Hi everybody. I wanted to share my latest SR-71 adventures. Maybe someone can benefit. I’ve just finished my 3rd gram of wax in my Herc and was debating on whether to clean it or start loading in a 4th gram. Taste was still pretty good but I wanted to try some new wax that tested out to 93% THC and I was reluctant to put premium wax into a dirty cartridge that had been vaping some run-of-the-mill CO2 oil (and I still have 3 more grams of CO2 oil). After mulling this over for a bit I decided to do the only sensible thing. I bought a second SR-71! My reasoning; I’d get a cartridge which will only be used with the best extracts , I’d have a back-up, I’d get a chance to try out a black rod for making a super stealth setup and last but not least @
ataxian was a bad influence on me!
I assembled the new SR-71 with the black rod and checked the results with my DMM (0.9 ohms). I put it on a 3.7 battery (AW IMR) and started trying to melt this premium wax into the coil (which came just to the top of the rod). It was very slow going. This was the most stable, difficult to melt wax that I’ve encountered. So I helped it along with a heat gun but this time I stopped frequently and checked airflow with the mouthpiece. After melting in each chunk I checked to see if I could get a hit. Only light wispy hits after holding the button down for long periods. After loading in most of a gram without getting better results I gave up on the black rod for this wax. I took the Herc apart and found the bottom chamber pretty clean. Maybe a .1g of oil there that was easily scraped up. Then I performed a rod-ectomy replacing the black rod with a white one without removing the coil. I reassembled the Herc so everything was the same but with the higher powered heating rod.
The difference was dramatic. Now I could get those big rips again. This new wax was very strong and clean tasting, an overpriced delight!
On the Iris it still produced clouds at 6.2v even though this is only about 5W more than the power of the black rod with a fresh battery.
I think the SR-71 has a large thermal mass (all the stainless steel and the oil itself) that needs a lot of power to get it going. So if you decide to go with a 3.7v, black rod setup you may have difficulty vaporizing the most stable of oils. Less stable extracts should work fine tho. So, my stealth setup remains 2 18350s instead of one. Maybe I’ll try putting the black rod into my old SR-71 containing the CO2 oil?
All in all, I’m still lovin’ my SR71s. It’s been my daily driver for a month now and seems rugged enough to go the distance. Plus, it’s a lot a fun to experiment with for us nerds.
Hedo
Edit: After another session 6.2v was not enough to keep the vapor coming with this difficult to melt wax. I bumped it up to 6.7v which was better. Finally I went back to the regular top and got great results.
Edit2: Another session with the Iris. This time I set the Iris to 7.0v and that seemed to be close to perfect for this wax. The Iris said that I was at 35W which is 5 amps at 7 volts, so I think that I'm pushing the Iris to it's limit. Interesting how different concentrates need different power levels for best results. With the CO2 oil I was able to run at 5.1v and still get decent clouds.