Monthly Archives: February 2020

This post is aimed squarely at those out there with an appendage: the vapers who grip their little Red Rods, the 18350 owners amongst us, the folks who resolutely claim that they are happy clutching their small mods. Why? Because vaping advocates are really missing out on dictating an important message to every representative of Homo erectus walking on the face of the planet, every single member.

From one-eyed cave dwellers and butchers slapping their salami on counters to allotment owners pulling their rhubarb – Time Magazine carried a throbbing story, unearthing a rich vein of information. It’s a hammered home by The Guardian and Men’s Health too:

Male vapers have bigger, harder penises than smokers.

The articles rely on information gained by a study carried out by VA Boston Healthcare System in 2011, where they found: “that men who successfully kicked cigarettes had thicker, more rigid erections and reached maximal arousal five times faster than smokers.”

According to the National Male Medical Clinics: “Cigarettes clog the heart’s arteries, including those that fill the penis with blood during erections. The toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke can damage blood vessels that may lead to erectile dysfunction.”

Doctor Lydia Bazzano, Tulane University Health Sciences Centre, is quoted as saying: “There is a fairly strong body of data that link smoking as a major risk factor for erectile dysfunction.” Recent research has demonstrated that the bulk of toxins present in cigarette smoke simply aren’t present in vapour.

Men’s Health reported that researchers at the University of Kentucky discovered: “that when asked to rate their sex lives on a scale of one to 10, men who smoked averaged about a five””a far cry from non-smokers, who rated theirs at nine.”

So, gentlemen, maybe the next time you’re sent out to vape in a smoking shelter you may wish to offer the others there a tug on your big, firm 26650 device.

As you might be aware, we purchased 30,000 metres of top grade Ti wire and the full three kilometres of it is still lurking underneath a pile of jumpers and spare Christmas wrapping paper. Despite providing a cleaner vape to Kanthal we felt it prudent not to sell it due to its combustibility on the mods available at the time.

With the number of temperature controlled devices now out in the marketplace we have seen that the proclivity for titanium to burst into flames has been greatly reduced. Despite this positive result we strongly caution against using titanium as a standard resistance wire – it is unsuitable for dry burning and poses a risk when over-heated.

It is springier to work with than tempered Ni200 but we are pleased to see that the development of temperature-controlled boards appears to have facilitated a way of using this wire in a safer manner. Also, annealed titanium has entered the market and appears to be much easier to work with. Titanium wire also appears to be less prone to oxidation than alternatives due to the low oxygen content of the metal, which may well prove to be a positive in the long run.

We should point out that we are not trying to instil a sense of fear; we see it as our duty as responsible vendors of vaping accessories to act responsibly and keep our customers informed. We welcome exciting advances in vaping technology and are proud to have been part of some of them.

Manufacturers of boards utilising titanium wire assure us that it is safe for use and we’re happy to trust them to bear the responsibility of that statement. Our concern remains that vapers should not be tempted to use titanium wire coils in mods not designed precisely for the purpose of using it.

Update 9 July 2015: Customer demand has been overwhelming for titanium wire to use with dedicated devices so we have sourced what we believe to be the best quality Ti on the market for this purpose. It will go on sale here when in stock.

While we can only speculate upon the motivations behind such an action, we promise that we will still strive to provide the best service and offer support through a number of online points of interaction.

Our physical address and contact number are listed on both the stealthvape.co.uk site and our new rebuildablesupplies.com online store. Our Facebook page (facebook.com/StealthvapeUK) is updated frequently and we guarantee to respond to personal messages. We are active on Planet of the Vapes too, our vendor section can be found here. If you wish to draw our attention to a question or problem please make sure you tag us by using writing @stealthvape in the post.

Within the next couple of weeks we aim to have a RebuildableSupplies.com Twitter account open (and hope that it remains so). We will be using it to advise users of that social networking service of offers and new products as well as any other site updates.

The feeling of anticipation doesn’t lie in the train-spotter experience; it’s been a while since I’ve found looking at other people’s mods and attys remotely interesting. The joy of the Internet is not reserved to hunting out saucy pictures of cartoon ponies or shooting tanks – even if that is its main purpose – but online forums have an ability to suck likeminded folk together.

