DIY Juice

[Proinsias]

Been vaping a few months now and pretty happy with my mods, atomizers and coil building. I've vaped my way through a few hundred mils of juice and thinking it's worth a shot getting some homebrew on the go, inspiration was mulling over another £8/15ml bottle of Smoked Custard Plus, I got the first for a fiver, with a review saying it was just some ry4 asian & vanilla custard flavouring. How hard can it be

After a little searching it looks like I need a bottle of high concentration nicotine, 72mg looks about the highest I can easily get in the UK, some PG, VG, flavourings and some syringes. Am I missing much and can I raid the kitchen baking cupboard for the bottles of glycerin and wealth of cupcake flavourings within?

I've got a wee stash of used 15ml glass ejuice bottles wth dripper tops, I assume it's cool to just wash & refill these.....

 

[Prof. Moriarty]

Do not use cupcake flavourings as they may contain oil

 

[Prof. Moriarty]

I'd recommend checking out http://www.justvape247.com/
7.2% is the highest you can get in the UK legally. Go for highest grade VG/PG you can find. Flavourings check out the site I listed above, never use a flavour that contains oils in it.
Remember custards/tobaccos those sorts of flavours need to steep for some period.
Syringes get a big one for the VG as it is incredibly viscous and difficult to draw up.
Yes it is cool to reuse the bottles, I do so all the time.
As always if you have any questions PM me if you want, or post on here
Vape on mate

 

[Proinsias]

Cheers, what sort of flavours lend themselves better to minimal steeping? it would be nice to have something I can make & vape quickly whilst I wait on stuff to steep.

 

[Prof. Moriarty]

Cheers, what sort of flavours lend themselves better to minimal steeping? it would be nice to have something I can make & vape quickly whilst I wait on stuff to steep.

Fruits and menthols mate

 

[Yojimbo]

Fruits and menthols mate

+1 for this. The Flavor/Perfumer's Apprentice, Capella's, and FlavourArt are my favorite brands for flavoring.

 

[Proinsias]

Not a big fan of the menthols but I've been vaping a fair bit of fruit so will put that on the menu.

 

[Proinsias]

Had a look about the baking cupboard, most of the flavourings have oil/ethanol but a few like this one are listed as being suitable for vaping, I'll be starting off with the flavours from the flavour/perfumers apprentice but might give the cupcakeworld stuff a shot later.

 

[missmertle]

Been DIYing for a few years now, and mostly use The Flavor Apprentice and Capella's, can't say enough good things about them. Of course, certain flavors that they offer are better than others, but overall, quality stuff. In your initial post, you mentioned your inspiration and I would suggest Capella's V2 custard, with The Flavor Apprentice's RY4 Double. Their Asian is good as well, but in my experience, the Double is a little more rounded and tad more caramel'y, which I tend to prefer, but ymmv. Good luck and have fun mixing, but beware.. it's addictive and soon, you'll end up with a shelf of flavors and experimenting like a mad scientist. lol

Oh, and for washing out the bottles, since they're glass, it's no problem, but when washing the bulbs of the droppers, I would soak them in a little warm water with dish soap and a few pinches of baking soda, as rubber/plastic tends to hold onto flavors.

 

[Proinsias]

Thanks missmertle. I ordered a few bits before you posted, went with the tpa ry4 double you suggest and some tpa vanilla custard to pair with it, the other plan is lime & brown sugar. It's waiting at the post office so will hopefully get to mixing in the next few days.

 

[SiBurning]

Cleaning tip from a chemistry book... Get yourself a squirt bottle for distilled water. After you wash in tap water, give the glass a good final rinse with distilled. It rinses away bad stuff that's in the water, like algae & minerals. Alas, it won't get rid of soap & detergent, but you can use vinegar after the soap and then a good rinse in tap & distilled if the soap gives a funny taste. Also rinse any droppers and squeeze bottles by squeezing some distilled through. You can usually just let it flow through a glass dropper and squirt from the bottle into the bulbs--no need to reassemble it. The specialty rinse containers from a chemical supply house are best because of how they're designed, but any squirt bottle will do it if gives a small enough stream. I usually dry small parts in a bowl with a folded paper towel on the bottom to collect runoff.

 

[Blue_2]

You guys seem to have some good experience. This is heading toward a decent sticky.

 

[Prof. Moriarty]

You guys seem to have some good experience. This is heading toward a decent sticky.

If enough people want it stickied, it shall be so

 

[missmertle]

Thanks missmertle. I ordered a few bits before you posted, went with the tpa ry4 double you suggest and some tpa vanilla custard to pair with it, the other plan is lime & brown sugar. It's waiting at the post office so will hopefully get to mixing in the next few days.

Cool beans. Def let us know how your experiments turn out. Start with low percentages (esp. for the lime, it can be a very strong flavor) and work your way up, tweaking as ya go. A few duds in the beginning is expected, so don't get discouraged.

 

[Proinsias]

First attempt, 5ml of key lime & brown sugar 100% VG aiming for ~6mg. I'll need to get proper measuring gear promptly but for 5ml made by counting drops I'm pretty pleased. At about an hour old it's vaping away nicely and compares rather favourably to my current fruity daily vapes. Will be trying another 5ml aiming for the same result shortly.


