I have not read anything in this thread since my last post, even though I know I have been mentioned a couple times. It's not to be a dick or a sore loser. Rather, it's more like protecting myself, as I am very fragile; probably in ways I don't even realize. I don't have anything against anyone who has contributed to this thread; I was just frustrated because I keep learning new things and trying to share them, and other people keep shooting me down and telling everyone else my prospective explanations are not the actual explanations. Even though they probably are.
If I had been wrong and people wanted to correct me, I wouldn't have a problem. But that's not what happened and I'm probably not wrong. Yet people have corrected me anyway, by providing information that I'm pretty sure is total bullshit.
I have a problem with that. But it's not personal.
What I have learned from my riser mod is not a preferential thing. That is, my modification does not make the Aromed better for me; it simply makes the Aromed better; more effective and more efficient. And it takes nothing away (except the vapor swirls, which contribute absolutely nothing and are probably a perfect example of inefficiency).
There is a lot of common "knowledge" about vaping that seems to have originated with people who vape, rather than through scientific research. Which is fine, as long as it is done somewhat scientifically. But it seems to me a lot of this "common knowledge" is based on faith. Or at least there seems to be a lot of data that has been poorly interpreted by people who vape, then widely distributed as fact, even though it's not. Like which cannabinoids and whatnot are released by vaping at specific temperatures.
Vaping at a specific temperature is not the same thing as heating your material to that same temperature and inhaling the vapor it produces. Baking a pizza in a 500° chamber is not the same thing as heating a pizza to 500°. Not even close. Similarly, baking herbs in a 400° chamber is not the same thing as heating herbs to 400°. Not even close.
If you manage to heat a pizza to 500°, it will turn out completely black. It will probably blacken hours before the internal temperature of the pizza reaches 500°. And remember, this is inside a very large baking chamber; not outside the baking chamber, like the herbs in an Aromed.
When you bake a pizza for 10 minutes at 500°, there probably isn't a single part of the pizza that ever reaches more than 200°. When we talk about heating our herbs to 400°, that does not happen by surrounding herbs with 400° air. Unless maybe that 400° air comes from a huge reservoir of 400° air. Which it doesn't.
As far as I know, every time I have accidentally combusted, it has happened via conduction. That is, I don't think hot air has ever caused my herbs to combust.
Is there any scientific research on either cannabis or vaping? I mean, this stuff has always been illegal to essentially everyone alive right now, including most scientists and prospective researchers. So how could a reliable scientific body of knowledge exist at this moment in time?
If a scientific body of knowledge still does not exist, then how do so many people possess so much so-called scientific knowledge about cannabis vaporization?
I have seen many instances of people explaining vape-related coughing by saying it happens because there is hot vapor in the lungs. (In fact, that's the only explanation I have ever read or heard. Which I can only assume means that's what most people believe.) But it's obviously total bullshit. Which should be clear to anyone, without devoting much effort to understanding why.
If vapor is not irritatingly hot in your mouth, then it can't be irritatingly hot in your lungs. If you turn on your Aromed to 456°F, and use it without herbs for an hour or two nonstop, you will not cough from the even-hotter air entering your lungs.
I've done it. Myth busted.
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Here's how I now look at the different parts of my Aromed. Basically, I compare it to an oven. Because that's exactly what it is, with one difference: Your objective is to bake something outside the oven instead of inside it.
Cylindrical glass lightbulb cover = Oven (or hot air reservoir)
Lightbulb = Burner/broiler
Area of herb holder below the oven = Baking chamber
The Aromed's oven is only large enough to heat a very small baking chamber for a very short time; a space significantly smaller than the Aromed's baking chamber. In an unmodified Aromed, the distance between the oven and the herbs (screen) is huge. A small amount of hot air cannot remain at a constant temperature, or even close, when it has to travel that far.
Using the Aromed unmodified is like trying to use your oven to bake something that's not in the oven.
