In early 2018, there was a new craze in the vaping world where mesh was being used again in the vaping world. I say again, because mesh served a different purpose back in the day as a wick. Let’s look into a little history and get technical.
Mesh has been used in vape devices for ages as a wicking material and nothing more. Those devices were called genesis rebuildable tank atomizers or RTA’s, it was considered a new form of vaping hence the name, Genesis or “birth” . The mesh came in flat sheets and was cut up, rolled into a straw like shape and fed into the tank. Through a process called a capillary action, the juice would wick up through the tank and to the coil, positioned at the top. Sound’s good but there were a few issues with using mesh however, like the hotspot problem and not to mention that you had to blow torch the mesh in order to achieve a layer of carbonisation on the surface and eliminate the hot spot effect. It was tedious as hell, to say the least.
Originally in genesis atomizers, a hot spot occured when the mesh and coil came into contact causing a short circuit, so plenty of fidgeting was necessary to achieve a vapable glow. Others would even use a cigarette rolling paper beneath the coil. When fired, the paper would burn away leaving a layer of carbon or ash in this case, underneath the coil itself which made it faster, due to the absence of shorts but even that wasn’t foolproof.
So there were always a few issues with mesh, not to mention that the liquid would not always wick to the top properly, they leaked like crazy and a subtle tilting of the tank was necessary to feed the liquid to the coil which to be honest, made us look a little weird! To be frank, I never got it… You got a mouthful of juice if you tilted too much and they just didn’t work that well!
Everyone always raved about how amazing the flavour was but I tried every single genesis tank we had in the store and none of them out performed a dripper. It was good, but not all that and you always had a mixed bag of results when it came to flavour.
After a few years, organic cotton made its way into the vape game and was quickly adapted for use in drippers – in some cases, it replaced the stainless steel mesh too. So mesh sort of disappeared, until now that is.
But why mesh is important; let’s get real here. Are there any real benefits? Well, yeah. Quite frankly, there’s a few. As mentioned before, a mesh coil on a dripper or other tanks eliminate hot spots due to the evenly distributed heating and finely woven steel strands. Incase you missed it, we went from using it as a straw to wick our coils, to using them as the coils themselfs. Thus, a more even glow is achieved producing not only heaps of vapor but great flavour as well. There’s no need to wrap coils with an rda such as the Mesh RDA by Vandy Vape, since all you have to do is cut a strip and then secure it. Easy as pie. There’s no need for “strumming” the coils either since as discussed before, no shorts! And now they’ve found themselves as prebuilt mesh coils in mainstream tank atomisers. Check out the amazing Freemax Mesh Pro, Smok TFV12 & TFV8 Baby and Morpheus Tanks all using the updated mesh coils, here.
And that’s it, that’s mesh for you! I hope you enjoyed this brief lesson on where mesh came from and how it has returned. Have you used mesh coils in one way or another and if you have, how was it? Better than a regular coil; only time will tell but it looks promising so far. And to wrap it up, the key universal rule when vaping – always remember to Keep It Moist!