My Minivap review: Taming the beast
I have been playing with my glass core Minivap for a few weeks now and feel ready enough to make a review. I have the 7 temperatures new firmware. The unit I have been testing was gifted to me by Jorge the man himself in order to polish its quirks.
The bad:
First impression upon receiving the unit is that its big and bulky and not very comfortable to hold. The interface is simple but it manages to get a little confusing because it is too easy to involuntarily push buttons while holding it. The battery life indicator is so vague I cant tell how much i have left.
It had a lot of new vape and silicone smell, spent like 2 days doing burnoffs and compulsively cleaning the flexicone until it faded away. Once I started using it, taste was not good for the first few chambers and manteinance was a bit high... not a good start.
The meh-meh:
Burnoffs done, taste got better and I started using it native with the flexicone. Experience was good but not brilliant.
The basket chambers work really well but they are a pain in the ass to refill when hot. Also, the biggest basket gives a lot of inhalations but no dense vapor. When placing the herbs in the glass core and filling it i could get the clouds I want but taste faded away soon with a lot of vapor left.
Started experimenting with temperatures and inhalation times but couldn´t get to a point where i received the clouds i wanted with the desired taste. Using the small basket as chamber helped a lot giving full convection taste and really decent clouds but was still lacking the clouds i crave.
The stock wpa worked well but i had a lot of silicone in the airpath and it was a tiny fragile piece.
At this point I understood Minivap has a dated chamber design but an extremely powerful heater. Maybe there was something I could do to improve it, which leads us to:
The good the beast and the mad vaporent:
Taste started to get better as materials cured until it got almost perfect. Vapor production got monstruous and I really started to like the flexicone but I still didnt get the experience I want from a powerhorse. I wanted to do small loads big clouds and bigger effects too.
While stoned something clicked on my head: This thing needs to use all possible conduction in the mix. The herb has to be in the core but the core has too much capacity and kills flavour too quick.
My solution was to use the biggest basket as a chamber reducer. With this tweak the vape got waaay better. I could press the herbs in the bottom like in a conduction unit and maximize its hybrid nature. But vapor was hot and harsh, silicone stem is not as good as glass for this purpose, and i didnt really like the stock wpa.
Thinking about it I just wished I could use my vapcap stems as a much better solution for this problem... so why not? Tried several ways until I found the key: Use the condenser. I mcgivered a condenser into the silicone cone of the minivap and it stood really firm and steady, and with the included orings I could fit any stem ever made for the vapcap.
So i got the vape loaded
Got the condenser and the cone and they coupled perfectly
And finally got a Minivap with a vapcap stem
3 inmense clouds later:
Bonus: tried my Woodscents wpa with Minivap and a slightly larger load (excuse my poor video recording)
So as final thoughts:
First impressions were not good, but started improving every time I used it. Now i have mastered the Minivap and it is an absolute beast. With my vapcap hack this thing delivers cool smooth killer vapor without any technique involved. It has a massive battery life which i have never spent in a day.
Once dialed in manteinance is almost non existent and it is one of the most versatile units i have ever tested.
¿You want full convection? use the basket as a chamber. ¿Mix of conduction and convection? use the core as chamber. ¿Want a lot of inhalations in one load? Full core and green temperature. ¿Want full spectrum fast extractions? Herb tight packed in the core, big basket as a chamber reducer and screen, red temperature. Orbit flight guaranteed!
PD: I have an old teflon core too, I am testing it but I feel tremendously underwhelmed by it. So far I think the glass core is so much better that the other one cant even compare.
