I have concluded my first round of tests using platinum wire and I am satisfied enough with the results to say that this is a viable option for building decks with.
The idea was to use a metal that will not oxidize at any temperature. My first experiment was with 24kt gold. Gold has such a low resistance that 30 gauge was the only real option. Working with 30ga gold wire (half hard) is like working with the child of the thinnest Ni200 wire and a wet noodle. The coils were extremely fragile and it failed the final test (dry burn cleaning) instantly, by melting into pieces.
Gold is also over $1100/oz. Screw gold.
I then sourced 24 gauge platinum wire (pt950, Pt/Ru alloy) from a jewelry supply (riogrande.com). This stuff is much more sturdy, like working with Ti at the same gauge, but without the springiness. You can actually clean up the coils with tweezers without heating the coils and they'll more or less stay where you put them. Like gold, contact coils don't work with Pt because the resistance plummets.
I didn't invent this idea - there are mods with a platinum TC mode, although I've never seen actual platinum coils. But to program in a mode, someone has done this already (and knows that magic TCR).
4 inches of this wire ohms out to 0.2 ohms, which is right around where I expected it to be after looking up Pt resistances online. I ordered 16 inches of wire, which cost $60.
I built 4 coils, and put two into a Hannya postless RDA, one vertically mounted into a Velocity RDA, and one horizontally mounted into a Smok TFV4 RTA. They have all worked well, although wicking TFV4 RTAs is a pain in the ... to get just right.
It seems that Pt coils heat very rapidly. Here's a dry fire of the Hannya dual coil build before wicking and vaping:
So far as I can tell, the juice isn't affected by any wire flavor, but different people may be able to tell, if wire flavor exists at all.
The main benefit is the ability to never replace the coil. To test this, I ran the deck dry and fried the coils. I then pulled the cotton, gave it a quick rinse to clean the juice off, then mounted it on a Coilmaster 521. The cleaning process was very simple, and can be seen here:
Pretty much everything vaporized off within the first couple pulses. Other wire types can do this. But the platinum wire returned to its ORIGINAL shiny luster. The coil also seemed to be a bit more sturdy - I don't know much about annealing but I'm guessing the heating and cooling helped the coil become stronger.
I didn't take a video of it, but the TFV4 coil was even filthier, as I had wicking problems and burned the hell out of it. It was brand new after just one cycle of heating it to red hot. Not even a rinse was required in both cases.
Platinum isn't cheap, but $15 for a coil isn't unreasonable. One would then have to build a deck only once, and you'd only need to rewick as needed. I know this can be done with kanthal, but the more you use and dry burn kanthal coils, the dirtier they get and I can definitely taste the difference between new and very used kanthal.
What amazed me was the cleaning process. 10-20 seconds of pulsing, and the coil is returned to a literally brand new state.
I need to find the TCR for this type of platinum - platinum wire comes in a wide variety of alloys and it's reasonable to assume that each has a different TCR. My dual-coil build ended up with a 0.08 ohm resistance, perhaps due to how deeply I mounted the legs. I have to therefore run it in TC mode; I'm running that deck on a IPV D3 mod in Ti mode, and I just carefully inched up the temperature and joules until I found the sweet spot. The single coil builds are running in power mode until I can find that TCR; part of why I fried the TFV4 build is because I tried running titanium TC mode on my RX200 mod and couldn't get it dialed in just right.
In practical use, platinum wire so far has been performing like titanium, with faster ramp up and the ability to dry fire the hell out of it. Titanium changes with heat, and while the actual melting points are very similar, we all know you can't glow Ti coils red hot. Pt wire is easy to work with, and you would only have to do it once.
Why bother with these new ceramic heating elements, when you can mount platinum coils on your existing hardware and get the lifelong use benefit, not have to deal with slow ramp times, and because platinum doesn't react with anything easily, it's likely safer - there's question regarding the safety of heated ceramics.
I hope some of you give it a whirl, and I'd like to see if your results mirror mine. Use 95% Pt/5% Ru. Here's why:
there are several different types of platinum that are commercially available. the platinum is either 90% or 95%, and the balance is usually iridium, ruthenium, or rhodium. there are differences in how each type of metal behaves in terms of electrical resistance, workability, etc.
You want a wire that works like titanium or kanthal. That rules out platinum/iridium and platinum/rhodium. Platinum/ruthenium is firm but not springy; it's a joy to make coils out of this stuff; you can clean up a coil at room temperature and it will stay where you put it - very little springback!
The hardest alloy is platinum/nickel. You wouldn't want to use this for the same reasons that Ni200 is questionable. Especially during a red-hot dry fire to clean the coil.
You'd also want the highest electrical resistance per centimeter. Of what's readily available at 95% platinum, that's the ruthenium alloy. It is absolutely a subohm wire, but it's nowhere near as ridiculous as some 24 wrap Ni200 coil....
P.S. the same website I got my wire from offers spools of 12 feet of 34 gauge platinum wire for $135. Someone's going to put 2 and 2 together and build a platinum clapton coil....
