When will you be taking pre-orders?
Extremely soon!
Just making sure there's enough people to commit to the soft launch.
I think we'll be good!
I received a question asking about why I chose Zirconia versus Alumina (what is currently used in ceramic ball vapes) and I wanted to address that.
Alumina is cool as it's the same chemical composition as the sapphire beads themselves (al203)
On paper that sounds really cool, and depending on what you're going for, it could be.
However, the problem with an alumina housing is the same reason why the material works so well as a bead. It's heat transfer is twice that of titanium; but for a
housing that means it's going to instantly dump tons of heat into the bowl. The only way it wouldn't start cooking the herb is if load is too far from the heat source to begin with, which is a different design flaw.
Zirconia ceramic is the only advanced material that has an ultra low conductivity close to glass.
For pure convection, that's ultra important.
This might be worth a separate post on its own, but a lot of vapes these days are
claiming to be pure convection but have metal bowls. It's not happening. Don't believe the hype, your taste buds know better.
Alumina is a great material, depending on the intended purpose, but it transfers heat ~3000x faster than Zirconia. And these XLR coils ramp up at about 3 degrees Fahrenheit per second, so a "fly-by-wire" design doesn't work, I built one in December. I mean it works great, but it dumps a lot of heat into the bowl for the reasons I've outlined above.
All this extra conduction, which transfers so much heat into the bowl, is why other designs have to rely so heavily on "thermal mass" and high operating temperatures as its drawing so much heat out of the system.
Comparing the flexural strength of the two materials, at our usage temperatures it's not even close. The goal here is to offer something with the benefits of glass and pure convection but with a much more durable "end game" design.
The lowest conductivity values at our temperatures, by far.
Here's an interesting value, zirconia features quite a bit of thermal expansion. This is great for our usage; one of the problems with 1.7 is the metal coil expands more than the glass housing, which makes getting the perfect fit extremely important, and a bit tricky.
A higher thermal expansion from this material allows the housing to "snug" up to the coil as it heats, promoting better heat transfer. The added top bezel of 1.8 means it has to load from the top down like 1.5, so it can't fall out of the coil either.
Tinkering around the other day, made a few small aesthetic adjustments to the bezel and face, let me know what you all think!
very much appreciate that sincere statement, it means a ton!