I’ve been fortunate to meet a collection of weird oddballs online that, if society had any sense, would be shunned by right-minded thinking folk. Weird oddballs who are right up my street and make me laugh – something BBC’s coma-inducing Miranda can only dream of. Of course, if you’ve been vaping for a while and using forums you’ll already know this: Vapers be like nice. In the main.

I’ve got juices that didn’t shine for me bagged up to give away, there’s a box with bits I sold all ready to be handed over to the new owner and now the slog comes…

To begin with each meet up necessitated that I take along my entire vape kit. I’ve no idea why, but I’d take bags full of wick, wire, juice and kit as if I had to prove I could coil to exactly one ohm after seven pints. This is a mistake – do not do it. Ever.

Each and every meet after this would see people thrusting all manner of atomisers at me. This went on for so long at the last one I barely had time to drink and could totally remember my name at last orders. My tip to the noob is this: pretend you are absolutely abysmal at everything; imagine you are vaping’s equivalent of Nicholas Cage, keen to do everything but unable to do anything in a convincing fashion. The less people rely on you to fix a short means you have more time for your quest to attain alcohol poisoning and your pub grub won’t get cold.

So my problem is this: I’m not taking anything other than a few tanks and a couple of mods. I need to plan ahead of time in order to predict what flavours I’ll be vaping over the course of 48 hours away from home. I have no concept of what type of curry I’ll be eating on Friday night, the chance of me successfully predicting what my vape whim will be on Sunday morning is non-existent.

And then there’s the battery issue: How come I find it impossible to leave home without taking the contents of Torchy’s ebay store with me? This is going one way, an ITV sitcom way because despite previous mistakes I know I’m going to end up repeating them again. Oh sod it – the wire can go in too.

The vape bag is empty but in an hour or so it’ll be bulging again. And come Sunday morning my head will be foggier than the pub was. And I’ll want to do it all over again.

Go to a vape meet.

A by-product of the liberation of Afghanistan has been spiralling opiate use. From the 2009 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Drug Survey, the four-year period witnessed a rise of 53% in opium use and 140% in heroin. This isn’t an attempt to make a simplistic direct correlation linking freedom from decades of war to drug abuse; I include this simply as an example that by attempting to solve a problem another has grown in its place. Whether caused by or opening the opportunity for, Aristotle told us “horror vacui” – nature abhors a vacuum.

Every Christmas brings with it a renewed push to eradicate drink driving from the roads. Almost universally supported, but the act of being drunk and in charge of something has been an age-old problem. In 1872 you could be prosecuted for being drunk in charge of a horse-drawn carriage, cow or steam engine – and yet as recently as 2009 a man was prosecuted for riding a horse while intoxicated while another ran a red light, inebriated, riding a pony trap in 2014. Strict legislation neither prevents nor alters the behaviours; education and a sense of freedom to make choices does. Banning or taxing vaping will achieve nothing but resentment and non-compliance in the same way that a teacher punishing the whole class for the actions of one errant child does.

Under the Town Police Clauses Act, 1847 a person could be fined up to £1,000 for hanging out washing or even flying a kite in the street. Having rid society of such menaces it is now possible to wander any town or city centre on a Friday evening without being disrupted by anti-social behaviour. In the same way that preventing the public beating of carpets didn’t cause drunken yobs to fight a century and a half later, actions and behaviours were replaced for people in high office to continue being concerned about.

In Management Control Systems by Merchant & Van der Stede, in relation to employees, they write that it’s impossible for individuals to enjoy following a strict set of guidelines for a prolonged period of time…they rebel. Merchant and Stede caution that people will fake report figures, call in sick, slack off or demonstrate any number of undesirable behaviours. If employees see what they are being asked to do as out of their control, not meaningful to them or simply unfair they will subvert their outcome.

