KeroZen
Chronic vapaholic
I should note, I have a problem with "robo farts". I think most people like to complain about it because they've read it and assume any form of plastic smell (no matter how small) is robo farts. Most plastics smell, as long as it doesn't smell like burning and that it doesn't taste like plastic.
Since I used the term a few posts earlier, I take it as aimed at me. So in short: I've been beta testing nearly all Smiss units since they started their vape division, and I've been using the term on purpose. In a lot of their conduction devices the heater was surrounded with a sandwich of (probably rockwool) insulation wrapped in yellow polyimide tape (generic name for the material know as Kapton)
The tape is able to sustain the temperature, no worries, but the (possibly acrylic) glue on it had a bad and strong smell, which needed over 3 entire battery discharges worth of empty burn-ins with active cooling (fan or blowing in the device) to get rid of. The higher the temperature the stronger the smell.
Then in the FM8 alpha unit for instance, they used an awful silicone bonding glue close to the heater (something like Silastic) and this was just ignominious, made the device unusable. Same material was later found in other brands when I beta-tested the Elo, and then later the VapeDynamics Duo, both units were big commercial failures (buyer beware VapeDynamics is coming back and launching a new device, cf the unreleased section, I would stay clear of that just by principle)
Some of their later units had a black silicone which was more smelly than the clear one used in the FM5 range. And the FM5-MiniPro has one extra silicone piece right under the heater, which smell I'm able to detect compared to the FM5-Pro and FM5-S.
Finally in the CFV teardown from puffitup, we saw what looked like again some polyimide tape inside the two separate telescoped heater elements (CFV and SwiftPro have two sensored heaters inside, one outter and one inner, heating the SS spiral heat exchanger) Some users reported a strong smell in the CFV thread, while my SwiftPro had strictly zero smell out of the box. If mine had that tape I would have detected it in a blink, but nope.
So our concerns are completely valid and to me the "robot fart" term couldn't be more appropriate. If the smell comes from the shell, no worries whatsoever. If it comes from the air/vapor path, well, that's a different story.