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clapton vs kanthal?
- Thread starter Mxcy
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Usually Clapton, due to larger surface area.
If you have a regulated device, the clapton is going to be better across the board. If you're running those coils on a mech mod, the .23 standard coil is more optimal.
Also, just to split hairs, claptons are often made of kanthal, too.
Also, just to split hairs, claptons are often made of kanthal, too.
This is the smallest reply ive ever seen from you, you sick?
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LOL. I was thinking that myself. Maybe a carpel tunnel syndrome?
To use up my Kanthol, I've been making hybrid Claptons. Stainless core, outer wind Kanthol. Temp control works just fine.
Makes sense, due to SS having the least resistance.
Haha, I was practically out the door to go have some free Japanese food. Nothing gets between me, sushi, and hibachi steak, understand?LOL. I was thinking that myself. Maybe a carpel tunnel syndrome?
I feel that way about beer. Free beer is always good. (once you get over the alcohol poisoning at age 16
, due to free beer) At that time, I was living in Germany, and drinking age for beer was 16.
People say that sushi is an acquired taste... ...I think they've never had good sushi, granted it is hard to find good sushi stateside.Ill take the Steak
Haha, that was about the age when I learned to drink... ...the hard way. Looking back, I'm wondering what the grown adult who bought the 151 rum for us was thinking. I became a beer drinker after that. I didn't know it was possible to bypass "drunk" and go into full medical emergency status until that day... ...I earned my medals for surviving that one.I feel that way about beer. Free beer is always good. (once you get over the alcohol poisoning at age 16
...I feel you on the free beer. It doesn't matter what time it is. Free beer means its beer o' clock. And if there's free food, I expect there to be beer as well.
Ive never had nad sushi, unless its spoiled, but ive never had spoiled sushi.. in more of a sashimi kinda guy, some tuna toro saku, now thats hard to find stateside
mostly due to lack of bluefins and abundance of bigeye and yellowfins.
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mostly due to lack of bluefins and abundance of bigeye and yellowfins.Sent from my SM-N920T using Tapatalk
we all went abit off task here lolIve never had nad sushi, unless its spoiled, but ive never had spoiled sushi.. in more of a sashimi kinda guy, some tuna toro saku, now thats hard to find stateside
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Bucky205
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Claptons are ok, but my preference is a parallel 26 gauge Kanthal. I have trouble believing wrapping a lot of extra wire that is providing nothing electrically to the circuit somehow improves it. The outer wire is doing absolutely nothing but acting as a heat sink. Claptons heat slower, because you have added mass to your coil. I don't see how trapping juice between the wires is any more effective than having juiced cotton against hot wire. People swear by them I know. They are even fun to build, I just think they are overrated.
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How much have you really experimented with them, though?
There are ways around the speed issue. You can use much finer wire and thinner cores. Though even the thin wire adds considerable mass, heat travels across it faster than it does the core, so it does very little to slow the ramp-up time. I'm talking near-instant ramp-up, here... ...literally a 1-second burst of immense vapor.
There are specific applications when you actually want a coil that disperses at least as much heat as it generates. High-powered, regulated mods and series unregulated mods come to mind, here. When paired with a series mod or really anything of comparable power capacity, a clapton helps compensate for all of the heat you get from the extra voltage and therefor wattage per unit of mass.
Standard coils... ...even big-ass .35, dual 22g builds have a tendency to rapidly overheat and burn juice when you pump that sort of power into them. The outer heat-sink that a clapton provides carries out a rather valid and useful function in this case. It is VERY beneficial to have some extra surface area for the heat to disperse across. Ramp-up is the least of your concerns when a .5 goes from silver to yellow-orange in a fraction of a second. The bigger challenge is actually giving that heat somewhere to go other than straight to your lungs.
The nooks and crannies make channels for juice to flow into the heating element and stay there as it heats up. As juice is vaporized from inside the coil, this creates negative pressure in those pockets that pulls more juice from the nearby wick up against the inner surfaces of the coil - like a heat-powered pump. It essentially acts as its own wick in that it can both store and transport juice on its own. Rather than being pushed away from the coil, it is forced to traverse through all of the little channels and pockets. This is especially true with fused claptons, where there is a dip between the two inner leads. The juice gets pushed along that valley by the heat surrounding it, ensuring contact with more and more of all of that inner and outer wire as it goes along.
The fact that the clapton is sucking up the juice takes some of the load off of the wicks and helps ensure more consistent and widespread juice-to-coil contact. This not only improves flavor and texture, but greatly decreases the likelihood of dry hits, as the way juice travels on/in one stabilizes the temperature across the length of the wire. The juice flows within the coil and disperses more evenly in a clapton coil.
