OK so basically... Titanium is best for uniform heating and durability.
Quartz is best for flavor but is fragile and can break. I've noticed a lot of brands and companies just throw these two together...
Liger... Full titanium body with a small nub shaped quartz dish.
Turtle banger... Quartz surrounded by titanium.
Halo... Ti but quartz "halo dish"
I was wondering... If i had a piece of broken quartz, quartz is quartz right?
What if I just threw that on my domeless? Yea, it might jiggle jiggle around, but wouldn't the gist of the flavor saving be made?
Let's say I have a quartz clock or something. and it burst into a bunch of pieces. I take a small piece and throw it in middle of my ti nail. As I heat the ti nail, the quartz also gets warmed from direct heat of the ti (being warmed by the enail coil)
Would this serve the same purpose as the other ones?
The ultimate "poor man's not spending 100$ on something ican do for 15$"
Let me address some of the points here.
Ceramics of any kind (from the plain old white ones to SiC and SiN) are all much better heat distributors than Ti, and taste infinitely better to boot!
Quartz is absolutely not the best for flavor. Sapphire is hands down the best flavor that you will find on any nail. SiC and the D-nail Quartz halo (which has a wicking surface and flat heater to reduce abovementioned pooling, but still will get more pooling than sapphire) is great for flavor and won't be beat by much that is available right now though. I have owned and used >$200 quartz nails many times and these cannot even hold a candle to the flavor you get from the quartz halo (which costs considerably less!).
By the way, quartz is not necessarily quartz. Various grades will prioritize purity of silica over stability of form, etc. Moreover, the shape and size/surface area/mass etc of the quartz will determine how useful it will be for our application.
Do not bother with ti, there is no reason to dab on a ti surface when using an enail in this day and age. The exception here is the ti base on a d-nail halo. These bases do not seem to effect the taste at all. I have never tasted ti when using any of the halos.
If you have less money to spend, get the SiC halo with a 1.4 slim series base. It'll cost you more than extra cheap chinese quartz and ti, but those materials just don't come close and by the time you replace a few cheap nails, you could have bought the SiC anyway, which is more durable, tastier and 54329083504985349053480594383049583409534x better at conducting heat.
If you're on a lower budget, get yourself a domeless.com ceramic nail, which will taste worlds better than any cheap ti/quartz on the market.
Onto the liger nails, I have never used one of these in person. I would like to see what a liger quartz/ti hybrid functions like, but it costs more than either the quartz or SiC halos FFS!
The quartz inserts are crazy pricey! How is a 16mm quartz insert $70 when a dnail sapphire insert is $50????? Lab grown sapphire such as that used by NASA for windows and lenses up in space costs a fortune more to manufacture than a small piece of workaday quartz, which is manufactured EVERYWHERE! This price discrepancy is not justifiable given materials costs and the fact that the sapphire insert also has the wik surface! I would recommend saving yourself the cash and buying a SiC halo or quartz halo (you could get either with a sapphire insert and still spend the same kinda money as most Liger combos cost).
The cheapest liger ti with quartz insert combo runs $170, whereas the quartz halo (machined in a way that ensures the thinnest film vaporization and hence best flavor/more complete vaporization currently possible with quartz) can be had with a slim series base for $140.
The cheapest liger ti with SiC insert costs $180, the dnail slim series base with SiC halo can be had for $120.
The math speaks for itself.
Now if you are gonna use torches at all ever, get the SiC.
If you want the best flavor with less durability and slightly less complete vaporization, get the quartz halo.
Hope this helps man.