Hi all,
I have gained a lot from the many informative postings of this excellent vaping website so here's some first impressions of my recently purchased Launch Box.
Firstly the people at Blissville were very good with processing my order and emailing responses to all my questions promptly. I am also very impressed with the information and responses of Magic Flight on this message board. First class!
I already have a Silver Surfer which I find to be a very good vape. However, I have been wanting to find a 'back up' vape, as well as something that is portable, and as the price seemed reasonable the Launch Box felt worth a punt.
First looks; It is small, unbelievably small and discreet.
At first when I used it I didn't seem to get much in the way of vapor such as I got from my Silver Surfer (not that the visual cue of vapor is the main thing, rather whether or not it effectively vaporizers your herb is what counts). But when I passed it to my partner I could see vapor swirling around under the clear top, which I hadn't seen/noticed when I used it (sometimes it is the angle of the light!). However when she breathed out it was clear she had combusted it somewhat (a strong burnt popcorn smell etc).
Having read various postings underlining the need to inhale slowly I thought I understood that already, but actually it has taken me a few 'tests' to realise that my slow was not enough,
the inhale has to be s l o w ! ! !
Once I retrained myself to inhale slower I started to get visible vapor, not as big/dense as the surfer but now I could at least see something. As one poster said, it gets the job done! I agree it does, and for such a small little unit that is portable it does that very well. I particularly like the fact that it doesnt use a lighter as it looks like it'd work great on the rare occasions I go fishing when it's windy and difficult to use a lighter when I am huddled on the rocks waiting for the fish to bite!
The rechargable batteries that came it seem to last well enough to vape a couple of trenches. Altho I am thinking of getting a 4 X AA/AAA Energiser unit that I saw in the supermarket for a reasonably cheap price as these (from memory) were about 2450 mha, so I guess they would pack a bit more of a punch and last a bit longer than the ones shipped with the unit. The little glow of the light that comes on when the battery is in place is excellent for showing that you have contact as without it I realize there would be times where I thought the battery was in contact but actually it wasn't, I guess without the light one would just have to maintain a sense of pressure against the battery to ensure contact is being made. The glow of the light decreases as the battery power is diminished as well as the general feeling of heat coming from the unit in one's hand while holding it, so at first I wasnt sure at what point the battery was 'used up'.
So after having several test sessions I formed a couple of queries, the first was after vaping with the Launch Box I noticed the vaped herb seemed to be a little bit 'speckled', i.e. it tended to look like it had both little bits of green and little bits of black almost combusted herb, it wasn't like the vapor was burnt but it had a little bit of popcorn taste/smell, whereas the spent herb of the Surfer tends to be uniformly even where the spent herb has changed from an unvaped green to a more golden color but without any black bits. So I was interested to find out if the spent Launch Box herb was still usable in the Surfer. And secondly I felt that visually the trench of the Launch Box seemed to use more herb than what I normally put in the Surfer.
So to test the above I first filled the wand of the Surfer with my usual modest amount (I know the Surfer can handle a large amount but I generally only use fairly small amount of ground herb simply because that tends to be enough for the effect I want and also because I usually dont have lots of it available). Anyway I then tipped out the amount I put in the Surfer wand into the Launch Box trench and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had been putting if anything less into the Launch Box than I had been using in the Silver Surfer. I then inserted a freshly charged battery and went about vaping the trench, my intentions were to then tip the spent herb into the Surfer wand to see if there was anything more I could glean out of the green and black from the Launch Box. But I got quite written off by the modest trench (less than level with the shoulders of the trench) and didn't finish the experiement and revape the spent herb in the Surfer until the next day when I found that I obtained a good hit in the Surfer from the LB's waste herb.
I think the LB's trench certainly gets hot, and it probably needs further time and usage to get the technique just right so over heating doesn't result. I found that the herb at the bottom of the trench if over heated would stick a little and required a little tapping upside down between tokes to get it mixed for the next vape, if it wasnt shaken/tapped/mixed between tokes then if over heated the material at the bottom of the trench could remain stuck and combust a little.
So overall, as someone already has said it does the job. It is tiny and I feel works well as something portable without needing a lighter or to be plugged in. The taste isnt as clean as that from the Surfer but I say that only as a comparision knowing that they are quite different machines, the bottom line is it works well and as long as one has charged batteries and breathes in slowly (but not too slowly) it will produce effective vapor, not as clean as my surfer but infinitely better that thick tarry combustion! So for my purposes it is a thumbs up from me
My one remaining query is about cleaning. I know it comes with the little cleaning brush which seems to work well in brushing the spent herb out after the vaping is finished. With my Silver Surfer, after a few months it needs it's metal gauze removed and cleaned or replaced, otherwise it becomes gummed up and hard work to draw air though, when the gauze is clean the toking is very easy and a pleasure. However the Launch Box has a kind of very fine gauze that is fixed, I am left wondering how this will be over time, will it gum up? Will simply applying alcohol gently with a cotton bud be enough to clean it occasionally or will the disolved residue begin to seep into the gauze and never be fully removed? Wont some stuff/residue fall thru or work it's way thru the fine gauze and eventually gum it up?
Silver Surfer - Launch Box
