OCD Tank from IBTanked!

OCD Tank from IBTanked.com

This is a great little tank that I picked up just a couple months ago and so far from using it I'm totally impressed with it. I never thought I would ever give a cartomizer a chance again but one day I did and I haven't really looked back since. A cartomizer is just a cartridge and atomizer together where it gets the name cartomizer when combined. They're just atomizers surrounded by a cheese cloth like material and then a cotton like filling material around that. Then it's surrounded by a metal tube with a 510 connector on the end of it. The way you have to use the cartomizer a in the tanks is to either put a slot or a hole in the metal so that liquid can seep in. Otherwise you can buy ones that are laser punched from them for about $1.20 each if you buy about 10 of them otherwise they're close to a $1.50. Which is actually quite cheap for some cartomizer a especially punched ones. 

Let's get back to the tank ! The tank is a Pyrex tube with two metal caps in various colors in anodized aluminum or straight stainless steel. The caps have a set of o-rings on the outside of them where they slide into the tank and seal off the liquid from coming out. Then the center of these caps also have another set of o-rings which block off the liquid from going passed the cartomizer as well as holding the cartomizer in it. In most cases these o-rings are very cheap and end up having a cartomizer that barely stays inside the tank meaning you grab the tank and it slides right off the cartomizer pouring liquid everywhere. In the case of this one that more than likely won't happen it holds the cartomizer very well, also you can pick it up with a heavy mod at the end and the tank won't slide off meaning this thing is a beast as far as sealing and grip goes. When you buy the caps they give you an extra set of o-rings that will keep your tank going for a long time. You can also buy extra glass tubes for about $6, and the price on the caps is $19.99. There is also another option rather than buying the tubes and caps separate like I did, there's an option that you can build a tank and whatever else you want with it cartomizers, drip tips, etc.  you also have the option to get the glass painted which only cost a few more dollars and an extra 48 hours of shipping time for it to be painted and cure properly before being shipped out. Otherwise if you want to wait the extra couple days and pay the extra couple bucks it's totally worth it with over 25 colors to choose from and them also being mixtures of colors and even having an option for custom ones so you have plenty to choose from. The overall build of the tank is quite amazing once it's assembled and ready to vape on. The one I got was a XL size carto tank that's 22mm wide, which is close to 6ml of liquid. They have them in standard size as well as a custom smoktech cartomizer designed for these guys called the halfling using super short cartomizers and a short tank that holds about .8-1.5 ml of liquid depending on the width you order with it. The glass is just amazingly thick and does take quite a bit of punishment and still hasn't broken as of yet. I did order an extra glass tube in case something does happen though. 

Show casing the super thick Pyrex this thing is made from ! 

The metal caps installed with a drip tip and topped off tank. 

Tips to using the tank!

There are quite a few tips and tricks to do when using this tank. Hole sizes and amount of them, even slot width and amount of them matter. The thinner the liquid usually the smaller the hole and the least amount possible works with this type of liquid. Liquids 40%-60% veg requires two holes, standard size holes on prepunched works well so two holes you punch about 1mm in size works fine. 70% vg and above can require three holes or a slot. This liquid is usually really thick and the more flow you can give to it means the less chance of ruining your carto or your liquid. You can buy a punch online or you can find something similar at your local hardware store. It's called a saddle punch and does water lines for fridges, this works great also buy a file to shave the tip down in case it bends. Also buying a dremel which is quite expensive or going cheaper like 8-15 bucks cheap. Use a triangle precision file it takes a quite a few strokes to finish it off but it makes a cleaner cut than the dremel and also less chances of just going through the whole cartomizer with it. You can make either one or two slots depending on the liquid you're using. With the triangle file you can make the slots very narrow or larger like I said its a little more precise than a dremel is. Just remember when working with these leave no sharp edges that can damage the o-rings holding the cartomizer in and keeping it from leaking everywhere. Also don't punch cartomizers to far down because they can become very warped and not go in your tank anymore. Also using drip tips that are made for filling or using one similar to the one I have in the picture with help protect the o-rings when installing a new cartomizer otherwise the o-rings can be damaged overtime pushing the bare metal of the cartomizer in and out reducing their lifespan and increasing the chances of leaks! So definitely use a slap your momma tool, a drip tip that's round and thin enough to go through the whole tank attached to the cartomizer. 