If your oven was 10 times bigger and your home was only big enough to fit both you and the oven, your oven when opened would probably heat you similarly to how vaporizers heat herbs, even though you wouldn't be inside the oven.
Big oven. Small herb chamber. Not like an unmodified Aromed.
And the burner needs to be near the bottom of the oven, not the very top. Remember, broiling something on the bottom rack of an oven doesn't work, because the heat has too far to travel, in the direction opposite of its nature. And this is in an oven that is much more powerful than a halogen lightbulb.
My dough mod has worked wonderfully because I moved my herbs significantly closer to the heat source and shrunk the size of my herb chamber considerably. Consequently, now I don't have the equivalent of a large room m to heat up with a standard oven; rather, I only have a tiny space to heat up. When I put my herbs in that very small space, they vaporize very easily, and they don't combust.
If you want to use a reservoir to drown someone just downstream from a dam, you need a large reservoir. If the dam is only a foot high, there's a good chance your drowning victim won't be drowned. But if the dam is 500 feet high, your victim has no chance. The water acts just like heat in a vaporizer (minus gravity). So if you want to drown your herbs in 400° heat, which is what we want to do, you need a large reservoir of heat. Which naturally goes up, not down.
The Aromed does not have a large reservoir of heat; it has a small reservoir of heat. I'm curious to find out what would happen if I was somehow able to make my oven/reservoir about 10 times bigger and use my herb holder unmodified, instead of using a riser. I think this would make a huge difference. Yet I realize what I think is going on in my head is merely theory. (Actually it's not even theory; it's a hypothesis.)
If you try to heat the interior of two ovens by creating a seal between the two baking chambers and only turning on one of the ovens, you're going to wait a very long time, if not forever, for your new double sized baking chamber to reach temperature. Conversely, if you were able to block off half of the baking chamber of one oven, while completely removing the second oven, the new, smaller baking chamber would reach temperature very quickly.
This isn't something I know from either vaping or studying thermodynamics, as I have never devoted a minute of my life to consciously studying thermodynamics. (Hadn't really ever thought about what 'thermodynamics' means until recently.) Rather, this is something I know from being alive for 4+ decades and paying attention to things I see every day, that never change. And I'm sure my two-decade-long obsession with understanding pizza has helped me considerably with vaping.
One thing I would like to do is enlarge the oven (or the glass cylinder that surrounds the Aromed's lightbulb), but I can't do that. To try it, I'd have to create a totally new vape. Which I am now considering. Because the Aromed is a rough draft. Its design has not been fully developed yet, and it obviously never will be.
I am pretty sure Research & Experience sacrificed function for form in at least a few different ways. For example, this thing is not a medical device; rather, it's made to look like a medical device from some long gone era. If I'm right, I also think they underestimated how much heat is lost by striving for form over function.
I have made my Aromed infinitely better simply by arranging small amounts of flour and water in a pre-planned pattern. I shouldn't have to do that. I have never studied thermodynamics or anything about electricity, but I think I understand what's going on with these things (vaporizers), in a way most other people don't.
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I am horribly and ridiculously wrong. But I feel like I may have a better understanding of the ultimate objective of vaporizing cannabis than most people, specifically from having baked and obsessively analyzed thousands of pizzas over the last two decades.
Baking pizza is basically the same thing as vaporizing cannabis, and I know I understand a lot more about baking pizza than just about anyone. I'm not bragging. I'm just sharing information, which I have also documented very thoroughly (volumes of pictures and rhetoric) on the internet.
Just improving the aspects I mentioned in this post is not enough to make the Aromed marketable to people like myself, who are horribly broken and need a reliable vaporizer that doesn't constantly break; true medical users. I think I may know how to accomplish that as well, but I'm going to keep it to myself for now.
learn something new everyday.
) but you're essentially using it as a spacer to just raise the screen up higher (what I've gathered from last few pages)? Don't know the diameter of the tube, but it looks essentially like the "Crucible" for the Herbalaire....don't know if anyone has ever tried it. 
This vape is the most fun for me personally!