are specific to this model.
The bottom line, I built these with #500 SS mesh, a 30awg Kanthal A-1 Microcoil and a bit of cotton from a sterile cotton ball. 1.8ohm resistance because I'm currently running them on 650mah eGo batteries and I want to stay on the safe side.
I picked #500 mesh because I saw a test thread on ECF (sorry don't have the link to the thread nor the name of the user that did the tests at hand), that showed conclusive evidence that the tighter the mesh the better it's capillary action. The 30awg Kanthal was chosen because I could make 1.8ohm microcoils of the right size to fit inside these atties. The bit of cotton was added to end just to help with flooding prevention.
First I wrapped my coil in a 7/6 wrap around a 1.5mm allen wrench:
The coil ends up being about 2mm in overall diameter:
Next torch the hell out of the coil and squeeze it with a pair of tweezers to compress the coils together (standard procedure to make micro coils, or someone correct me if I'm wrong but this might be a nano coil):
Cut off a piece of mesh 32mm long, it should be about 20mm wide, but I trimmed it close to the end to be about as wide as the atty, the crucial measurement is that the piece be 32mm long, it could maybe be 1 or 2mm shorter but I manage to get my resulting wick through my coil just fine by twisting it in when I cut the mesh at 32mm:
This is probably the hardest part of the build. Roll the mesh as TIGHTLY as possible along the 32mm length of the mesh, try your hardest not to leave any sort of hole in the middle of it, make it as tight as it can go, if you can't twist the resulting mesh through the coil unwrap the mesh wick about half way and pull back on the rolled part to help tighten it as much as possible. It helps to keep rolling the wick on your fingers constantly in the same direction while squeezing it as hard as possible. It is also easy to get the roll started by doing the first turn using the allen key as a guide, then remove the key and pull back on the first two rolls to get going. The resulting wick is just a hair over 1.5mm thick. It will not go into the coil loosely, it will be tight, I pushed it through by twisting and pushing the coil from "behind" while twisting and pushing the mesh through the front of the coil. Once all the coils are over the SS mesh you'll be able to push the wick towards the middle using your finger nails. Note that I say pushing the wick, not pulling it. Remember, you don't want to separate the coils, if you do separate them, step back and re-torch and compress your coils together:
Now you have to torch the hell out of the entire coil/mesh assembly to oxidize it. Keep moving your torch over the entire coil and wick slowly for a minute to a minute and a half. You want to build up a good carbon deposit on your wick and coils to prevent shorts and metallic taste in your mouth when using your finished clearo. Go over over bit of the wick, from the front, back, into the tips, everywhere:
Your wick should look like this after it's completely oxidized. Note that you should take care not to move your coils over the wick at this point or you will remove the oxidation layer and create a short so be careful not to yank on your coil wires the wrong way. The coil will be tight on there so it shouldn't be THAT fragile in this respect:
Slide your silicone grommet over ONE of the wires pinching one wire to the outside of the atty's casing with it. The other wire will be pinched by the center pin once you push it through. Note that it helps here to pull tightly on your wires when you fold them over the sides so that the coil is snug. It also helps to hold the wires down with one finger while you press the silicone grommet and center pin so that the wires don't get pushed up through the atty and the coil stays tight:
Now correct the position of your coil and make sure it's right in the middle of the atty:
Test your coil's resistance. I used a regular Multi-Meter, first test your leads against each other to get the margin of error of your leads, mine meassured 0.2ohms. I need to substract this from the reading I'll get from the atty to get my true resistance. My atty read 1.5ohms - 0.2ohms = 1.3ohms. That was way to low to run on an eGo battery, I double checked my wrap and I had made a 6/5 wrap instead of a 7/6 wrap. The first picture on this post shows my wraps correctly. Also note that once mounted there will be maybe 0.1 - 0.2 additional ohms from the atty base itself so take a reading again when it's finally built. The third picture below shows my final resistance with the device fully built and filled 2.0 - 0.2 = 1.8ohms:
Fire your coil, it should fire from the middle outwards like shown below. If it fires from one of the sides first pulse fire the coil a few times, if it doesn't correct itself push off the first coil just a hair to correct the hotspot:
Trim off the excess wick enough to be within the inside portion of the silicone seal on the bottom of the base. I recommend you squeeze the tips of the wick together slightly to make sure that the miniature hole that will be left through the center of the wick is closed up:
Now roll a tiny piece of cotton and place it over the mesh wick. As stated in the beginning of this post I used a sterile cotton ball. Make sure your fingers are clean from contaminants and that your cotton ball comes from a nice clean sealed bag. I used to keep my cotton balls inside the bag with all my juices and that cotton ball absorbed all the smells from the various liquids and made my clearo taste funky when I was done. To help keep the flavor intact and so that oils from your finger tips (even after washing them) don't affect the resulting flavor I've taken to putting a drop of the e-liquid I'm going to be using this atty for on my finger tips to help roll the small piece of cotton tightly. Don't go overboard with the cotton, you only need enough to help make a seal between the atty post and the ss mesh wick. I tried doing this just with SS mesh wick but I can't fit an SS mesh wick large enough in there to form a complete seal. So I needed the small cotton piece to prevent flooding:
