DaveRickey

Well, I started vaping a couple of months ago, and like a lot of people I was immediately unhappy with the battery life of standard eCigs. Seems like you have barely gotten a cigarette's worth of puffs out of one, and you need to swap for a fresh battery.

So I started looking around at the options, and I didn't like any of them. For stock eCig products, you've got the eCigars and the 601 ePipe, both of which have nice big batteries but also have the atomizer and battery compartment in one unit, along with all of the electronics. So when the atomizer wears out, or fluid gets into the circuitry, you've got to replace the whole thing. The mini pipe uses a little 14250 cell you can't buy from anyone but the pipe manufacturers, and doesn't have any more capacity than the stock 801 it replaces.

So I looked at aftermarket battery packs, which addressed all of the technical problems of stock eCigs, and made some significant improvements in some cases, but had awful aesthetics. I showed a friend some pictures of some of the better ones and asked him what he first thought when seeing them: "Sonic Screwdriver", "Old School Pager", and "Pipe Bomb" pretty much covered all of them.

So I decided to try and turn an actual pipe into an ePipe. Another friend of mine who actually makes and sells "Sonic Screwdriver" style mods told me I was taking on a really hard problem, that it was harder than it looked, but I went ahead and started working on it.

First round, I got a 16340 (CR123-size) cell and stuffed it into the bowl of the biggest cheap pipe I could find, and put an RCA connector on the stem end, mating that through a hot-glue and heat-shrink adapter to an 801 atomizer:



It worked, after a fashion. At least, I could hook a switch to it and vape from it, but there was a lot it didn't do I thought an ePipe should:

1. No indicator of when it was running
2. No safety switch
3. Hard to change batteries
4. Way too long
5. Battery wasn't really high enough capacity

So I started looking around for solutions, and realized this was a much bigger job than I could handle with a rotary tool and soldering iron. I bought a drill press, found out what size battery the 601 pipe used (18350), drilled out the bowl to be big enough for that plus the wiring (took some serious modification to the drill press to do this without sending pieces of pipe flying in every direction), shortened the stem end by about 1 inch, and found some itty-bitty coax RF fittings to use for a power connection:



I also found that a cable boot made a good way to hide an RCA->801 adapter. But as you can see, I had a real rat's nest of wires on top, and no room for them in the pipe:





At least it looked mostly like a pipe, if a bit clunky and steampunk. But I wanted something better, and a few hundred dollars worth of tools, some solder burns, and some torn up IDE ribbon cables later, I had this:







Although I "MySpaced" the photo angles to not show the lack of a proper cap and the battery connection, you can see this one is much better and less obviously not a normal pipe (it's now my standard vaping tool). It does everything I wanted, and passes the "Would you take this through Airport Security" test, which nothing else I was seeing in the aftermarket battery mods would. So, more tools, more parts, and I hope to make that one look roughly like this:



Of course, that's not good enough, is it? So I've bought a bunch more pipe bodies, more parts (including some to make a battery compartment so I don't need a complicated pack anymore), and I hope to make something really pretty out of this:



Anyway, that's kept me busy the last couple of months, and hopefully once my parts come in I'll be able to justify my wife's patience with all the money and time spent on this project by making some for other people.

--Dave

Robert

Hey Man, good to see you! I remeber you- how are the Pipes coming? I still have a corncob pipe I want to mod.

Oggy

When she brings up the exspense, just remind her of all the money your not spending on cigs. And how much healthier not smoking said cigs are, and maybe that will help. Great job and very ingenious thinking look forward to seeing the next one.

Hachiroku

OH, goody! Another OCD experimenter!

Dhileas

I'm actually more interested in a pipe mod like this for a 510 than a flashlight mod or a $199.99 "Spade". This would look really cool!

mgatlin

I know this is an old thread but your original post inspired me. I'm sorta cheap by nature (one of the attractions of vaping vs. smoking) so I thought I'd give it a go myself.



I wound up making a fairly simple e-pipe for under $20. My soldering sucks, so I screwed up one of the switches (luckily I bought 3 of them). Also, the button is on the stem, so it takes a little getting used to the most comfortable way to hold it, but I like that I can throw on any eGo or 510 parts, and it works with my charger, etc.

Here's a link to the YouTube - HowTo video about it....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rGw7tzM4sI

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berger

Very cool...thanks for sharing it..

tek

awsome thanks for sharing thats cool bro.

Shekinahsgroom

Very nice video...

How do ya charge the battery if its all wrapped up in tape and soldered to the switch?

mgatlin

You just hook the eGo battery charger up to the connector by the switch. Charges just like an eGo/510 battery.

Shekinahsgroom

Aaahhh, but what happens when the mosfet in the ego fails?

Which it will, eventually....then you're kinda screwed, huh?

Won't be able to charge the battery.

Rocketman

Then you put a $4 ego board in it.

wetwire

Always a quick witted answer around here!

Shekinahsgroom

LOL, how did I know you were gonna show up?

Sure, make me look like the bad guy, then you swoop in to save the day!

Mgatlin, this is the "go to man" for modding in here!!

He's the one that clued us all in on the Ego switches....failing.

And the answer man for just about anything...

mgatlin

I figured something would wear out/fail sooner or later, so I kinda think of it as a disposable unit - hopefully I'll get a couple of months out of each one. The main difficulty was soldering the switch in the first place (I really suck at soldering). On my next set of pipes, I might just cut open an old (or new) eGo battery and use the guts from it.

One thing that's weird is on one of the pipes I can use a SmokTech dual coil cartomizer just fine, but when I put it on the other pipe, it flashes the blue led on the switch and shuts off (circuit protection, I think). It only does this on the dual carto, but works fine on my 510-T attys. I figured my crappy soldering was to blame...?

tek

I am guessing you got the board from goodprophets.com right?

VanguArd

dude, this is awesome. once i'm in the guard, i'll have to tinker around. i love innovations!!

tek

once ur in the guard there is a bit of decomminsioned equipment perfect to use that gets tossed, keep a eye out!

berger

hmmm.....picturing tek building an M1A1 in basement from surplus parts...

tek

umm.... me? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO... well.. ok once a long time ago.. the hard part is getting the foundation out of the way....

berger

not with ammunition it isnt..

tek

But it is when your trying to get it out quiet..

berger

yea...but you have an M1A1...what the heck do you need to be quite for?

Shekinahsgroom

Ya know, I've heard of tank mods, but isn't that a little extreme, huh?

VanguArd

agreed, everyone around will be quiet for you >=)