Vaping with Julia

Boy has this been a busy and lightening-fast week! I can’t believe the time went by as fast as it did. Has it really been more than a week since Christmas?

Last weekend, New Years Weekend, was spent going over some new vapemail we received from my buddy Jon at MyVaporStore. Jon tries to keep me up to date with all the new products his incredible store sells but sometimes its just impossible, there are only so many things I can pay attention to at one time.

Some of the things I was able to try out I’ll talk about below (some will appear in reviews upcoming, others may not. It depends.)

The Joyetech eVic arrived last Saturday. John really wanted to review it so I gave it to him to use for a few days. Apparently he (John) had no idea that The Smoken Joey was sending him an engraved eVic. You should have seen his face yesterday when it arrived. Having already used one for a few days that ‘breaking in’ period was over and John had decided that the eVic, if nothing else, was a damned good PV, so he was more than happy to see one arrive in the mail yesterday with “Spinfuel Magazine” engraved on the side. The outside of the box had the words “For Johnnycakes Only!” lol, John was one happy camper all day and into the night. Needless to say, he really likes it.

So what do I think of the eVic? I love the price, it is a high-end PV with the most modern electronics yet inside so when you consider that the eVic kit, which includes the battery, USB cable, Wall charger, and the thick manuals, can be purchased for $104 you would be silly not to buy one if you are in need or want of a full size PV. What I mean by full-size is any PV that uses an 18650 battery.

John had a good point in his review about how much a ProVari costs when compared to the eVic. You can buy two eVics for the price of a single ProVari, so the math works out well for the eVic. I like the quality of the hardware as well. Cheap finishes don’t engrave well and the engraving on John’s eVic looks great. So, if you are looking to buy a full-size PV and you’re considering the ZMAX, Lambo, and Provari or eVic, you should go with the eVic. As far as vaping with it is concerned, I’m not yet used to the menu system but so far I’m enjoying it immensely.

I should mention that tomorrow I’m supposed to receive a package from Jon at MyVaporStore that will have a new “Anytime CVI” PV which looks like it has many of the features of the eVic, I’m sure I’ll have something to say about that next Friday.  We are definitely reviewing the CVI next week.

I also received some Kanger T-3’s from MVS (MyVaporStore), and a few more ViVi Nova’s from Vision, in Red, Black and Grey. I love love love the Red one especially! You know, as much as I love the Vision Vivi Nova’s I feel as though I should warn you if you haven’t used one there are a few things you may need to do to maximize the vaping experience. I know a lot of people say they vape great right out of the box, but that’s not entirely true. The Vivi’s vape “well” right out of the box, but there are some things you can do to improve the vapor production and boost the flavor.

In fact, the one thing I have trouble with when using any “wick” system thingy is that if I bump the voltage up too much I get a burnt taste with less flavor and when I set it for optimal flavor I suffer in the vapor department, and finding the magic ‘spot’ isn’t as easy as you’d think. The one advantage that a cartomizer-tank has over a tank using replaceable wicks is that the carto will produce vapor at the max as soon as you can find the sweet spot (the eVic makes that an easy task), but with a wick tank or Clearo sometimes you have to clip the wick, season the wick, or at the very least, break in the wick with a few hours of vaping. Once you have it set up to produce the best vaping experience you’re good to go for a couple of weeks, which is why I use them in the first place. Oh, and I like the 1.8-ohm atty head the best. If you haven’t yet picked up a Vision Vivi you should. The ones at MVS are priced right and you don’t have to worry about them lying around the store and getting stale. MVS pushes more products out of the warehouse then you can shake a stick at.

As far as eLiquids go we’ve been working on reviewing 9 flavors from Vaporetti. I don’t want to give out any spoilers, but I can tell you that you won’t want to miss this review.  Lisa, at Vaporetti knows flavor, and if you are someone that places flavor at #1, you’re going to want to read the review.

We are also ramping up a “sequel” review on several eLiquid brands we’ve reviewed in 2012. One of the great things about reviewing eJuice companies is they are always coming out with new flavors and tweaking older ones, so there is always a reason to come back every 6-9 months and do a sequel review. We’ve got some great ones lined up. And there are plenty of eLiquid vendors we’ve not yet reviewed at all, so we’re working on lining up some of them for January and February. So, lots happening in the eLiquid department.