In contrast to this, the smooth, flat surface of a standard coil scatters juice when it heats up... ...it essentially pushes juice away from its hottest portions, which puts a limit on how much wicking can really do to regulate temperature and get juice where it needs to be, as it has to compete with that force in order to carry juice to the inner surface. Imagine dropping water onto a hot pan. A standard coil does very much the same thing to juice.
And since the center of the coil is the hottest part, where do you think the juice least wants to go? It instead stays in the wicks or towards the outside. The same goes for a clapton's core. But with the clapton, the outer wraps keep that juice from getting away from the hottest parts.
This is very important to consider. There are limits to how fast cotton can transport juice on its own. High-power, high-heat, high-surface-area vapers can tell you the countless tales of their wicking woes. When you start pushing things to the edge of what is possible, that extra second or two that the coil is holding onto juice for can make all of the difference in the quality of the vape.
Additionally, not only does the outer wire add mass, but surfaces for the juice to make contact with. More of the mass directly translates to exposed surface area. This means that for each unit of mass, an adequately powered clapton coil will always be able to vaporize significantly more juice than a solid coil of the same mass. That means more flavor, more vapor, and more density.
Essentially, the reason some of us prize our clapton builds so much is because it allows you to squeeze much more mass into a build, pump more power to it, and vaporize more juice than would otherwise be possible with standard coils of equivalent size.
I'm not trying to start an argument over this. I would never say that they are superior to standard coils. I'm just saying that the unique properties of multi-wire coils are not to be overlooked. Depending on what sort of vape you're after, they are pretty much a necessity. There's more to it than us just thinking they work better. When it comes to chasing heat and density, there is a very real line where standard coils start to fall short. We use them because the performance truly is better for that specific goal. Take the theory behind them as you will, but the results are very real.
So don't write them off. Maybe they're not for you, but I'm telling you, there really is something to all of this clapton nonsense! They're not unanimously the best, but there are times when they really are the way to go.
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Bucky205
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Robot, you never start an argument. I always enjoy reading your replies. Every reply I have ever read from you, has always been well stated. I don't dislike claptons, I just think they are somewhat overrated. I have tried a lot of different types of wire, fused, and anything else we could dream up in the shop. If you look at the cloud comps, wins on parallel builds are pretty common. A guy came into the shop with a set of fused claptons he had built, 24/38 If I remember. We wrapped a set of parallels to the same resistance using Kanthal A1 We tested on the same type RDA, same type mod Set both airflow's to wide open, same wattage, fully charged batteries when we started. They were almost identical in vape production. Everyone that we had test could hardly tell a difference without removing the cap. If anything it was easier to spot the clapton because of the ramp delay, if you were looking for it. I wont give up on claptons, to many people ask for them, and they are a favorite for many people. One thing I've noticed with the claptons, it seems to produce a cooler, dense vape. Parallel may have the same vape density, but it's warmer.
Bucky205
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I always like threads where @robot zombie is participating, he's very smart, and apparently reads and memorizes everything. I accused him of being an EE major once.I Agree with the Quantum Physics Major Above
It also depends on your draw, your inhale...I like a slower pull. I like feeling it heat up and I usually am full by the time its too hot and I release....I love 2x22K/46N60 Fused Claptons 6 Wrap/3.5mm ID @ around 110-130w....Parallels seem to jump to too hott to quic and I dont enjoy it as much, also burns cotton easier..but this is just my opinion, granted I love building also.
I pick on him every time I see a nice juicy reply from him...I would love to see what the hell runs through his mind as he sets out on his typing adventure on these replies...
Bucky205
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I like a really warm, full vape. Probably explains a lot, as to my preference. One place I absolutely love claptons, is if when were mixing juice. They hold enough juice, you can get a good hit without cotton. Heat em up, rinse them off and sample again. Much easier than changing wicks all the time.
I dont like changing cotton sometimes with them...sometimes they hold onto fibers and the smell of them when dry burning fills the house...but claptons/fused claptons last forever.....Thats another plus about them, I have a build in my Twisted Messes RDA that I built in early June that still going strong and looks a week old. Just wick, dryburn, rewick and keep going.
Bucky205
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You ever run them under water while they are still hot? They look shiny and new again. I just tilt the mod over so it doesn't get wet, and rinse them under the faucet. All these people talking about their coils gunking up, LOL, I wash mine. Heat em up, rinse em off, good as new. I don't put them under while they are glowing red, but within five seconds of releasing the button, I'll rinse them.