Overall thoughts. 

If you buy the tank with no paint, whatever color caps you want the cost is about 25 bucks which is really cheap, considering the quality of the device and it being made in America that's really cheap ! Painted you can have one for about 31-35 bucks also is really affordable when it comes to something quality. As I said in my last blog this is my review of the product and my take this May or may not be the same experience you'll have, and if you're happy with what you have and it works for you definitely stick with it. If you're in the market for something new this is something to check out if you want that near atomizer flavor and reliability of the cartomizer and simplicity of the tank. 

SmokTech Magneto & Clearomizers/Tanks

I haven't had a lot of time to really get to post on the blog and I apologize for anyone who's read the blog. This time I'll be talking about the SmokTech Magneto and a couple Clearomizers and/or Tanks. Since it's all electrical I figured this would definitely still fall into technology. I also could do a phone review if you would like. I'm not doing any computer reviews for a while so my main focus will be the E-Cigarettes for the most part, since its more of a daily thing for me as well as many other people.

If you have heard the latest craze, about E-Cigarettes, it's pretty much everywhere ! Local shops opening everywhere with their own liquids and their equipment that they sell. I wanted to talk about a slick little mod that I picked up as you already know what it is. The SmokTech Magneto is one of the few magnetic devices floating around in local shops and on the internet. The advantage to having this magnet over a spring based mod, is the fact springs wear out just like everything else does. Face it we do, our cars do, our homes, and anything else you can think of. The magnet will still keep going for years and years to come, unless you of course get rid of the thing. The mod comes in two choices of color, Gold as they call it which is really brass, and stainless steel. In the review I am doing I'm currently using the brass one. It definitely looks great feels nice, seems to be well made. It definitely is a totally different beast than most of the mechanical mods out there, I keep hearing they copied the N-Zonic I'm not 100% sure I am spelling that right, because I myself have never seen one nor heard of it till recently. Even if it's a copy or similar in design I've heard it really doesn't look like one, the only thing mainly is the magnet switch. I'll get back to the mod itself, it comes in just a few pieces, the top with a 510 connection, the middle tube which is telescoping inside the main tube, and then the magnetic switch on the bottom of the device. The device can hold a wide range of 18000 series batteries due to it's telescoping action. I so far have only used a 18350 which I prefer even though they don't pack as many mAh as the larger ones do, the mod is in it's shortest mode and shows no center tubing. The mod accepts a Kick very well, I also have been using it lately with a 18350 and a SmokTech variable wattage kick, this is mostly to help out with those dual coil carto's or tanks that just seem to take a lot of juice to get going right. Also adding the variable wattage to a mod that well has no variable anything because its completely wire-free and circuit free to begin with. Some people think this defeats the purpose of having a mechanical mod, but it does help out sometimes. You'll notice the insides of the device are all brass also, I must have got a version 2 brass model because the first ones didn't have an adjustable center pin for the atomizer to fire off of. This is really a must have especially when you want your device to sit flush and nice on top without any wiggle. The design on the top is also serving a purpose other than just looking nice, they also serve as air channels, speaking of that, keep them clean or your device won't get any air at all. The magnetic switch also has brass connections in it also, there is a ring on the top of the switch that you can adjust to change the throw of the switch I usually leave it about halfway to make it easier to use. One thing to keep in mind though don't make it to loose it has a tendency to just fall off then, and the button may just fall out of the device. I forgot to mention the price tag on this one, they can range from 49.99 - 60 dollars.

                                                  Magneto with a Protank II mounted on it

                                                                   Smoktech Kick

                                          Kicked with a iClear30 dual coil 2.0 ohm head.

