I would trim the tails at least down to less than 50% but I have gone as low as 15% and you think in your mind that it’s going to leak but it won’t! It’s so great like that.
The G2 will be a little easier than the Griffin. Just pull your rayon through and fluff up the tails. Tuck about 15-25% behind the wick ring and then cut off the rest to the coil.
In my experience, as a wick it’s very forgiving. It’s so good it doesn’t matter if you underfill, it’s impossible to overfill. The lifetime is what I’m trying to get people to understand. It lasts months of continuous use. Your coils get crusty. And the flavor is like day 3 of rayon all that time. I don’t mean to whore myself around, but if your interested:
I’m on the original and new rayon threads over at ecf. I love the stuff. Paid right about $12 for 500 feet from Sally’s, so I’d better ;). No break in, much better flavor, lasts longer than cotton wicks, what’s not to love?
I’m not going to lie, I find rayons flavor superior to hemp. That’s for the first 3 days. While rayon deteriorates continually afterward in flavor quality…Hemp just stares your crazy mod and build in the face. But again, rayon does taste great. Hemp is just eternal. Seriously, your coil is the limit. Claptons die first.
Ok, so I saw a random post about using Cellucotton from Sallys and the replies were pretty awesome, so naturally I went and got some. Two days later (today) I had watched a couple of YT videos, thought I knew enough and pulled a pretty nice wick through. To my surprise, it was freaking nasty! So me, being slightly stubborn, looked up more info: do you need to boil it? Does it need to be primed? Etc… after a couple of tanks of “meh” juice today, I was like “dangit, I’m gonna make this work!!”. So I washed my hands really well (very important!) pulled a new wick and turned the watts waaaaay down on my Asmodus Minikin. Guess what!!! Two or three pulls and I.FREAKING.LOVE.IT!!! Very long way of saying, keep at it! I knew that with the juices I’ve made (lots of potential but not lots of patience) but I really thought I was pretty good at wicking already. Just goes to show you there is a LOT to learn about so many things with this hobby!
Well, I had sent via PM some of the following information to Kinnikinnick, but thought I would share it with the public forum. So for what it is worth:
Please note:I am MTL / 100% NET, so YMMV… I believe that is also true for Kinnikinnick, but you will have to ask him about his use cases. I only have been able to make rayon work on drippers, I can not get it to wick correctly on the Kayfuns (or other for that matter any other) tanks. I stick with the true Koh Gen Do Cotton, it works the best for me on the tanks. I did have to go through a few brands of cotton before finding a source for genuine actual Japanese KohGenDo. Inferior cotton is re-branded as KohGenDo by many different fast buck types, and a lot of it is garbage. I have heard many people say “cotton is cotton” but I have found that is not true.
Make sure the KohGenDo you have is genuine… It is actually knocked off and much is rebranded very cheap cotton then sold as KohGenDo on Fasttech, Gearbest and the like !! But the labels are not correct, like all China knock-offs the label is always the giveaway of the fake.
I got curious abt the various wicking. Here is a micrograph of the rayon sample you sent, and the rayon I have in stock, and my KohGenDo.
Note the much higher fibre density per mm of the KGD. Also note the finer fibre diameter on the KGD. a casual visual observation of the two rayon samples under bright sunlight and a 5x hand loupe reveals a slight darker and more uniform arrangement and slightly high fibre density of your rayon sample compared to mine. I think it is a minor and insignificant difference that can be disregarded as anything meaningful in “vape” terms.
I am sure the rayon is perfectly fine to vape on, but of course I promised to never go ‘chemistry head’ again on all this, but there is a lot of various manufacturing techniques and methods for making rayon fibre. Actually there are hundreds of them, rayon is quite the little piece of ‘boutique chemistry’. Industrial chemists just love something that they can tweek and twist and get a nice variance of end products, each with slightly different properties and therefore each one can fit slightly different applications. It always ‘makes the boss happy’ to have more stuff to sell on the products list !. A happy boss is a happy industrial chemist Just so long as there is no organophosphate plasticizers, then we are happy vapers. Hummm
Yeah… I’m kind of a hybrid MTL / LH vaper, depending upon certain scenarios… and yes, I am a 100% NET juice guy.
I found that I didn’t have an issue with rayon in tanks. This maybe partly due to the variables of 1.) coil size (2.5 to 3 mm ID), 2.) using just enough rayon for an almost squeaky fit in the coil, or 3.) making sure I elongated the fibers within the rayon wick by performing a slight tug on the full length of the rayon wick prior to installation in the coil.
Many people “comb” the rayon wick tails before juicing them up and installing them on the deck floor or juice channels… I’m not that picky about the process; small tug on the rayon wick prior to install in the coil is good enough for me.
But hey… this hobby and lifestyle is all about making it work for the end user!
I was quite sad when I ran out my stock of wicking material bestowed upon me by @DarthVapor … it’s not every day that someone shares their supply of spun mane hair of a virgin female Unicorn. It was great stuff… however, he didn’t tell me that my lifespan would be reduced by 6 months for every half inch of wicking material used. Needless to say… I never took him up on his offering of his “special” Unicorn Blood ejuice… enough damage has been done already… Thanks buddy!
i love Rayon and use it sometime, but here’s my own method of wicking with cotton pads (i use Muji) - let’s call it the Shredder method (not related to Ninja Turtles), or call it TVS method if you like.
i tried SCOTTISH, and the regular way, but when i started doing this technique, i got much better performance from the wick (judging by how fast i go thru a tank) and much better flavor (most important for me) - so got hooked. pls try this on an existing setup when you re-wick, so you can compare - Alert: this method needs a bit more patience
i cut the Muji pad in half (across the thread lines) to make it easier to manage
split the half in 2 layers - we only need one - thickness would be down to around 1.0mm or so - remove outer (skin) layer if you don’t like it (i keep it, doesn’t make a difference here for me)
using scissors i cut thin strips (this time along the thread lines) of around 1-2mm width (yeah, they will look like what you get when you put a piece of paper in the office shredder)
carefully take few strips and roll them (from one end) together between fingers (don’t compress the rest of the “band”). for a 2.5mm ID coil, i usually need 5 strips, 3.0mm i may need 6. and so on… if when inserting them in the coil they feel too much, take away one strip and try again - i would end up using much less cotton than i normally would.
insert that rolled end into the coil, pull to adjust, cut the rolled piece, and you end up with a wick that is fluffy “inside” and outside the coil - i think it’s this part that makes the performance better. the cotton inside the coil is not packed - capillary action is better than when jamming a relatively “collapsed” piece of cotton inside the coil like what i did before, even in SCOTTISH, we still don’t have these “air channels” inside the wick like when i do it this way. my feel is, when i vape this wick, the air inside the wick helps cook the juice and maximize taste and i get more dense vapor.
finish wicking as usual, prime the coil/wick, and “vape on it”
_this SHREDDER method has been working great for me so far. i use it now most of the time - so Engine Mini, Griffin 25, and even the Pharaoh (hey, no leaking) when it’s done right.
i hope you may find improvement with this technique. Please share results with me - very curious to know - and it’s a lot more fun when i’m not the only one enjoying this discovery
should i put some photos - hope I managed to explain it well. didn’t want to start a new thread and thought the crowd here would be the ones with the patience to test a more elaborate and “different” wicking style
happy wicking