Okay, the last few pages are kinda freaking me out. Quit smoking tobacco last year and I'm ready to fuck combustion completely. My wife kindly offered to get my first vape for my upcoming 50th; so I've spent 2 months trying to educate myself on an appropriate choice. I finally pulled the trigger on the solo 2 as a solid, simple 1st device and now I'm second-guessing myself. Mind you, I've not even received it yet!
Side note: I got it and a few extra bits from PlanetVape; they were amazing, the lady I talked with was just lovely and patient with my ignorance. I asked about an FC discount like they say to on their sponsor page, not really knowing what to expect. Wow, FC membership has privileges! What a great experience.
Re: your concerns with the last few pages, all I can really offer is my personal experience that it never stopped me from enjoying my original Solo. Goin' on 4 years now? It hasn't seen any use in some months but for a while it was my primary, getting used anywhere from 1-5 stems a day for weeks and months on end. It did have a smell, but it was that "new electronics in packaging" smell that I also found in my PS2, electric toothbrush, one of my torch lighters... they all go away after a little bit outside of the packaging.
When you get it, you'll want to clean the stems with some ISO alcohol or similar. Get a qtip end soaked in some ISO, give it a quick shake so it's not dripping, and invert the Solo 2 with the oven pointing down, and give it a quick swab as well. Upside down and with a moist, not dripping, qtip, so you don't drip a bunch down the holes. It's ISO alcohol so it will evaporate anyways but let's not go pouring stuff down there anyways
You don't need screens in the stem if you grind coarse, but you may find little pieces still going through. 1/2 inch screens sit flat inside, but if you get 5/8 inch screens you can make a little sort of dome screen and put that inside, with the dome pointing up. These are ideal because when the screens sit flat, it's easy for debris to accumulate where the holes are and it clogs them right up. With the domed screen, the holes sit underneath the little domed screen and stay clean and opened until all of the actual screen is plugged up (which can only really happen with pure kief bowls or if you put a lot of oil into it lol). It should look a little bit like this
Other than that I dunno. Make sure the material isn't too moist? Vaporizing will start vaporizing the lower temperature stuff before the higher temperature stuff, so your first few hits are mostly terpenes and water vapor from the water content. The big big hits are around 2-4 depending on the material. Once it reaches temperature, let the stem sit there for 15-30 seconds before you take your first draw and it will help make it cloudier. Don't fight the resistance of the stems/oven too much. Have a glass of cool water or something around, vapor is different than smoke. Seemed to me that vapor had the ability to be drier and warmer than smoke if that makes sense? Plus the cottonmouth
edit:
@I'm Ron Burgundy? I don't know if this will tag you but here's a video AJS posted further back in the thread of a water sesh. Skip to 3 minutes to jump to the start of it.
http://fuckcombustion.com/threads/arizer-solo-ii.23703/page-33#post-1122524