Spaced coil vs contact coil

I’ll bet! They do seem to work wonderfully for all of my three MTL tanks at 2 Ohms (ish) running at 8-14W (Siren, Ubertoot, Kayfun) I am perhaps remiss for not mentioning this in my original post… My apologies for the confusion this may have caused… (There’s quite a bit to this vaping business isn’t there?)

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Man, there are so many variables in this hobby it’s hard to reconcile them all, ever haha. Maybe the lower power needs to be concentrated in a smaller area…id buy that argument, probably. Seems plausible.

And getting just one of those variables ‘wrong’ can spoil the entire (subjective) experience. My first vape (Joyetech AIO Pro) tasted like crap and hurt my throat with both coils that came with it. Then I read that Claptons produced great flavour, but the flavours were muted. It wasn’t until they came out with the 1.0 Ohm coil that it finally tasted ok at 7/10. For perspective, this is compared to Kayfun/ Siren/ Ubertoot/ Serpent Mini/ Bellus at 10/10, but only with the ‘right’ coils, wick, and Watts. No wonder so many smokers trying to quit with vaping go back to smoking…

But the good news for any smokers in this boat, frustrated that your last hope of quitting is shit, is that you’ve found THE best vaping information and nicest people on the web right here on this forum. In my earlier searches for better flavour out of my pre-made juice and coils, I kept skipping all these links to e-liquid-recipes thinking ‘I don’t want recipes’. It wasn’t until I DID want recipes that I found shed-loads more and better information than what I’d found before, and lovely people prepared to help. So if the starter kit, or the 0.1 Ohm/ 300W mod main stream says is the bee’s-knees isn’t working for you, this is the place to be…

Concentrate the power…good call. I’d buy that too…

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@paingawd Hmmmmm, I dry burn like a forest fire. Going to do more research on this. The following did catch my eye…

Several studies have shown that oxidation of chromium can occur at similar temperature of a dry burn process [a, b, c]. Although these studies show the formation of a less harmful chromium oxide, Cr2O3, we cannot exclude the formation of hexavalent chromium.

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I always rinse or it’s a mess

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I never use temp control so I don’t want to speak on that, but I find spaced Coils to lack a bit. I get a better vape if there neatly together.

No problem with them personally, I just live to see a neatly installed braid, slentre,fralien.

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I think a lot of that is what’s going on between the ears… I’ve heard a lot of people say the opposite as well but I personally don’t notice much difference in taste between spaced or tight coils.
The difference for me is that a spaced coil doesn’t get any hot spots and my wicks tend to have a longer lifespan when they’re spaced. Tight coils, even in TC, tend to get too hot in the middle of the coil and eventually scorch my cotton. Properly spaced coils never have that issue in my builds.

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I’ve played around with all kinds of coils in the last three years (shout-out to Dan_the_Man - his coils rock!) and after all is said and done have settled in lately on boring spaced 24 gauge round wire (kanthal or SS316, sometimes NiCr80 spaced coils. (when I am not using exotics). I’m not going to get into the taste factor cause I don’t really notice much of a difference whether they are spaced or contact…but I did want to make one point. I have found that upon dry burning & quenching to clean my dirty coils they for one get dirty much faster and more so don’t taste as good as when they are new and not dry burned. I am not so much afraid of the warnings of dry burning coils (Konstantinos Farsalinos states this is not good for you) but there is a noticable drop off in flavor after doing so. Perhaps I am liking simple builds again because I can use new spaced coils all the time on the cheap, have great flavor, and not bother with pre-firing to get out the hot spots or dry burning to clean.

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I haven’t noticed a flavor difference, but they don’t gunk up or scorch the wick as fast. It was also shown a couple of years back through a bench test that they produce more vapor, which makes sense when you think about it.

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I was pondering this a while ago, and because I’m such a mod/rdta hoarder, I had the opportunity to do direct A/B comparisons. Same tanks, same mods, same coils, same juice, etc.

