Screwball Appreciation Post
This is my “recovery position”; a day bed and coffee table in the living room so I can join my partner,watching TV, but where I am able to still lay down when I need to.
Firstly another thank you to Cal, I really appreciate your assistance all the way through my Screwball journey.
I wanted to write a review of sorts, just to share some of the things I have been playing with in the last few days.
While I’ve been recovering I’ve been using my Screwball most frequently, as it’s consistent, reliable and the lower temperatures both lower the chance of combustion, but it also produces a nicer vapour, it’s more comfortable imo and I don’t cough any where near as much as when I’m using my other devices at higher temperatures. This has been so important over the last month as coughing fits would cause me to vomit in pain so for similar reasons I have been using the Screwball with the bowl in the half bowl setting; which I’ll explain more on later.
Lately I’ve been running my Screwball with the starter kit PID, with the bowl set to half bowl position and the PID set to 475f. I like to firmly pack my bowl with flower and I usually like to add a crumb or two of shatter.
Hears a lazy long video of me using the Screwball…
Also after talking to Cal about the way that the Gem cut rubies work and why he chose them, I wanted to see for myself if I got the same results he was talking about.
I’ve never had a easy way to compare them against other gems as the Screwball is unique in that it has a huge gem chamber and I don’t have enough gems to be able to fill it so it made it impossible to replace the gems to compare it. A not on this, the screwball is unique out of the heaters I have. The Thermal mass of the Screwball is primarily from the gems, the amount of titanium in the screwballs heater is far less than the others I have. The titanium in the screwballs heater I believe is around the 14g and I’m pretty sure the weight of the gems exceeds that amount.
Anyway…
With a bit of “you can borrow that if I can borrow those”; I got my hands on some wireless diffusers and a couple of coils so I could do some testing to try and compare how they perform. My main interest wasn’t the diffusers them themselves but in the fact that they had small gem chambers and that it was very way to swap the gems around.
I mainly was using different sizes (2mm, 3mm, 4mm) of rubies, zirconia, borosilicate, the gem cuts rubies.
The Mary came with 3mm rubies and I wasn’t overly impressed, I had to push the temperature up to 600f to get an experience that I enjoyed. So I tipped 7g of the gem cut rubies out into a container; not ever 2/3 if the rubies in the Screwball and put them in the Mary Jane. I threw it on the coil at the same temperature and it was a horrible combusted mess. I turned the temp all the way down and started raising it up to find the right temperature. I ended up settling on 565f when using the half bowl setting, it still can get close to scorching so I could turn it down further but I like the quick 2 draw clear.
The gem cut rubies transfer a noticeably larger amount of heat to the air and then to the herbs at the noticeably lower temperatures as compared to the other options I had to test with.
I ended up settling on two setups that sort of perform similarly - before returning my gem cut rubies back into my Screwball as it’s my daily driver like I said while I’m healing.
The two setups I was using the performed very similar was; the Mary Jane filled with 7g of 2.5mm gem cut rubies running @ 565f; and for the same experience I was using the Tiodw (22mm) with 9g of borosilicate balls with the coil running @ 590f. I have included some photos below of the AVB for compassion.
I guess the take away is that the gem cut rubies transfer significantly more heat to the air than the other options I tested and I wonder at what a wireless Screwball is going to be capable of assuming a similar sized gem chamber.
These configurations performed roughly the same, similar number of breaths per bowl, similar roast and similar flavour. The only major difference was when using the Screwball bowl, which is compatible with both diffusers, is that the Tiodw gets stuck sometimes.
The design of the bowl that comes with the Screwball is probably my favourite bowl’s out of the ones I have. It’s compatible with most of the diffusers I have used. It’s light and thin and that allows it to heats up and cool down quickly. It has sufficient surface area in contact with the herbs to ensure a quality roast, without stirring or having to preheat the bowl or heat soak the bowl and herbs. This protects a lot of the more volatile compounds and makes for an amazingly flavourful vapour with whatever diffuser you are using.
The one thing I would say about the bowl is that it get stuck in some of the joints I put it in, so on the advice on a friendly Milkman, I added a Tiny Might 2 o-ring to try and improve the connection but managed to get what I was looking for when I added a second blue o-ring, it’s now perfectly stable and doesn’t get stuck in the joints when heated.