The idea was to use a metal that will not oxidize at any temperature. My first experiment was with 24kt gold. Gold has such a low resistance that 30 gauge was the only real option. Working with 30ga gold wire (half hard) is like working with the child of the thinnest Ni200 wire and a wet noodle. The coils were extremely fragile and it failed the final test (dry burn cleaning) instantly, by melting into pieces.
Gold is also over $1100/oz. Screw gold.
I then sourced 24 gauge platinum wire (pt950, Pt/Ru alloy) from a jewelry supply (riogrande.com). This stuff is much more sturdy, like working with Ti at the same gauge, but without the springiness. You can actually clean up the coils with tweezers without heating the coils and they'll more or less stay where you put them. Like gold, contact coils don't work with Pt because the resistance plummets.
I didn't invent this idea - there are mods with a platinum TC mode, although I've never seen actual platinum coils. But to program in a mode, someone has done this already (and knows that magic TCR).
4 inches of this wire ohms out to 0.2 ohms, which is right around where I expected it to be after looking up Pt resistances online. I ordered 16 inches of wire, which cost $60.
I built 4 coils, and put two into a Hannya postless RDA, one vertically mounted into a Velocity RDA, and one horizontally mounted into a Smok TFV4 RTA. They have all worked well, although wicking TFV4 RTAs is a pain in the ... to get just right.
It seems that Pt coils heat very rapidly. Here's a dry fire of the Hannya dual coil build before wicking and vaping:
So far as I can tell, the juice isn't affected by any wire flavor, but different people may be able to tell, if wire flavor exists at all.
The main benefit is the ability to never replace the coil. To test this, I ran the deck dry and fried the coils. I then pulled the cotton, gave it a quick rinse to clean the juice off, then mounted it on a Coilmaster 521. The cleaning process was very simple, and can be seen here:
Pretty much everything vaporized off within the first couple pulses. Other wire types can do this. But the platinum wire returned to its ORIGINAL shiny luster. The coil also seemed to be a bit more sturdy - I don't know much about annealing but I'm guessing the heating and cooling helped the coil become stronger.
I didn't take a video of it, but the TFV4 coil was even filthier, as I had wicking problems and burned the hell out of it. It was brand new after just one cycle of heating it to red hot. Not even a rinse was required in both cases.
Platinum isn't cheap, but $15 for a coil isn't unreasonable. One would then have to build a deck only once, and you'd only need to rewick as needed. I know this can be done with kanthal, but the more you use and dry burn kanthal coils, the dirtier they get and I can definitely taste the difference between new and very used kanthal.
What amazed me was the cleaning process. 10-20 seconds of pulsing, and the coil is returned to a literally brand new state.
I need to find the TCR for this type of platinum - platinum wire comes in a wide variety of alloys and it's reasonable to assume that each has a different TCR. My dual-coil build ended up with a 0.08 ohm resistance, perhaps due to how deeply I mounted the legs. I have to therefore run it in TC mode; I'm running that deck on a IPV D3 mod in Ti mode, and I just carefully inched up the temperature and joules until I found the sweet spot. The single coil builds are running in power mode until I can find that TCR; part of why I fried the TFV4 build is because I tried running titanium TC mode on my RX200 mod and couldn't get it dialed in just right.
In practical use, platinum wire so far has been performing like titanium, with faster ramp up and the ability to dry fire the hell out of it. Titanium changes with heat, and while the actual melting points are very similar, we all know you can't glow Ti coils red hot. Pt wire is easy to work with, and you would only have to do it once.
Why bother with these new ceramic heating elements, when you can mount platinum coils on your existing hardware and get the lifelong use benefit, not have to deal with slow ramp times, and because platinum doesn't react with anything easily, it's likely safer - there's question regarding the safety of heated ceramics.
I hope some of you give it a whirl, and I'd like to see if your results mirror mine. Use 95% Pt/5% Ru. Here's why:
there are several different types of platinum that are commercially available. the platinum is either 90% or 95%, and the balance is usually iridium, ruthenium, or rhodium. there are differences in how each type of metal behaves in terms of electrical resistance, workability, etc.
You want a wire that works like titanium or kanthal. That rules out platinum/iridium and platinum/rhodium. Platinum/ruthenium is firm but not springy; it's a joy to make coils out of this stuff; you can clean up a coil at room temperature and it will stay where you put it - very little springback!
The hardest alloy is platinum/nickel. You wouldn't want to use this for the same reasons that Ni200 is questionable. Especially during a red-hot dry fire to clean the coil.
You'd also want the highest electrical resistance per centimeter. Of what's readily available at 95% platinum, that's the ruthenium alloy. It is absolutely a subohm wire, but it's nowhere near as ridiculous as some 24 wrap Ni200 coil....
P.S. the same website I got my wire from offers spools of 12 feet of 34 gauge platinum wire for $135. Someone's going to put 2 and 2 together and build a platinum clapton coil....
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