Personally, I’ve been vaping all sorts of flavors and brands’ this past week. Lots of Ginger’s eJuice, her sweet flavors mostly, Hot cocoa, vanilla iced cupcake, things like that. If you ever have a sweet-tooth attack pick up a sweet flavor from Ginger and you’ll be all set.

In addition to Ginger’s eJuice I’ve been tapping some of our reserves and vaping a few from Alice in Vapeland. Alice is a company we NEED to do a sequel with because we never did review their entire line, and they have a few new flavors. I’ve been vaping their Black and White Cookie and Cupcake City. Unfortunately I have since exhausted the remaining Alice juice so there is nothing left now.

There was some FanceeJuice left so I took the remaining eLiquids and shared them with the team upon returning to Florida. For some reason all the juice we took with us when we all went home was gone long before we returned… people were really going through the storeroom looking for juice most of the week. Note to self: Build up supplies!!

Here’s something interesting that happened this week. While I was gone John, Mr. Bossman, had decided that my long requested “Choice Awards” would be something we would begin in the New Year. So, he set out to write the plan and put together some basic ideas for the graphic we would use. I was ecstatic when I got home and found out we were moving forward with the Spinfuel Choice Awards because this is something I think we were missing in 2012. If a particular eLiquid flavor gets a 5 star rating from every member of the team there should be some kind of recognition for that. Finally, we’re doing it.

To make it fair we decided to go back through the eLiquid reviews we had done since June of 2012 and find the flavors that had earned those stars ratings (from the whole team) and add the graphic to the review and to announce those winning flavors. But here’s the funny part (not that funny really). We did one graphic that I thought was pretty good. More importantly, I thought it was the final one. So I worked with Dave and Jon yesterday and sent out the graphic to a couple of places. Turns out that wasn’t the right graphic and a new, and admittedly better, graphic was supposed to be the one I was supposed to send out. Needless to say, I spent time today fixing those issues. Hopefully, it’s all taken care of now.

Lastly, I wanted to let you guys know about a show I’ve been watching on VapeOn.Tv. The PR manager of Alice in Vapeland, Lori, a real doll, and Will run this show called “Down the Rabbit Hole”. It’s on from 8-10 on Tuesday nights. That’s’ a terrible time if you like to watch sitcoms TV, but its interesting, funny, and Lori is cute enough to look at regardless. They do some giveaways, interviews, and general vape-speak stuff. Andrea from The Plume Room was on this Tuesday, and two Tuesday’s ago Dan from FanceeJuice was on as a guest. I highly recommend the show. I’m thinking about asking if we can sponsor some giveaways. If we can I’ll set some up and make sure to mention somewhere here on Spinfuel.

Lastly, you may have seen that we’ve kinda changed the name of our magazine. We dropped the eCigs from the name because “eCigs” is just so 2011. LOL. Our parent company is called “American Vaper”, so our full name now is Spinfuel – An American Vaper Magazine. We are still using “The Art of Vaping” as our tagline. We paid a small fortune for the trademark so we just can’t stop using it 😉

And that was my week, as uninteresting as it could be unless you lived it I guess. It went by much too fast and there is enough work left to do that I’m sure I’ll be here working, or working from home all weekend. Either way, there is a lot left to do to get our New Year off right.

We have some great reviews coming up too. We’re working on an amazing giveaway that we can’t talk about right now. But if we can pull it off it’s going to be historical. Maybe we can tie things up next week and I can let you know about it then. You will be shocked with the prizes if we do it.

Oh, the Newsletter is coming out a week from today. I sure would love to see more subscribers so please, if you haven’t sign up yet please do. And if you have any spare time, try to get the word out. This newsletter is MY project and it has to work. We’re going to offer exclusive content, exclusive giveaways, and a lot more newsletter-specific coolness, so it’s worth subscribing. It’s free too, so why not?

Tell me, what have you been doing this past week? Anything interesting? I would love to read about them in the comments below.

Have a fun and safe weekend. See you next Friday!

Julia Barnes