                                                                  
                                            18350 battery mode, no middle section shows.

                                          The magnetic switch taken off the bottom of the
                                                                      device.

                           Top of device you can see the brass center pin  as well as the air channels
                                                          and the bottom of the iClear30.

Out of the couple tanks I have been using lately, the Protank II and the iClear30 have their benefits and draw backs. The Protank II has a decent capacity around 2.4 to 2.5 ml, with a Pyrex glass tube that's removable from the top and base. It has a bottom coil atomizer, which sits on the bottom of the tank with the e-liquid laying on top of it. The idea behind this is that the coil is always fed e-liquid effectively. I have found this to be true and untrue at times, most of the time the atomizers have great wicking without any modification, and other times it has horrible wicking, where I am removing some wicks from the atomizer for them to feed right. Most of the time this is the case with thicker VG liquids, at times even the thin ones never make it into the atomizer properly and you end up with a burnt atomizer in just mere minutes. I have no clue if this is a quality control issue or different materials are being used or whats going on. Sometimes I will get a pack of just perfect atomizers, then other times I get ones that just seem to be burnt up no matter how the wicks are done, or what type of liquid is in it. This actually makes me love and hate the tank at the same time. When you get the good ones you'll be extremely happy, but just angry with the bad ones. The Protank series I have used on and off for I would say 8 months now so I have had my fair share of good and bad atomizers. If anyone has had luck with these more power to you, I'm to the point I just want to sell em off because I'm not happy with them at all if you want them just get a hold of me somehow. The Protank I, II, III, and the Mini I, and II all carry a price tag between 18.99 - 22 dollars.

The iClear30 is similar to a Vivi Nova in design having a polycarbonate tank section with a removable top and bottom. The iClear also has another unique feature that isn't on many tanks at all, which is a ball joint like drip tip where it rotates inside its casing basically making it able to be used at different angles to your preference, but it cannot be replaced with your own drip tips which the Protank II does have this feature. It has 8 wicks total, and two atomizers, but since the atomizers have the wicks hanging from two sides, it totals 16 wicks that are hanging into the e-liquid. It may seem like overkill, but when you have to dig into the e-liquid from the top of the tank it definitely comes in handy on sucking it up and keeping those atomizers nice and wet. With those dual coils you may need the kick or a variable voltage/wattage device, to get them nice and warm this would be depending on the ohms you're coils are also, I would say with the 1.5 ohm heads you would probably be fine running your mechanical mod without any kick. The 2.0 ohm head would be a different story you definitely need more power to get those guys going, not saying you can't run them, but if you want them to burn a little hotter you will definitely need some extra power. I myself have been using the mod kicked because of the 2.0 ohm heads just not satisfying me without the kick at all. I also have noticed when using this tank over say a Vivi Nova by Vision you aren't tipping the tank very much. These 16 wicks seem to suck the liquid up nicely I haven't had to tip till the thing is almost bone dry. The nova would be somewhere around 1.5 - 2 ml and I was already tipping the tank, nothing wrong with that at all if you have adjusted to doing that, but not tipping much is nice. I have usually got the thing down to about 1 ml or less before it needs any tipping what so ever, and this thing has a 3.0 ml capacity ! You end up going quite a long time before its being tipped. Overall this tank has a more consistent replaceable head, they seem more reliable from the get go and they last quite a while also. WARNING (DON'T PUT E-LIQUIDS THAT ARE KNOWN TO BREAK DOWN PLASTIC TANKS IN THIS TANK!!!!!) I have not tried it, but it is very prone to breaking down because this plastic used in this tank is used in many many tanks and they break ! Usually these liquids are citrus ones, cinnamon, and a few others I can't remember the name. I have used strawberry flavors, pomegranate, raspberry, menthols, tobacco, and many others that have worked perfectly fine without a single hint of damage. The tank has no plastic taste nor metallic taste either, for the price tag it carries it seems to be decently made. The price tag on these tanks are about 12 - 20 dollars.

