Oxidizing - tips and tricks

was.deevey

So I'm pretty new at the whole stainless steel mesh wicking, while I await delivery of my kanthal, I got to trying various methods on my rebuildable stardust having watched several videos found some methods that work great and others not so great.

Thought this could be useful to anyone going down the same route.

1. Regular Method - and what seems to be promoted the most
Quench 3 times, burn some juice on, reburn etc.

This Worked reasonably well, but the coating was easily scratched and shorts a plenty.

2. Cigarette paper method

Basically you oxidize as normal, and wrap the mesh where you are wrapping in ciggie paper, dab a bit of juice on and fire the rig till the paper burns off.

This worked well in conjunction with the above, but if you have bad wraps and need to adjust you'll still end up with hot spots, also with thinner gague wire I found that the coil would fry before the paper burned off pretty easy.

3. Find a different quench than water - my own method

I haven't seen this anywhere else .. so here goes

I got to thinking about Metalwork class in school 100 years ago and remembering "blackening" of objects in an engine oil quench, which made a pretty robust blackened surface on the object which was hard to scratch off - excatly what we are trying to achieve with oxidization of the SS mesh.

So without doing anything else I rolled my stainless, heated to red hot, and quenched in pure Propylene Glycol, repeated this 3 times and low and behold, I havent had short yet no matter how much I've poked at the coils or slid the wick in and out of the stardust.

So .. anyone else got any funky tips or tricks for mesh wrapping ?

tommy2bad

I just burn,quench, burn, quench, burnm quench, drench in PG, burn, drench in pg again,burn. just burning the pg off the last two times, doesn't need to redden. Never had a short but wicks still give a better flavor after a few hours vaping.
Doesn't seem to be a way to speed up the 'settling in' bit.