Their ‘employees’ are analogous for the general public. If public health officials and politicians place strict mandates on vaping then it will be met with large-scale non-compliance because it is devoid of logic, unjust and seeks to control our free will. Like sourcing Snus from Sweden, markets outside of the EU will flourish for mods and juice. Global eMarkets will fill the voids created by insensitive and ill-considered legislation.

There are few whose lives have not been touched by cancer and yet alcohol (which causes 1,008,850 hospital admissions and costs the NHS over £3.5billion a year) doesn’t face the same controls that are heading towards vaping. Imagine the outcry if we were to be told that beer was to be limited to 3.6% and only sold in 100ml child-proof/drip-free bottles.

And no one mentions dementia and Alzheimer’s, the biggest killer of women and fifth largest killer of men in England and Wales. There seems to be a huge disparity and unfairness in the attacking of vaping, targeted as a result of dogma and vested interests, wholly disproportionate to the threat it poses to the population.

I strongly suspect that even if electronic cigarettes are forced out of the national consciousness it won’t free up many hours for public health officials – they will seek out new monsters to battle. A new war to be fought will rise up in its place, probably of equal or less threat to the fabric of society as vaping is.

My postmodern nihilism leads me to pose a further question: to what extent does Karr’s maxim, from the satirical Les Guêpes, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” hold true for our use of nicotine? To paraphrase: the more legislators attempt to change things for us the more they will stay the same. Afghans will remain at risk, cows will still have the occasional drunk owner and people wishing to use nicotine will still find a way to do so.

I understand the reasoning to try to improve the public health but surely that should only be if those members of the public want it improved and their actions pose a clear danger to themselves or others? The data doesn’t support legislation or taxation and, until it does, the de facto position cannot be to assume threat.

All I do know for certain is this: If they remove my liquids from me I’ll be buying an awesome kite and heading for the M1, and to Hell with the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847.

My parents owned records by Max Boyce and we holidayed in North Wales with my Dad’s rugby team – but not once did they mention leeches while I saw them collapse around a campfire in a field strewn with empty Watney’s Party Seven tins. You’d have thought an industry providing 42 million leeches a year to the UK market would be something to crow about? You know, like the low incidence of cholera in Wales in the 19^th century?

Wheels revolve, needs change and the inexorable crushing foot of progress tramples on us all.

You will have seen from the website that Cotton Bacon is now on sale. Not just that, a new form of nickel is here too – not only is Stealthvape probably the only vendor in the world stocking tempered nickel round wire, the product line has been augmented by tempered nickel ribbon.

More options for coils and wicks; advances, developments…change. I love shopping online, I can get what I want without ending up with pockets full of coins – I’m like that, I hate change.

I think it’s an age thing. I think you get to a point in your life where you want to say ‘alright, I’ve learnt lots of stuff and most of it has proven to be useless (especially the bits about celebrities, fashion and pastry making).‘ I think that is what lies behind the elder generation pining for the old days when you couldn’t move in your street for the police. A bit like living in the Notting Hill Carnival without the drugs, violence and annoying dancing.

I know I should ‘get it’. I appreciate that everyone who has adopted nickel coils goes on about how great it all is – it just makes me feel like when my Grandad was shown how to bodypop. I end up feeling awkward, uncoordinated and that the world is laughing at me. Again.

Louder.

It’s a desire for simplicity that has drawn me strongly to stainless steel and taken me away from the brass and copper that I adore. If there were a Facebook quiz analysing your responses to predict your favourite colour then mine would be a freshly polished copper hue. Although, saying that, given the abysmal record of Facebook quizzes to get the right answer that possibly isn’t a given. I mean to say, how the Hell am I ever “Sansa Stark, first daughter and second child of Eddard and Catelyn Stark”? Stupid Facebook quizzes.

It’s a quest for simplicity in the sense that as much as I love the look of freshly polished brass and copper – I loathe spending time doing it. Once upon a time I enjoyed it, the process was cathartic…but once upon a time I did many things I thought I enjoyed (like Facebook quizzes) before discovering the time could be better used to daydream, fiddle and any of a number of other forms of procrastination.

Wheels revolve, needs change and the inexorable crushing foot of progress tramples on us all.