Overall I would definitely recommend the iClear30, the Protank is awesome when they work right, and highly recommend the Magneto mod. Just remember these are my opinions and my experiences and yours may vary from my own. Don't take my advice as you need to buy these devices at all, whatever makes you happy at this very moment, keep vaping away on it, and if you're in the market for another device definitely check these out for yourself and see how you like them. Since its Christmas time, I'm sure you may get to get someone to buy you one so you don't have too !

Have a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year !

MacBook Air. Great Little Machine

I purchased a MacBook Air recently mostly for school. I was pretty impressed with how it looks, how thin it is, and also how powerful the thing can be as well. The MacBook Air can be configured in a few different ways. You can get them in two different sizes 11 inch and a 13 inch. The 13 inch also includes an SD card slot on the side of it as well. Both models come with 2 USB 3.0 ports, and 1 Intel Thunderbolt port which is very expandable as far as its capabilities. They all come with Solid State Drives instead of Hard Drives, which definitely helps increase the speed of the machines. The model I acquired was the 11 inch MacBook Air with the Retina display, a 1.7 Ghz i5 intel cpu, with turboboost, 4 gigabytes of ram, 128 gigabyte SSD, and an Intel HD 4000 GPU also with turboboost. The guys at school have HP EliteBooks exactly the same specs on this so I was quite impressed and decided to pick one up. I also got the school discount which also made the deal even sweeter of course. Its very fast I never have to wait for any of the programs I use for my computer courses in college to load. Everything is pretty much instantaneous with the SSD drives, and the quite capable hardware. They also manage to play games very very well on the computers as well, so I figured I would download a few games for Mac OS X and also Windows 7 because I also did manage to use BootCamp to dual boot the Macintosh as well.

The first game was Counter Strike - Global Offense.

I didnt test out any frames per second or anything like that, but I did manage to throw all the settings on high pretty much without any lag at all from the game. The game itself ran very very smooth, and played extremely well on the little machine. I was actually quite impressed with the results myself after playing the thing. I'm still getting used to the gameplay of this game so I will definitely have more results as far as how I rate the game at another time.

The second game was Modern Combat : Domination

This game is a series that was made mostly for mobile phones such as iPhones, and Androids. The games are very detailed as far as graphics even on the mobile devices. I seen this in the App Store so I figured I would give this a shot since the graphics I knew where also going to be pretty demanding on the system as well. The graphics on this game as well were also on high, and played extremely well. The game itself is also a very good game, the maps are pretty unique, and the weapons are also nice.
This game also I haven't had the most time playing, but I will also comment on this game at a later time in another blog.

The OS

The MacBook Air has plenty of software available now days to pretty much accomplish anything. The new OS X Mountain Lion that came pre-installed on the machine as well is a pretty smooth operating system. I tested the one with 10.7.4 installed as well, same specifications and everything. The system itself didn't seem near as fast as the new 10.8.2. Apple included 200 new features into this operating system. They brought many iOS features such as the notification menu to the desktop, as well as an integrated iMessage application which also combines iChat into it to run various other chat programs as well. FaceTime is also included with the OS as well as with the last OS it still maintains the ability to FaceTime other Apple computers with Lion and above, and iPhones and iPads as well. There are basically to many features to name, but the ones I'm very fond of are the desktop switching commands by swiping your fingers in different ways across either the trackpad or the Bluetooth Wireless mouse. It's very useful when you want to say have a web browser open to read, but you also want to type out a report from what you're reading instead of having to fumble through the windows to try to find out where your Document editor is at. You just swipe three fingers upward across the pad, and it'll display Mission Control which is like Expose but also includes a more compact style of viewing, and your desktops you can add quite a few of them even if you like. It really comes in handy because you can swap between the desktop of the Document and swipe to the desktop with the web page, enabling you to have a clear full paged view of each one. If you haven't bought a brand new Mac with Mountain Lion installed, definitely download it from the App Store for the 20 dollars. The features, and speed of the operating system won't disappoint you. I have read reviews of people saying that their Mac's have slowed down. Apple did recently come out with 10.8.2 with quite a few patches and tweaks to make the system run a lot faster and also more efficient as far as battery life. I'll talk more about the software at a later time.

