I'm back from vacation! As promised, I've been working mixing chemicals recently, but what's one more hobby for a mad scientist and Quantum Anomaly eh?

^{I might show off more of my collection of vials and flasks in a later post, but for now...}

Vaping is a big deal for me. I've been a pack-a-day smoker since about 2003, up until this last May. I first started vaping off and on when Blu around 2010, then again with Volcano around 2012, and various pens ever since, but I never fully kicked my analog smoking habit. That is, until my wife and I both decided that after our honeymoon, we wouldn't buy another pack of traditional smokes. With the help of a good friend and local manager of a vape shop, we were able to better keep that promise by upgrading our gear from wimpy vaping pens to powerful modular box units.

^{The batcave's got nothin' on my setup}

This has been fine and all, but even with steep discounts offered by trading my 3D printing services and scotch eggs for batteries and fluid, it can still be expensive. I go through about 15 milliliters of fluid a day, which can be just as expensive as smoking if you have a discount, more so without one. I'm a bit of a heavy vape user, prefering low-nicotine and high volume clouds to a more traditional light pen with a higher nic content. With the recent changes to ecigarette regulations, those trades and discounts are a lot harder to perform legally, so my friend did what any good friend would do, and offered up some training on how to make ejuice. Training I'll be sharing with you today.

See, ejuice is like soda at a gas station. Anyone that's worked food service or been a gas station attendant knows that soda, even with a fancy cup, costs less than 10 cents a glass to make, and is one of the most profitable things to sell, at 1000% (yes a thousand percent) profit or more. Ejuice is the same way. A 15ml bottle can cost 12-18 bucks for premium, coming out to .80/ml. Bulk orders and discounts can get you as low as .40/ml. Today I'll be making it for .10/ml, INCLUDING the cost of supplies, and allowing myself access to make it for about .03/ml on almost all future mixtures, so long as I care for my starting equipment.

^{Some of the [REDACTED] have been highlighted in black highlighter for your [REDACTED]}

Booya! The box doth arrive. Wizard Labs has everything you need to get started, and I ordered backups of everything I could. Unfortunately, the only thing they were out of stock on was a 14 gauge needle tip, but I can make do. But enough of that, on with the unboxing!

^{I'm surprised that each packing peanut doesn't have its own warning label}

The box was well and tightly packed, plastered with "fragile" and "this end up" stickers. Plenty of bubble wrap and bags within bags. All properly labeled and segregated. Call me impressed at this point.

^{Bubble wrap is a glorious gift that comes free of charge with every order of $50 or more!}

All's good so far, let's sort out the contents.

^{So many contents!}

There, now we can see things a bit better. 250ml each of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin. 120ml of nicotine, at 48mg strength. I'll be mixing this down to an end strength of 3mg/ml, but got the higher strength so that I can mix it down without having half of my solution be the nic base. It's also cheaper that way, and I'm all about saving money here. 14 sample flavors, 8ml each. 2 each of each capacity of luer-lock syringe, and a couple bulk packs of disposable pipettes. Last but not least, a bit of safety gear to supplement my own stock of things that keep a mad scientist safe. I went ahead and got a few packs of disposable finger-grip nitrile gloves and a nicotine test kit to ensure my batches were consistent. Nicotine in concentrated solutions can be deadly, and can cause skin irritation if you get it on your hands or blindness if you get it directly in your eyes. Better safe than sorry.

Let's Get Mixing!

Three flavors were selected for the first run. Honeysuckle, bubblegum, and french vanilla. I will be mixing 40ml batches of fluid, 50/50 pg/vg at 3mg/ml nic strength, and to stay on the safe side I will be mixing 10% flavoring. This is slightly low, but I would rather mix in more flavor later than have to cut it down. I also opted to use 60ml containers, to give me plenty of room to mix and shake the solution afterwards. Each pipette has a different gauge needle that I pre-selected depending on what solution the needles would be handling. 18 gauge needles for solutions in PG that need high precision (flavoring and nicotine) 20 gauge for lower-precision (PG and VG base fluids).

Dangerous stuff first. With clean gloves on I opened all of my final containers. Again, this is a on-joking situation. 48mg strength concentrated nicotine is safe enough that all I need are goggles and gloves, but I went with the face mask anyway. Even a mad scientist takes precautions.

2.5ml of nicotine were added to each bottle. Adding the nicotine first also ensures that with each step down the path, the nicotine will be more diluted as the final solution is formed.

Several boring steps were omitted, namely doing the same thing with each part of the mixture. Dip, measure, squeeze. Repeat for each flavor. Consult the calculator to make sure that I'm extracting the right amount, etc. This one however, deserved it's own picture. Vegetable glycerin is THICK and VISCOUS. The 16ga needle just wasn't enough to pull through ANY fluid, so I opted to do it with just the syringe without a needle attached. This worked ok, but still took quite a bit of suction to get the required 20ml out. Lesson learned.

After each fluid extraction, the pipettes were cleaned with an alcohol solution, taken apart, and set out to dry. They may say "single use" on the package, but I've used syringes like these for all sorts of things and they tend to be rather reusable so long as you take care of them and don't let the rubber gaskets dry out.

And viola! 3 separate containers of my own home-made premium fluid! Because half my order was equipment, this batch came out to about 10 cents per milliliter, but in the future all I will need to order are the base ingredients and flavor, which should reduce my costs quite significantly, down to about 3 cents per milliliter. Still, at 4 bucks per bottle, plus a bit of fun labor mixing chemicals, I think I'm coming out on top.

I've since sampled the honeysuckle and french vanilla, and am rather glad I stuck with 10% flavor. This gives me a good idea what it tastes like without being overpowering, and I think I'll be writing down custom percentages for each one as I fine-tune them to their final forms.

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All other photos by me