What’s up vapefam!
Sirrisc is back on this glorious sunny Wednesday with another review courtesy of FocalEcig.com!
I’ve been enjoying another dual coil RTA that looks a bit different from the others, the Silverplay!
Premise
If you’re anything like me and like your deals cheap yet good quality, you’ve probably used a clone before.
Now I know that some people are very anti-clone because it supposedly takes bussiness away from the authentic manufacturers. I know a lot of time, effort and money goes into development and prototyping. I know. You don’t have to tell me.
The RTA I’m reviewing today is a clone and apart from a few details you wouldn’t even be able to spot the difference.
It performs like an authentic, it was just made somewhere else.
Given the fact that you’re shopping around for a good deal, you’ve probably also checked out FocalEcig.com but if you haven’t, you really should.
They carry a lot of vaping gear that is worth checking out, organise groupbuys, and have one of the best customer reps I’ve ever come across by the name of Doris.
Doris is a sweetheart who goes out of her way to make sure you have a good experience with FocalEcig.com, and she manages to do so with a smile.
But I digress… let’s look at the Silverplay!
Specifications:
- 304 Stainless Steel
- Pyrex/glass tank with 3ml capacity.
- 22mm diameter
- Bottom fill screw
- 3 heatsink fins
- Adjustable 510 connection
- Laser etched logo on the steel part of the tank
- 4 airflow holes, fully configurable
- Lockable airflow ring
- 3 post design (though the website says 4 post, the centerpost is in fact one post with two holes)
- Dual coil design
- Huge juice channels
- Can take high VG liquids (Again, I tested up to 95%VG)
Unpacking
The packaging isn’t overly impressive but sufficient to protect the RTA until it lands in your mailbox.
A simple cardboard box with shiny silver lettering and a window to show off the RTA inside.
Inside of the cardboard box there’s a plastic insert with two compartiments, one with the RTA and another with accessories.
The RTA isn’t exactly secured in there but it’s packed in a plastic wrap and was completely free of scratches when I unpacked it so the packaging does its job.
The second compartiment contains 2 plastic bags, one with a pair of coils around silica wick (which is a tad useless in an RTA like this), and the other with a bunch of spare o-rings, spare screws and the illustrious blue screwdriver (yaaay, another one for the collection!)
Performance
I ran into one problem that made the Silverplay either leak or dryhit, which was being caused by the glass part of the tank being a little too short.
The way the tank is built in 3 parts means the glass is being held into place by the bottom barrel and the topcap with the heatfins.
Unfortunately this means they had to make a ridge in the steel barrel to place an o-ring on where the glass would rest on, and that o-ring was the problem.
When I used the original o-ring, the tank was leaking because the glass could move around and wasn’t sealing the tank completely.
I figured the o-ring wasn’t thick enough so I added a second o-ring, which kind of worked but that made filling the tank a pain in the ass.
It also meant the juice couldn’t move freely towards the bottom of the chimney and into my wicks, causing the dreaded dryhits. (45W of burnt cellucotton is no pleasant experience in the early morning, trust me!)
However being the smartass tinkerer I am, I went out to my local hardware store and found a thicker o-ring that would fit the barrel and now the Silverplay performs better than I ever imagined a clone would.
And when I say that, I mean it. This thing performs equal to the Cthulhu and the Goblin I reviewed earlier, if not even better than the Goblin.
Aesthetics
The Silverplay is a beauty in my opinion. The steel barrel and smaller glass section of the tank are sturdy and will withstand more punishment than any of the full glass tanks.
The Project Subohm logo etched into the barrel is clean and looks great, though it did raise questions when I set it down at a friends house.
On the bottom ring which locks the airflow ring into place there’s an etching that says Silverplay, or at least it should say that.
Mine says Slierplay with the V only half printed across the I. I guess that’s where one of the disadvantages of clones come into play, it’s not entirely perfect.
To be fair though, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because the performance isn’t affected.
Besides that little mistake, it looks perfectly machined and came out of the box ready to vape. I didn’t even have to clean it (though I did).
One thing to note, it does not come with a driptip, you’ll have to get one yourself. I’m using mine with a Vapelyfe driptip and it looks great. 
Building
If you read my previous RTA reviews you probably read that the Goblin had a fairly small deck to build on, and the Cthulhu was only slightly better.
The Silverplay falls into the Cthulhus territory, the deck is big enough to get a decent build going with a maximum inner diameter of 2.6mm.
Mind you it does come very close to the chimney then and it may short after a while of gunk building up on your coil. It’s that tight.
I’m currently running a 0.2ohm build in there which has an inner diameter of 2.4mm and it’s snug but a bit safer.
The postholes are plenty big to hold up to 0.6mm wire so you can put some thicker gauge builds in there too.
Pros and cons
Pro
- Big clouds
- Big juice channels
- Easy to build on
- 3ml tank
- Great flavor
- Sturdy, it can take a beating
- Very open airflow
- Looks great
- Lockable airflow ring
- Heatfins actually work to cool down the driptip
Con
- Doesn’t come with a driptip
- O-ring for the barrel/glass isn’t thick enough
- Etching has a misprint on the locking ring
- Steel barrel makes it harder to see how much juice is still in the tank
- Drinks juice like Belgians drink beer. Plenty and fast.
In conclusion
Despite being a clone the Silverplay performs like an authentic, the machining is close to perfect and it has only a few small issues.
The o-ring in the steel barrel needed replacing with a thicker o-ring, which is a bit of a shame because it does cripple the tank out-of-the-box.
Once it’s replaced, you’ll find that this is really one of the better RTAs out there.
It doesn’t just look the part, the performance is on par with the authentic RTAs I’ve been reviewing.
In terms of flavor it beats even the Goblin in my opinion, though it’s only by a very slight margin.
I will be pitting the Silverplay, the Cthulhu and the Goblin against each other in a photoreview soon-ish to see where the differences are.
Unfortunately my schedule has been rather busy lately so I can’t promise any timeframe on that.
Believe me when I say I would like to have it differently, but daily life has priority.
On that note I do have a bunch of things on the reviewqueue ranging from small boxmods to a ruggedised temp control tube mod.
Oh, and a juiceline with organically extracted flavors which should prove very interesting!
In closing I would like to thank Doris from FocalEcig.com for sending me this RTA for review.
And of course I would like to thank all of you for reading! Without an audience, I’m just a guy ranting about vapegear.
I’m always looking for more opportunities to review, so get in touch if you want me to review something from you! Juice, RTA, RDA, mods… it’s all welcome and I’m sure we can work something out!
#staycloudy !
SirRisc disappears in a pink lemonade scented cloud of vapor
