Cloning or mimicking disposable vapes with nicotine salt in pod systems

E-liquids Recipes
1

Hey y’all!

I’m a total newbie but this forum is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

So for context I’m in Australia. I resisted vaping on and off but the taxes here made smoking incredibly unrealistic to continue doing - especially for a student like me.
A lot of the head shops and tobacconists around here sell those nasty disposable vapes (imitation/fake HQDs, I’m yet to see any Puff bars etc). Well, I tried one and bang, hopelessly addicted. Which was fine initially but at $15 a pop for 300-600 puffs, that adds up. Plus I shudder to think about what happens to them after I throw them away.
I loved the fact that as the disposables use nicotine salt, there’s no heavy back-of-the-throat hit like you get with freebase. The flavours are strong and delicious. Iced peach, r u kitten me?

So I started looking into how to replicate the effect with a salt nicotine juice in a pod system. At first I dropped like $20 on a Suorin Drop and $50 on a few Zap! nicotine salt juice flavours. It was ok, but the flavour wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted it to be, and the pre-mixed juices have a weak ass amount of nic, so it was pretty disappointing. The Drop also leaked and spat, which were my pet peeves from back in the day when I freebase vaped.
So I grabbed an OG Caliburn Uwell, a bottle of VG, a bottle of PG, some nicotine salts (in PG), and a bunch of Flavour West concentrates. Can’t be too hard, right?

I was wrong. Theoretically, I know nicotine salt juices in pod systems perform best at a 50/50 ratio of VG and PG. But how ⁸do those proportions translate? Do you take into account the amount of PG included in the salt nic additive? What about the PG or VG in the flavour? Do the flavours even have PG or VG in them (i assume they do?)?.

I want to test these flavours and the mixes before I add the nicotine.
Would the best way to do this be:

  • mix up the vg/pg that I have to create a 50/50 mix, add the correct proportion of nicotine salts to create unflavoured juice, then
  • have a seperate bottle of 50/50 VG and PG, which I withdraw and use to test flavours in small amounts, noting the amounts of flavours added to the mix to reproduce in larger quantities?
    Thanks so much for any help you can provide!
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in order to figure out what you like, you will need to know your final vg/pg ratio whether or not your testing with or without nicotine. Have you found the create a recipe, and the master list of flavors? Find your flavors in the master list and most of them will list if they are pg or vg based. When you add flavors creating a recipe it will keep track of the pg and vg amounts and produce a list showing the vg/pg ratio for the final recipe. When you enter nicotine you get to set the strength and pg and/or vg percentage. Use the recipe calculator for everything you decide to make, be it a flavor test sample with or without nicotine, or a pre_mix base of pg/vg with or without nicotine. The only way to accurately mix to a specific target of pg/vg/nicotine is to mix everything seperate.
I always mix using a premix base of 80%vg/20%pg with 8% nicotine. My final percentage values and ratios will always vary depending on how much flavoring I add. Most flavors I use are pg based so I usually end up with close to ~70%vg/30%pg and ~7.3% nicotine. That is all close enough for me that I don’t notice the difference from one mix to the next. I do it for the convenience.

I hope that helps you.

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