On these BCC's the atty doesn't screw down onto the base. It requires the force from the center air hole post in your tank to push the atty down onto the base to complete the seal between the atty, base and center air post. On the Mega sized tanks I found that I would still get an occasional flood so I did this to my Mega sized tanks. My Mini sized BCC's did NOT need this, I did it anyway and it made screwing down the tank against the base a very tight affair. Basically take another silicon cap from another atty and place it over the bottom cap, then push the skirt of the top one over the bottom one creating a larger overall cap. With this little trick the final seal of all the internal parts is much tighter and if I get a flood its because I didn't put enough cotton over my mesh wick:
Now fill your tank, screw your base on it and let the tank sit vertically at LEAST 10 - 15 minutes. BE PATIENT, resist the urge to vape it right away. Even with SS mesh and cotton it will take a while for everything to get properly saturated:
When you finally hit it the first time, if you did everything right and you made sure your cotton piece was clean and fresh, you should get a flavor slap in the face and a pretty good cloud. To me this build was all about getting the best flavor out of my current setups and in my opinion, it delivered in spades! More so than just running the same kind of coil with straight cotton and lightyears beyond what the stock atties provided. My final objective was also to build a very long lasting coil. I only just built these today, but from what I've gathered around ECF and YouTube I've seen microcoil over ss mesh builds last months with only some dry burning and a dunk in some hot water on a weekly basis, replacing the cotton bit in the process. I'll report back on this tread as my coils age.
You could build these with lower resistance, each wrap you take off seems to be around 0.3ohms less. I would be warry about going to very low resistances with these clearos as the piece of mesh is sitting very close to the silicon seal on the base. I'm not sure how hot the actual wick gets but I reckon that burning off some of that silicon will foul up your juice really quick and give a nasty burnt rubber taste in your mouth. Feel free to test the limits if you'd like. I might once I get my next vapemail, I'll be receiving a Nemesis Clone and a Kayfun Lite this week so here's to being ready to build that sucker once it gets to my door!
Vape on!
The bottom line, I built these with #500 SS mesh, a 30awg Kanthal A-1 Microcoil and a bit of cotton from a sterile cotton ball. 1.8ohm resistance because I'm currently running them on 650mah eGo batteries and I want to stay on the safe side.
I picked #500 mesh because I saw a test thread on ECF (sorry don't have the link to the thread nor the name of the user that did the tests at hand), that showed conclusive evidence that the tighter the mesh the better it's capillary action. The 30awg Kanthal was chosen because I could make 1.8ohm microcoils of the right size to fit inside these atties. The bit of cotton was added to end just to help with flooding prevention.
First I wrapped my coil in a 7/6 wrap around a 1.5mm allen wrench:
The coil ends up being about 2mm in overall diameter:
Next torch the hell out of the coil and squeeze it with a pair of tweezers to compress the coils together (standard procedure to make micro coils, or someone correct me if I'm wrong but this might be a nano coil):
Cut off a piece of mesh 32mm long, it should be about 20mm wide, but I trimmed it close to the end to be about as wide as the atty, the crucial measurement is that the piece be 32mm long, it could maybe be 1 or 2mm shorter but I manage to get my resulting wick through my coil just fine by twisting it in when I cut the mesh at 32mm:
This is probably the hardest part of the build. Roll the mesh as TIGHTLY as possible along the 32mm length of the mesh, try your hardest not to leave any sort of hole in the middle of it, make it as tight as it can go, if you can't twist the resulting mesh through the coil unwrap the mesh wick about half way and pull back on the rolled part to help tighten it as much as possible. It helps to keep rolling the wick on your fingers constantly in the same direction while squeezing it as hard as possible. It is also easy to get the roll started by doing the first turn using the allen key as a guide, then remove the key and pull back on the first two rolls to get going. The resulting wick is just a hair over 1.5mm thick. It will not go into the coil loosely, it will be tight, I pushed it through by twisting and pushing the coil from "behind" while twisting and pushing the mesh through the front of the coil. Once all the coils are over the SS mesh you'll be able to push the wick towards the middle using your finger nails. Note that I say pushing the wick, not pulling it. Remember, you don't want to separate the coils, if you do separate them, step back and re-torch and compress your coils together:
Now you have to torch the hell out of the entire coil/mesh assembly to oxidize it. Keep moving your torch over the entire coil and wick slowly for a minute to a minute and a half. You want to build up a good carbon deposit on your wick and coils to prevent shorts and metallic taste in your mouth when using your finished clearo. Go over over bit of the wick, from the front, back, into the tips, everywhere:
Your wick should look like this after it's completely oxidized. Note that you should take care not to move your coils over the wick at this point or you will remove the oxidation layer and create a short so be careful not to yank on your coil wires the wrong way. The coil will be tight on there so it shouldn't be THAT fragile in this respect:
Slide your silicone grommet over ONE of the wires pinching one wire to the outside of the atty's casing with it. The other wire will be pinched by the center pin once you push it through. Note that it helps here to pull tightly on your wires when you fold them over the sides so that the coil is snug. It also helps to hold the wires down with one finger while you press the silicone grommet and center pin so that the wires don't get pushed up through the atty and the coil stays tight:
Now correct the position of your coil and make sure it's right in the middle of the atty:
Test your coil's resistance. I used a regular Multi-Meter, first test your leads against each other to get the margin of error of your leads, mine meassured 0.2ohms. I need to substract this from the reading I'll get from the atty to get my true resistance. My atty read 1.5ohms - 0.2ohms = 1.3ohms. That was way to low to run on an eGo battery, I double checked my wrap and I had made a 6/5 wrap instead of a 7/6 wrap. The first picture on this post shows my wraps correctly. Also note that once mounted there will be maybe 0.1 - 0.2 additional ohms from the atty base itself so take a reading again when it's finally built. The third picture below shows my final resistance with the device fully built and filled 2.0 - 0.2 = 1.8ohms:
Fire your coil, it should fire from the middle outwards like shown below. If it fires from one of the sides first pulse fire the coil a few times, if it doesn't correct itself push off the first coil just a hair to correct the hotspot:
Trim off the excess wick enough to be within the inside portion of the silicone seal on the bottom of the base. I recommend you squeeze the tips of the wick together slightly to make sure that the miniature hole that will be left through the center of the wick is closed up:
Now roll a tiny piece of cotton and place it over the mesh wick. As stated in the beginning of this post I used a sterile cotton ball. Make sure your fingers are clean from contaminants and that your cotton ball comes from a nice clean sealed bag. I used to keep my cotton balls inside the bag with all my juices and that cotton ball absorbed all the smells from the various liquids and made my clearo taste funky when I was done. To help keep the flavor intact and so that oils from your finger tips (even after washing them) don't affect the resulting flavor I've taken to putting a drop of the e-liquid I'm going to be using this atty for on my finger tips to help roll the small piece of cotton tightly. Don't go overboard with the cotton, you only need enough to help make a seal between the atty post and the ss mesh wick. I tried doing this just with SS mesh wick but I can't fit an SS mesh wick large enough in there to form a complete seal. So I needed the small cotton piece to prevent flooding:
On these BCC's the atty doesn't screw down onto the base. It requires the force from the center air hole post in your tank to push the atty down onto the base to complete the seal between the atty, base and center air post. On the Mega sized tanks I found that I would still get an occasional flood so I did this to my Mega sized tanks. My Mini sized BCC's did NOT need this, I did it anyway and it made screwing down the tank against the base a very tight affair. Basically take another silicon cap from another atty and place it over the bottom cap, then push the skirt of the top one over the bottom one creating a larger overall cap. With this little trick the final seal of all the internal parts is much tighter and if I get a flood its because I didn't put enough cotton over my mesh wick:
Now fill your tank, screw your base on it and let the tank sit vertically at LEAST 10 - 15 minutes. BE PATIENT, resist the urge to vape it right away. Even with SS mesh and cotton it will take a while for everything to get properly saturated:
When you finally hit it the first time, if you did everything right and you made sure your cotton piece was clean and fresh, you should get a flavor slap in the face and a pretty good cloud. To me this build was all about getting the best flavor out of my current setups and in my opinion, it delivered in spades! More so than just running the same kind of coil with straight cotton and lightyears beyond what the stock atties provided. My final objective was also to build a very long lasting coil. I only just built these today, but from what I've gathered around ECF and YouTube I've seen microcoil over ss mesh builds last months with only some dry burning and a dunk in some hot water on a weekly basis, replacing the cotton bit in the process. I'll report back on this tread as my coils age.
You could build these with lower resistance, each wrap you take off seems to be around 0.3ohms less. I would be warry about going to very low resistances with these clearos as the piece of mesh is sitting very close to the silicon seal on the base. I'm not sure how hot the actual wick gets but I reckon that burning off some of that silicon will foul up your juice really quick and give a nasty burnt rubber taste in your mouth. Feel free to test the limits if you'd like. I might once I get my next vapemail, I'll be receiving a Nemesis Clone and a Kayfun Lite this week so here's to being ready to build that sucker once it gets to my door!
Vape on!
