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Dead Rabbit Max RDA Review

I_aint_Joe

Bronze Contributor
Member For 3 Years
Introduction

I have to admit that I was slightly surprised and skeptical when I first saw the Dead Rabbit Max RDA, the Dead Rabbit V3 RDA already does its dual-coil RDA thing , so what is the point of a bigger Dead Rabbit?

However, it turns out that the Dead Rabbit Max significantly outperforms the Dead Rabbit V3 once the wattage is in triple figures - or you could just read the review.
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More images are here

Product overview

The Dead Rabbit Max is a 28mm dual-coil RDA, with side airflow, inner and outer top-caps, and (at a guess) an 8-10mm juice well.

What do you get?

  • Dead Rabbit Max RDA
  • 2×0.2ohm Ni80 coils
  • 2×3.0mm ageleted cotton
  • Coil cutting tool
  • spares/accessories/squonk pin
There’s nothing super special here, but there aren’t any glaring omissions.

First impressions

I think I’m developing a fetish for wide and chunky atomizers, I really loved the proportions of the Blotto Max and I feel the same about the Dead Rabbit Max – 28mm of width makes it look more purposeful than the regular 24mm Dead Rabbit.

On the subject of aesthetics, the two pairs of X airflow grab your attention, and fit the Dead Rabbit design language very well.

While the outside of the RDA is 28mm, about 2mm of that is the built in beauty ring, I’d guess the deck has about 26mm of space, which is still more than enough for most builds. One the subject of more than enough space, the juice well is pretty huge – while no figures are given, if I had to make a wildly inaccurate guess, I’d say it was about 10mm.

The top-cap is a two-piece affair, consisting of inner and outer sections, similar to that of the Seri RDA – this design helped the Seri keep temperatures down when vaping at high wattages, so I’m happy to see it on another RDA.

It does look like the posts are just carried over from the Dead Rabbit V3, however when I put them side to side, the dimensions are completely different, also the Max’s posts lack the gold/silver color coding of the V3, which is a shame.


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Build

It’s a Dead Rabbit deck, so you build it just like any other Dead Rabbit RDA, right? No, not exactly.

Due to the high juice well walls, you can’t really get under the posts to snip the coil leads. There is a coil measuring tool which is marked at 5mm, but I didn’t bother using it, as there is enough space under the posts to leave the coil leads dangling, without touching the base of the deck. (assuming your coil leads aren’t excessively long)

I trimmed my coil leads to about 10mm, dropped the coils into the posts, half tightened the post screws, aligned the coils and then tightened the post screws fully. I decided to position my coils aligned with the center of the posts and dropped down quite low, depending on your vaping style, you might prefer to them towards or away from the airflow, I make no claims as to my coil positioning being the only one that works, but it works for me.

Wicking, is just like any other RDA – enough wick to just about touch the juice well, fluff nicely, thin just a little, and stuff them in. My wicking was done with dripping in mind, rather than squonking.
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How does it perform?

  • 2×26g dual core 3.0mm fused claptons 0.18ohm for the pair - these are the same spec coils that I’m running in my Dead Rabbit V3 – I wanted my initial build to be a direct comparison between the two. The first thing I noticed when putting this build in, is that dual 3.0mm coils look tiny and lost on this big deck. At under 90w, the Max can’t compete with the V3 when it comes to flavor. However, things are getting a little more even at 90w, and once you take it to 100w (the point where the V3 became a little too much for me) – the Max overtakes the V3 for both flavor and vapor production. I did take this build to 120w, but I wasn’t really getting any more from these coils, than I was at 100w.
However, the thought that the 3.0mm coils looked a little lost in the large deck stuck in my mind, so…

  • 2×28g triple core 3.5mm fused claptons 0.11ohm for the pair - I didn’t have any 3.5mm prebuilt coils, so I hunted down some wire and wrapped my own. At 100w, this build was better than the previous build, with excellent flavor and very good vapor production. Unlike the previous build, taking it to 120w was very worthwhile, flavor and vapor both increase – this build was highly successful, the jump in performance over the 3.0mm build was very noticeable.
At this point, I really wanted to use a pair of 4.0mm coils, but that was the last of my triple core wire, so that’s going to have to wait until another day.

What I enjoyed the most about the vape quality of the Max, is that at 100w and above, both the vapor and barrel temps remained well within my comfort limits.

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Airflow

Of course this is not a restricted draw RDA, the airflow suits the type of build and power required to make it perform at its best.

I am however curious how it would have performed, if it had the diffused awesomeness of honeycomb airflow.

Maybe the X shape is diffusing the airflow, I have no idea – I can’t really complain about the airflow, because it’s not overly loud or turbulent, so I will leave this point as a ‘what if?’.

Squonking

Not a clue to be honest, I’m only using single battery squonk mods right now, and they aren’t really suitable for this RDA.

What could be improved?

I’m struggling to find something constructive to complain about, but there isn’t much that annoys me about this RDA. If I had to complain about something, I’d say color code the posts, as with the other Dead Rabbit RDAs and maybe drop the juice well a fraction, so the coil leads could be trimmed from under the posts.

Conclusion

This is going to be very subjective, but this is what a dual-coil RDA should be like. There’s no attempt to provide a multi-purpose single and dual-coil experience, that leads to compromises – this is very much big(ish) coils, 100w+ or go home.

It goes without saying that you have to push this RDA to get the most out of it. However, what surprised me, is that I’m very much a restricted single-coil and MTL vaper, and yet I’m vaping this RDA at 100-120w and enjoying it a lot.

While most of the dual-coil RDAs that I review end up with a single-coil build (Rath/Recurve V2) or get stuffed into a 'I’ll use it once in a while' box in my closet, whereas the DR Max is sitting proudly on a mod, with the rest of my daily rotation and is likely to stay there.

Disclaimer

The Dead Rabbit Max RDA was provided for the purposes of this review by Hellvape.
 

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