Hey, thanks for the kind words! Your points are well-taken.
There are many factors to how a clapton performs. If you compare them side by side as you did, particularly at the same wattage, then you're probably not going to notice much of a difference in performance other than maybe cooler temperature and slower ramp-up. I can see how it might not seem worthwhile to run claptons if you try to run them like your standard coils.
The cool thing about claptons is that you can run them at higher power levels than their bare-wire equivalents for something of comparable temperature, albeit with a distinctly different character to it. It's interesting to me that you describe the clapton vape as being cooler. My experience is the opposite. It's a hot, hot vape, but I find it much smoother and more textural than other builds with similar temperature profiles. It makes the temperature much more bearable and even pleasurable. That is where they really distinguish themselves from their bare-wire brethren, imo.
That's probably why you don't see them used in comps too often, though. They don't perform noticeably better than other coils at natural voltage. But with that in mind, I'd put money on an optimally-powered clapton build beating out an optimally-powered standard build any day of the week.
At the end of the day, I guess it all comes down to the balance you're trying to strike.
Lol, yeah, yeah... ...even I couldn't tell you what's going on up there - it's everything and nothing in particular. I have ADHD, so my mind is just always going. I am easily distracted, which can go one of two ways. It's either the stereotypical "OOOO what's this? Oh hey what's that! What's going on over there? Oh now that's interesting...." or I get so caught up in a single distraction that I don't pay attention to anything else for extended periods of time. Either way, my mind is just going in every direction at once. Just rapid-fire bursts of disorganized information. I don't consider myself to be particularly intelligent. I prefer to consider my thoughts qualitatively similar to those of others... ...the quantity is just unusually high, hence my general inability to be brief and tendency to over-think rather simple matters. It makes me prone to connecting bits of info in ways that others may not. That's all.
Writing seems to help me bring it all together and make meaningful connections. It also calms me down a good bit, so I guess it all works out. *shrugs*
Flavor def changes from coil to coil, i dont know if its the whole juice channnels deal or whatever but the whole dynamic of the clapton def works well (with me).
Maybe its a combination. The ramp up, the channels, the surface area, makes it all different compared to like parallels.
I can appreciate a nice parallel though its easy and it gives off nice flavor and vape. Before i made my first clapton my go to build was parallel 26k ohming out to like a .2 on a mech, that was my jam. That or triple parallel 32k for the same ohmage.
I made a staple coil once and to me it one upped the clapton. The ramp up is even longer, gotta throw some hard watts at it to compensate, but vape is phenomenal.
Thats the beauty i think of vaping is you can try a little of everything and pesonalize your own vape and fine tune it to your likings. Example is twisted wire, i hate it... people like it. I got a pack of ud 4x32k i got for free, like a 50f sample, i claptoned it on 26n80 and thats the best vape ive ever had, on the cricket, at .4ohm. So i didnt like twisted, but twisted claptoned is ok... the sky is the limit, i love that about vaping.
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Maybe its a combination. The ramp up, the channels, the surface area, makes it all different compared to like parallels.
I can appreciate a nice parallel though its easy and it gives off nice flavor and vape. Before i made my first clapton my go to build was parallel 26k ohming out to like a .2 on a mech, that was my jam. That or triple parallel 32k for the same ohmage.
I made a staple coil once and to me it one upped the clapton. The ramp up is even longer, gotta throw some hard watts at it to compensate, but vape is phenomenal.
Thats the beauty i think of vaping is you can try a little of everything and pesonalize your own vape and fine tune it to your likings. Example is twisted wire, i hate it... people like it. I got a pack of ud 4x32k i got for free, like a 50f sample, i claptoned it on 26n80 and thats the best vape ive ever had, on the cricket, at .4ohm. So i didnt like twisted, but twisted claptoned is ok... the sky is the limit, i love that about vaping.
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The whole point of claptons is the way they heat up. The wrapped wire is heated by the core wire. So you have a large surface area and a relatively slow heat up ramp. By varying the power to the coils you can get that to deliver the heat the way you want it to. If you used a single wire of a huge guage it would heat up much faster. Whether the 'juice channels' in the outer wire make any difference I don't know, I have never used that thick of a wire without it being a clapton so I have nothing to compare it to. My guess is that they do as the juice in them will slow the heatup ramp time even more. All this makes them pretty much useless on a standard mech mod (4.2v), if your only experience of claptons is on a mech it will be bad.