Fully understanding the principals and physics of it, say for example, a space coil should technically heat up more of the wick as it’s spread out, rather than focused in a smaller area like a contact coil, I didn’t really get any demonstrable differences in vapor or flavor. Maybe it’s because of my setups maybe (all SteamCrave RDTA’s), but the only difference (and it wasn’t that big), was that the coils did seem to foul less on the spaced, and dry burning/cleaning was easier with spaced than contact. This was almost to be expected.

I read some posts about issues with hotspots in regards to contact coils, and others mentioning stroking and squeezing the coils with ceramic tweezers, which is exactly what I always do. Freshly built, contact coils can have hot/cool spots, but fixing it in less than 10 seconds by strumming and squeezing is as to be expected, and easily overcome. Let the debate continue…

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I think I prefer spaced coils mostly out of habit. When I first started building the idea of having coils touch bugged me. I know, a resistance zone forms on the outside of the wire after strumming and squeezing, but it still bugs me. I do use contact coils in plus ohm mtl builds where space is extremely limited. As far as performance, I have no idea. I’m a believer in matching the coil to the atty. I know the flavor I want to achieve and when I achieve that I’m gold. I guess I see this debate as primarily academic. Fun, but academic.

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Personally I use both depending on the atty. On atomizer with a narrow airflow like the reload I use contact coils, so I can have a short coil where most/all of the coil is directly over the airflow. On atomizer with a wide airflow like the wasp, I use spaced coils so I can use a long coil that covers the whole airflow slit.

The only difference that I have been able to detect, is that spaced coils tend to pop and spit much more than contact coils, but flavour and vapour production is the same.

Of course if you make the contact coils so tight, that there isn’t a tiny gap between the wraps, then it is an entirely different matter. I did that once with some flat-wire, and the result was horrible, but a tiny gap is all you need and that will happen automatically with normal wire.

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Gap ??? then would they not be spaced??? Sorry just looking at that statement made my brain hurt.:grinning::grinning::grinning::grinning::grinning:

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Technically yes. But try to look at a contact coil under magnification, and you will notice that there are in reality a tiny gap, it might be thinner that the width of a hair, but it is also practically impossible to avoid (at least with normal wire).

I guess you could say that the difference between spaced and contact coils, is the size of the gap.

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I was just poking, but if you say the do not actually touch than no contact coils actually exist, maybe we should all debate on the ultimate spacing down to the nanometer. All irrelevant, each to their own. Peace

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I’m always on the look out for improvement, when it comes to flavor and since wire is not my strong point, somebody could tell me that standing on my head naked while vaping, equals flavor improvement, trust me i would give it a try lol.

Of course I spaced coils because of the argument that they deliver better flavor.

To be honest I don’t notice a difference (especially in tc ) and most of my atomizer are small, wouldn’t even hold spaced unless I reduce wraps, but then I drop in ohms etc. Always my issue, one day I would like to experience vaping at 0.7, right now I can be lucky if I make it above 0.35 ohm but fully different story.

By now I just pick whatever I feel like, when redoing my coils. But unless it’s a bigger deck and I can’t reach the other side of the post/clamp, most likely i wrap contact.

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Don’t bother, I already got suckered into that one, all it did was make me dizzy. Didn’t improve the vape.

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Well good at least I can rule that out as a weekend activity :wink:

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That’s a BIG 10-4! Once I’ve found the correct built for an atomizer, the game is done and I can relax. Every atty has it’s own quirks, and getting the correct build to take advantage of those quirks can be a challenge at times. For example: I’ve got a Serpent Mini currently gathering dust on my shelf because I had a helluva a time getting the right build in it. Now that I’ve got some fancy coils from FT, I’ve actually be contemplating dusting the Serpent off and seeing if 1) I can get the right build(Staple vs Alien vs Cat Track vs fused clapton) and ; 2) I want to keep said atomizer or toss it into the “too much trouble to fiddle with” bin.

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Say if you’ve tried 25-30 tanks, but only 1 tank hits the spot for you, and you found that 1 coil build that suit you beyond all others that you’ve tried. Would you continue to test tanks and builds?

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