Leeches have returned: Wales once more provides the three-jawed, 300-teethed mini monsters to a medical market. Maybe this means I can skip the revolutions in the vape world and just pick them up next time around.

The problem with personality is that there is no discernable cut off. It seems to me that it’s impossible to say some people are positive and others negative, it’s not a Boolean on/off function. I prefer the notion of intersecting rainbows where one end resides in a pot of gold and the other a vat with the dismembered body of Katie Hopkins filled up with excrement. But focus on the rainbows.

It’s this mental impression of personality that holds me to a belief that no one apart from Katie Hopkins is purebred evil. Pol Pot may have massacred between 2 to 3 million people but, by all accounts, he always sent his mother flowers and was a massive fan of The Two Ronnies – especially Ronnie Corbett’s seated monologues to camera.

The Spock-like logical side to me knows that mods, coils and atomisers have no soul. I fully appreciate the in-human nature of metal. And yet I can help but feel that sometimes, shortly before I wake up, they get together on the rack and plan out to the finest detail exactly how they’re going to ruin my day.

Just look at your box mod, now. Do it.

See that? See those buttons? They follow you around the room. I swear there’s a hive-like collective intelligence like that exhibited by a colony of ants. A single one is stupid – but lob a load of them together like the Argentine Ant super colony stretching 3,728 miles from Italy to Portugal. The same thing if you managed to clone Katie Hopkins and make a billion of them live together without access to Twitter.

No. Sometimes atomisers are egged on by the rest of the collection: “Go on, Gary, you’re nearly empty. You know he’s going to recoil you later. Just mess him about a bit for shits and giggles.”

And so that coil you’ve made a hundred times before, the one you know always runs in at 1.1Ω, gives an odd reading. Or the reading flits about. Or, halfway through vaping, the regulated mod finds the ability to throw up 1,000 watts. But mainly that the wick and coil that operate so effectively on a daily basis suddenly don’t wick juice.

Damn your hide, denizens of the rack, I know what you’re doing – I can hear your tinny chuckles. But it isn’t just that they conspire to mess me about, they constantly flummox me by simply working.

I’d put off getting the new Kayfun for a whole host of reasons. It struck me that the level of complexity of the device was overkill and that, combined with the cost, it would fail to reward me. Of course there was also fear. Not fear that I’d be unable to master the thing, more the fear that being a sizable lump I’d not want to be hit with it when my partner discovered I’d bought yet another addition to the collection. My expectations couldn’t have been lower, like when my daughter made me watch La Hopkins in an episode of Big House Full Of People No One Knows (apart from Cheggers and that vessel of spite in human form).

“Go on Sharon, mess with his head. He thinks you’re nothing – but there are two types of atomisers, those that do and those that don’t. Be the atomiser that does.”

For a while I’ve been accumulating more metal than a patient undergoing reconstructive hip surgery. Plans to cease buying things failed in the same way that I never gave up drink for January, never cut down on crisps and how the bicycle remains gathering a nice collection of cobwebs. The resistance to change, the force preventing me from clearing out those mods not seeing use, feels as though it increases the larger a collection gets.

Do mods combine their mass? Do they begin to exert a gravitational pull? I’ve not witnessed drip tips flying in orbit around the vape stand but I’m betting it happens. Probably when I’m asleep and the kids’ toys are playing around the house.

It’s the catastrophising mind-set I have; the worldview that if things go pear-shaped for vaping under the next government I’ll need to return to simple mech-based vaping…this, and the work of the evil vapers who drum into you the need for a backup to your several other backups. Damn you Pop Will Eat Itself, damn you and your “One’s too many, ten’s not enough”!

In March the collection finally numbered over twenty mods. Of that I only tend to use the regulated ones – so what purpose does a collection serve? How many mods turn you from a vaper into a prospective vendor?

One Internet advert later and eleven parcels sat waiting to be wrapped – and now I realise where the inertia to divest the collection comes from. I’m a man, I have man genes…we don’t wrap unless it’s in a gangsta style. My wife’s birthday present was tastefully presented in the packaging a bicycle rack was delivered in, with a side order of masking tape circumventing the joyous gift.