System performance

As I mentioned earlier this thing is a speedy little machine. Don't let the size of the thing fool you, I have brought this thing to school and impressed quite a few people with the games on it, and how well it played them as well. I have applications that I run that are very large and usually use a lot of
resources. I use many Microsoft Office applications, as well as OpenOffice with Oracle to edit PDF's. I also run Linux as a virtual machine on here using both cores, 512mb of ram, 128mb of graphics memory, and 8gb of hard drive space on my OS X installation. I'm using VirtualBox to run it, it actually runs OS X quite a few of the office applications, and Ubuntu 12.04 really quick. Plus leave me with the room I need to keep a browser open and of course all the MSOffice stuff. I have Mac Blu Ray player which I purchased because OS X doesn't natively support Blu Ray playback at all. The Application is built by VLC which is a very popular and versatile movie application and another movie player company called Mongoose which I don't know much about. Mac Blu Ray player is great utilizing the Intel HD 4000's high definition capabilities very well. I hook up to my HDTV with the Thunderbolt port to HDMI adapter, the port itself supports very high transfer rates so the picture quality comes out amazing as it should. You can also choose various other adapters for the Thunderbolt port as well, since the port supports many types of devices with the 10 Gbs + transfer rates. Such as multiple hard drive stacks configured in raid for server like storage, also an ethernet adapter which lets you hook up to the internet as well by wire. The port can support a few devices at once too, which makes it even more expandable.

I also run an application called Crossover which helps me run some Windows based applicataions on my system from OS X as well, they install like as if they were part of the operating system which is pretty nice. The software and system are built so well that the application installs and runs the applications extremely efficient. With Boot Camp Windows 7 runs extremely fast and scores a decent rating on the Window's Experience rating. Everything is pretty much the same result of OS X very good performance overall for daily use as well. I would not advise doing BootCamp to a 64 gig model. Both operating systems use about 20 gigabytes of space to install well. splitting the drive in half to share the operating systems would not leave either with very much space to be very useable without the use of an external hard drive, but your computer would also keep losing space to future updates. The 128 gigabyte model would be fine to do so on, because at least each could have 60 or one could have 70 or 80 and the other would still have more than enough gig's to be useable for quite a few things. The BootCamp installation is very simple to use as well. It prompts you with three options when you start it up. Create windows 7 bootable usb, Download Apple BootCamp Drivers, and Install Windows 7. Before you can do this you have to create an ISO from Disk Image, just google how to do it from using your Windows Disc in your BluRay/DVD drive. It literally takes only a couple minutes, and is very simple to do. There isn't anything I have thrown at this thing that has lagged or taken more than a second to load on this thing. The boot time is extremely fast on this MacBook Air too.

All in all I'd have to say that this machine was well worth the 940 dollars I spent on it with a student discount at Best Buy. It came with 10.8 which of course an update came out Sept 19, 2012 to 10.8.2. Has a 128 Gb Solid State Drive (Flash Drive for hard drive space), 4 Gb of ram installed, an Intel HD4000 GPU, and a 1.7Ghz i5 intel processor with turboboost to 2.6 Ghz (overclocks the processor when the cpu is in high demand). It does everything that I need it to for now, and I'm sure it will for a while longer too. I'm really impressed with what apple has been coming out with lately, at first I was in shock with the change from the white, but it has been working really well. I'd have to say I'm really impressed with how the price has managed to go down about 900 dollars for the cheapest MacBook Air as well yet yeilds much more powerful hardware than before. This thing is very capable, being able to play games, run virtual machines yet multi-task on OS X, and run MS Office.