Hey FCers. I'm back.
Wish I could jump on the Joda fanboy train now that I've received the gong. The coloring on the gong looks nice and overall it seems nicely made, but unfortunately the thing has a pretty undeniable flaw in its function.
The stem designed to hold the enano has a ring around the lip that isn't present on standard enano screens. The ring causes the vape to not seat properly. Here you can see a comparison of standard stems vs. Joda's. Joda's looks more like a mouthpiece than a gong to me.
If I leave the piece on a table and hold the power cord in my lap to offset the weight of it I can get the enano to balance upright on the gong. However, if I try to move the piece at all or pass it to a friend the vape ends up getting off balance and smacking people in the bridge of the nose when they go to hit the piece.
This is what happens any time I move or pass the piece:
Not only does this make the thing a pain to hit and a pain to pass, but I also worry about it slowly loosening and potentially breaking the center tube in the enano. Since it causes the enano to wobble around a lot each time it is passed, I worry that it is causing unnecessary stress where the inner tube meets the outer tube in the vape. Luckily the enano is pretty sturdy, but I'm still concerned.
The entire reason I wanted a carbed gong was to simplify the process of passing the enano in a circle of people who aren't familiar with clearing it. Unfortunately the wobbliness of the gong just makes it more confusing for people, so we're back to warning our guests how not to burn themselves while pulling the standard gongs.
Hopefully this is just a bad gong and not all of Joda's gongs will behave this way.
Either way, I can't recommend him for this type of custom work.
If you still want to place a custom order with him I say go for it, just be patient and hopefully you'll be luckier than me.
There are some differences although I also see similarities, I don't know if those were made by an artist in his glass shop or not? I don't know exactly who all he deals with in the states. I just knew something made him pull those Kleins off of DH gate very fast so I asked him about it. He said it was a conflict of interest and his largest US re-seller, they felt he was undercutting their sales with a similar design for much less. I asked if the company in question was "Tag" and he said yes but it could have been lost in translation because he also buys Tag glass rods! lol (Trautman art glass). Who knows? I can post you plenty of pics of the Hemping though! They are all bad ass rigs and pretty much my favorites right now as you can see lol.
Beautiful collection there Mr. Bonsai! I think I might have the one mega mai tai recycler that you didn't snatch up. I managed to pull the trigger on it right before he switched the minimum order quantity to 5 pieces. It's really too bad that he isn't able to sell more designs through DHG. I've been asking him about his TAG pieces and some other designs for quite some time now.
Mod note: posts merged.