Packing up eleven items made me empathise with vendors across the country doing this on a daily basis. Not just the tedium of fighting tape, tearing skin from lips and slicing into skin with paper but also the worst bit – having to visit the Post Office.

Entering our local mail specialists is like climbing out of HG Wells’ Time Machine. You are flown back to a time where customers are as welcome as children talking in Victorian family dining rooms. The wonder of the modern age is that for most people, most of the time, we can avoid the ritual humiliation of the Amusement Park queuing-style system.

A woman employed for her observation skills noticed something was up. “You have more than one parcel,” she opined, the air now charged as clearly I had contravened the secret first command of posting. Other options were presented to me that included form filling. Exactly how difficult should sending mail be? Meanwhile, in the ever-growing queue, there had been a birth, two birthdays and one unfortunate fatality involving a greetings card.

I may have finally managed to overcome inertia and sell on some kit but I can’t see this happening again in a hurry.

Vapefest is the premier vaping event in the UK. Despite the welcome addition of other things taking place this year, VF15 will remain at the top of the list of must-attends for most vapers. Noobs will be full of questions like:

• Who is going to be there?
• Will I get to see the man passed out with a straw in his backside?
• Are beards compulsory? And,
• Should I take enough batteries to power a trans-dimensional portal?

A full weekend of drinking, laughs and vaping beckons. Best of all, it’s a family-friendly event. I can’t speak for others, but I know my children love nothing more than to watch me collapse near a PA speaker clutching a bag of shopping. Admittedly they get to do that most Saturdays in front of the market meat van but here they also get to hold my extensive collection of li-ion batteries.

Thanks to the free camping being laid on you can be assured of spotting a number of tent-loving personalities. It is highly probable that Kim Kardashian, Gandalf and Dame Judy Dench are seriously considering joining the ginger one from Harry Potter under canvas in Shrewsbury. Jack Nicholson has spent the last month making a sleeping bag out of Muji packets.

And for those aware of the dangers of being fallen on by a fat, drunk man at half three in the morning there’s always hotel accommodation. Rooms in Shrewsbury are plentiful and many come with that weekend away essential: bacon. A hearty breakfast is the most important meal of the day, it will set you up for the fun ahead and be the buffer between ‘waking’ and ‘curry’.

What is probably perplexing you is why this advice is being given out so early given that VF15 isn’t on until August. Simple, all vapers (if YouTube is anything to go by) appear to be sporting fantastic beards. With false beards available from most leading beard shops this is a truly unisex fashion statement. Also, as the day ticks by, a beard provides an excellent repository for breakfast morsels.

“Is there a VIP section?” I hear you ask. Why no, at Vapefest everyone is a VIP. Beard or no beard, everyone is treated as though they are more important than celebrity vaping politician Nick Clegg. Just like the Deputy Prime Minister, you will be able to shuffle from stall to stall with no one recognising you. No paparazzi photographers, no pressing meetings with the under-secretary in the Department of Pebbles, just an unhindered time to browse and laugh, to laugh like Johnny Depp the celebrity vaping pirate (who is sharing a tent with Doctor Konstantinos Farsalinos).

When you sit sharing a bottle of rum with Johnny Sparrow-Depp he is going to want to know what you own. And have ever owned. Carrying around a hernia-inducing bag full of kit you never use will be a wonderful talking point. Oh how you will both giggle in the sun as you look at the seventeen CE2s and that bottle of Dekang.

And what if something goes wrong or the hernia becomes unmanageable? Shropshire’s NHS is on the case. From minor coil burns to a hole in your ‘The Only Way Is Subohm’ t-shirt caused by a venting Trustfire, the wonderful nurses will be on speed dial to fix you up and send you back into the fray.

But do not ponder on disaster, despite the media hype no one has ever needed to call out the juice mountain rescue or the sea of raffle prizes lifeboat service. The only setback you may have is not having enough space to carry home your purchases and any freebies you’ve picked up. Maybe the time has come to launch the Stealthvape box on wheels. Go to Vapefest 2015!