Thunderhead Creations x Mike Vapes Blaze RTA
Antony gets his clouds on with the Thunderhead Creations Blaze RTA
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by Antony Lord
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Mike Vapes has been one of the most prolific and popular vape designers over the last few years and now he’s teamed up with Thunderhead Creations to bring us the dual coil Blaze RTA. Mike’s rebuildable atomizers have gained a fairly good reputation so I asked our good friends over at Healthcabin if we could take a look at his latest creation.
Specifications
- 26mm diameter (24mm at the base)
- 37.8mm tall (excluding drip tip and 510)
- 2ml straight glass / 5.5ml bubble glass
- Stainless steel construction
- Top down 270 degree honeycomb airflow
- Dual coil build deck
- 810 drip tip
The Blaze RTA comes in a small presentation box with the RTA behind a clear window so you can easily see which of the five available colours you’ve chosen, Healthcabin sent over the Matt Black for me to test. Inside the box you will also get a 5.5ml bubble glass (2ml straight glass pre-installed), a small user leaflet, two premade fused claptons, a bunch of spare O-rings and deck screws, and finally a coil cutting guide.
The Blaze RTA is 24mm at the base but this flares out to 26mm with the 2ml straight glass and 29.8mm with the 5.5ml bubble glass. As this is a dual coil RTA, I opted for the larger capacity, the glass is held firmly in place with an O-ring at the top but changing it over was easy and spare glass sections are available should you need them. It’s only 37.8 mm tall excluding the drip tip and 510 connection so it’s fairly stubby if you’re not a fan of tall tanks.
There are plenty of exterior design details like the bold vertical lines and diagonal slashes around the top cap and base but nothing that looks too busy or out of place. You also have a Blaze logo on the chimney section which does unfortunately become slightly obscured with the bubble glass fitted.
On top we have what is supposed to be a standard 810 drip tip however this isn’t the case, it’s too small. It’s close but this non-standard size means that you can’t use your own drip tips here and you’re a bit stuffed if you manage to lose this which would perhaps explain why it’s also available as a separate purchase (Blaze drip tip). I do like the bold colour chosen though, and it seems particularly well suited to this matt black tank.
The top cap has a few threads and requires a full one and a half turns to expose the large kidney shaped fill ports underneath, those diagonal cut marks around the base of the top cap make this easy to get a grip so they’re actually functional rather than being purely aesthetic. The fill ports are a little recessed into the top of the RTA, but even so I didn’t experience any difficulty filling this up. You might just need to exercise a little bit more patience when using e-liquid bottles with larger nozzles.
Below this there’s the adjustable dual cyclops airflow ring with hard stops at the fully open and closed positions and a nice amount of resistance to the movement. These are 12.9mm by 2.6 mm and have an angled section at the top to help direct the airflow down towards the build deck.
At the base you have a few logos and a nicely protruding positive pin so I’d say this one is probably hybrid safe if that’s your thing. The base is 24mm but as this flares out, particularly with the bubble glass fitted, I’d say this is going to be better suited to larger mods.
Unlike a lot of other top down airflow RTAs, the chimney section is removable rather than being fixed in place inside the tank. The advantage here being that you can align everything and then screw the tank on rather than trying to line things up blind with a fixed chimney section which can be quite awkward. There’s a bit of doming going on inside the chimney section as well which should enhance the flavour.
The build deck is fairly large with 270 degree airflow coming from the sides and underneath the coil with two very large wick ports. This is a postless design and you shouldn’t have issues with the screws deforming coil legs.
There are two nice premade multi core fused claptons included in the box but as usual these are Nichrome so I can’t use them thanks to my nickel sensitivity. I actually managed to make some kanthal triple core fused claptons of my own which was quite an achievement as every time I’ve tried this in the past I’ve just ended up with a tangled mess.
The included coil cutting guide suggests a leg length of 5mm and this seemed about right once I’d got the coils in place. Securing the coils was straightforward but I’d suggest using a coiling rod to stop them getting too deformed, this will also help you position the coils more easily as well.
The cotton needs to be cut slightly outside the base as it’s quite a distance down to those large wicking ports at the base. As I tend to use 2.5mm inner diameter coils, I actually found that I only needed to fluff the cotton lightly but you may need to thin things out a bit more if you’re going for regular 3mm i.d. coils.
With everything in place and juiced up I discovered this is pretty airy but even fully open I was getting excellent flavour, the wicking was keeping up as well even at 100 watts on my 0.15 ohm build. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on having the airflow about three quarters open with the power set to 75 watts and it’s stayed there ever since. Whilst this is hardly silent, the airflow is smooth and I’ve really been enjoying a nice cloudy vape after all the pods I’ve been using recently.
Pros
- Excellent flavour
- Easy to build and wick
- Build quality seems very good
Cons
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Non-standard drip tip
Conclusion
Hats off to Mike Vapes and Thunderhead Creations for bringing us another great RTA. It’s great to see a decent rebuildable amongst all the stock coil pods so if you’re in the market for a dual coil RTA, then this is well worth putting on your short list.
Many thanks to Healthcabin for sending the Thunderhead Creations Blaze RTA over for review.
Antony Lord
Reviewer at POTVI was a twenty a day smoker for 25 years and like most smokers I was always going to quit "next week". Having hit my mid forties and having the usual smokers cough and difficulty with anything more than moderate exercise it was obviously time to give up the cancer sticks. I bought my first e-cigarette in 2013 when they were expensive, difficult to find and quite frankly... crap. I used it for about a week then went back to the roll ups, mark up another failed quit attempt. The fact that I had just changed jobs and was under quite a lot of stress probably didn't help. Move on to 2016 and whilst I was browsing eBay I noticed that one of the suggested items that would occasionally pop up was for a cheap e-cigarette. It looked similar to the one I'd bought 3 years earlier but it was only £5 (about 8 times cheaper than before) so I decided to give it another go on a whim. Once the kit arrived I managed to gradually replace the cigarettes with my new kit over a two month period and got into watching YouTube reviews for newer kit. My cheap and cheerful kit was replaced by a more upmarket affair, and being a noob I made a mistake once it arrived... I put in the supplied direct lung coil, this was of course a complete revelation and I haven't touched a cigarette since. Oh and I no longer spend the first five minutes of every day having a coughing fit either.
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