My Dabbler arrived earlier this week. I wish I had a gram for every time someone has posted this on FC, but it is smaller than I thought it would be.
The Dabbler is not the sort of device I would normally own. I don't use concentrates much and the Dabbler is designed specifically for oils and waxes and such. There's a lot of interest in the pen form factor, however, and I know nothing about this segment of the industry so I wanted to try the Dabbler to further my education. Based on reports I've read, a lot of pen vapes out there are poorly engineered conversions from e-cigs that don't work well. This one is from a venerable and reliable company with experience in real vapourizers, so I expected the Dabbler to be well-made and to work as advertised. I was not disappointed.
The Dabbler comes disassembled in a nice metal case:
Fully assembled, it is still small and light. True to the name for this form factor, it resembles a pen and isn't much bigger or heavier than a good old fountain pen (which I can still remember, not sure about you kids).
The mouthpiece is plastic and fits onto the part they call the cone, which is on the left below. The centre shows the top end of the battery and controller, and on the right is the heater coil.
The battery is charged through a mini-USB port in the bottom of the unit. There's no cable. A neat little USB/mini-USB adapter is included instead, making the kit compact:
My initial impressions of the packaging and construction were quite positive. It looks and feels like a nice, solid unit. My first test with any device is to draw through it before using it in order to estimate restriction and look for any taste. The Dabbler has a somewhat restricted draw, which didn't surprise me based on my examination of the mouthpiece. Unused, I didn't detect any flavour. I did a couple of dry heat cycles to burn off anything left from manufacturing and shipping. I watched for any off-gassing and didn't see any. I then hit it again empty to check for changes in taste, and again found nothing.
The only concentrates I have at the moment are some ISO reclaim and a little kief. I first tried the reclaim and got a pretty thick cloud out of my first hit. Because it was reclaim, the flavour was not great. (My wife said it tasted stale, which is exactly right.) The second hit was a bit thinner, the third was downright weak, and the fourth produced nothing. I think I probably would have gotten two or three more hits with better material and perhaps a bigger load. (The reclaim is quite thick and I was afraid of damaging the coil while loading it.)
I found that after using it with the reclaim, it had acquired a flavour, so I cleaned it with ISO and got rid of all but a slight hint of the taste. I think a more thorough cleaning would take care of that. I'm not sure if the mouthpiece can be soaked in ISO; does anyone know? I don't recall seeing the answer in the thread.
I know kief isn't on the list for this device but I have some so I thought I'd try it anyway. It worked quite well in my opinion. Again I got a thick first hit, thinner second, and in this case almost nothing on the third. I thought maybe kief might leave the coil clogged up or dirty but it didn't seem to. The load probably could have been bigger, but the fact is that the Dabbler is pretty much a 3-4 hitter and then reload. I'd say this is its weakest point. Loading it takes a little care and isn't something you can do easily on the go. This makes it less of a portable solution and pretty much sidesteps the battery life issue.
On the positive side, it does what it is designed to do quite well. Despite the short path, I didn't find the vapour harsh or too hot. The flavour from the kief was quite nice, but the reclaim tasted, well, like reclaim. My assessment is that the Dabbler delivers the flavour of the material without adding its own note, and that's really all you can ask.
That's about all I want to say without living with it for a while. I'll be ready to comment more once I get some decent concentrate to try.