4 ingredients, 5 mins, one emtpy glass dropper bottle. I used the ejuice calculator here. 8 drops of 7.2% VG nicotine using the dropper, rinsed the dropper and put ~72 drops of VG and then straight from the bottles I added 12 drops of brown sugar and 7 drops of key lime. Shook it up a little, gave it a few mins, vaped it and felt my wallet relax. Spent £25 all in and got enough nicotine for 600ml @ 6mg, I will need a little more pg/vg and flavour to get beyond a few hundred mils.

Feeling a little more self sufficient now, I'm sure I'll still be buying and trying juice but it's nice to know I can whip up acceptable juice, coils and wicks on demand. Fresh daily cotton wicks are easy as pie on the Derringer and alongside cleaning the red hot coils under running water the coils are lasting and it's tasting great. I'm in no rush but will need to pick up a basic mech mod, charger and batteries in attempt to KISS from the ground up. SWMBA has gone cycling daft recently and is eyeing battery chargers for bike lights so hopefully I can piggy back on that and get something mech battery friendly too.

In short: success! Thanks for the tips

 

[Blue_2]

Good work!

SWMBA has gone cycling daft recently and is eyeing battery chargers for bike lights so hopefully I can piggy back on that and get something mech battery friendly too.

A lot of bike lights use the 18650 so you are definitely in luck. Check out the Nitecore i4. Amazon's got it for under $20 and it's pretty widely used.

 

[Proinsias]

This one? I was thinking I'd have to spend twice that for a decent charger but £15 would ease the path to mechs. Just checked the cats eye bike lights she's bought, they are AA which the Nightcore, and I'm assuming most other chargers, will it deal with just fine. I've heard a lot of 'here be dragons' when it comes to batteries, chargers & mods. It's been about 15 years since I was regularly using multipurpose rechargeble batteries on heavy rotation. Always keen to do things on the cheap but would rather play the waiting game than the safety game, will have a read up on the Nitecore as it looks like a good option, cheers.

 

[SiBurning]

First attempt, 5ml of key lime & brown sugar 100% VG aiming for ~6mg. I'll need to get proper measuring gear promptly but for 5ml made by counting drops I'm pretty pleased.

10ml & 50ml glass graduated cyliners are easy to come by, and 5ml are hard to find, but not impossible. Best to get glass because plastic is harder to clean of flavors. Also, I'm not sure which plastics crack from certain liquids--maybe someone can chime in--I'm curious.

I use a graduated cylinder (10 or 50ml) except for experimenting with flavors which needs just a few drops at a time. With a cylinder, all you need aside from eliquid bottles are some really small funnels and maybe a really thin test tube brush. (I use plastic funnels and don't have a brush, but you might need one with a 5ml cylinder.) I also break up the large bottles of PG & VG into smaller squeeze bottles, but ones that flow well, not slowly, and are also easy to refill. So they're not the same that I use for eliquid--I want the eliquid bottles to drip, not flow, when squeezed. This makes it really easy to make up liquid. You have the calculations beforehand, so you just pour or drip each liquid from their squeeze bottle or dropper until you reach the right line. Takes 3-5 minutes to gather everything, make the liquid, decant, and clean everything up.

The only annoyance is the bottom of the cone on the funnels fits the eliquid bottle perfectly, kind of sealing the bottle, preventing air from escaping, and then the cone fills up instead of the bottle, so you need to lift the cone off the bottle. I'm sure I've seen funnels with an extra piece like a sort of reverse-slit on one side or a little square just near the base of the cone or along the cone to prevent the round cone from fitting perfectly in a round bottle, but haven't been able to track any down lately.

 

[Proinsias]

Will probably buy some graduated glass cylinders & syringes from ebay but will take a few days off on the slight chance there is any vintage glass nearby, pretty sure the smallest few of the plastic funnels we have aren't used at all and could be stolen for ejuice use.

 

[missmertle]

Also, I'm not sure which plastics crack from certain liquids--maybe someone can chime in--I'm curious.

Mostly, it's the polycarbonate tanks that have issues of cracking. Also, not just cracking, but some take on a more mild deterioration, i.e. turning clear tanks cloudy, but don't actually make any cracks. It's all a breakdown of the material, in the long run. Thankfully, most measuring supplies that are plastic rather than glass, are polypropylene, which don't have the same issues- totally different chemical makeup and are used in labs with much more caustic liquids than we're dealing with.

I've scoured a bunch of different lists for "tank cracker" flavorings on the various forums and FB groups I belong to, but I tend to take them with a grain of salt. A LOT of the listed flavorings, are ones I have used in my mixes, for years, IN polycarbonate tanks (before I switched to a Kayfun, I used to use Vivi Nova tanks almost exclusively), and have never had an issue. I guess it all depends on the concentration of the flavorings in your mixes. The only ones I have personal experience with tank damage are straight banana flavorings, highly sour flavorings, and sometimes, ones with lots of mint (peppermint and wintergreen particularly).