Thanks to Parallel Coils and Twisted Kanthal Coils, I have not been building a lot of standard microcoils anymore. With vaping, at least for me, there always seems to be new ways of “taking it to the next level”.

For me, both parallel and twisted kanthal coils are both considerably better than a standard microcoil. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with basic microcoils, it’s just that I’m always after the best possible vaping experience, and I like tinkering anyway.

I have already done a full walkthrough on setting up a parallel coil. Now it’s time to learn how to twist kanthal. I’ve watched a ton of different tutorials on how to do this, and surprisingly there are quite a few different ways to approach it. For me, the way I am about to show you is what changed everything for me and made this process stupid simple.

What You’ll Need

Kanthal – I would recommend starting out with 28 gauge, however you can use this tutorial for any size kanthal. I get mine from Temco on ebay here.

Drill – You can use basically any type of drill or rotary tool. I use a basic Ryobi hand drill.

Paperclip – any size

Nail Clippers

Pliers

Step 1

Snip off a piece of kanthal. You probably want at least a couple feet. Once you are comfortable you can do a bigger piece and make a lot so you’ll have extra and you won’t have to keep twisting more. Bring the 2 ends together and pull it out so that the other end looks like this:

Step 2

Take the two ends and cross them over to make an X. It should look something like this:

Step 3

Manually make about 5 tight twists in the kanthal where you just made an X. This should close up the open end securely. It should look something like this:

Step 4

Ok now you need to get your paperclip ready. What you’re going to want to do is straighten it out, then make a “hook” on one end. The hook should go almost all the way around. The idea is to loop the wire through the hook so it won’t come free.

Once you have the “hook” created, tighten it directly into the drill. Make sure it is totally tight.

It should look something like this:

Step 5

This is where all the action happens. If you twisted up the ends of the kanthal back in step 3, you should have one big “loop” of kanthal.

Slide the loop through the paperclip.

Then take your pliers and get a firm grasp directly on the spot where you twisted up the ends. Pull the kanthal straight out so you end with 2 long parallel pieces, one end looped through the paperclip and the other end securely gripped with the pliers.

Now you can fire the drill. I’ve found that it really doesn’t matter what speed you fire it at, but you can start off slow if you want. The main thing is to keep a steady grip on both the drill and the pliers holding the other end of the kanthal the entire time you are firing the drill. You don’t want to have any slack at all in the wire.

Continue drilling until the kanthal is completely twisted. You don’t want to twist it too much so that it buckles on itself, but you should end up with very tight twists.

When you’re done, you should have something that looks like this:

Here’s a better closeup so you can see how close the twists are to each other:

If yours looks like this – congrats, you’ve just twisted your first piece of kanthal.

The Bottom Line

This is just the beginning. The possibilities with twisted kanthal are endless. For example, you can experiment with different gauges. You can double twist kanthal. Heck, you could even probably pull off a kanthal parallel coil if you have the right gauge and atomizer to attach it to.

You can basically wrap most kinds of coils that you could wrap with normal kanthal, you just want to be mindful that the ohms are going to shake out differently. Many times, you are going to want to opt for a wider diameter coil. I tend to do a lot of twisted kanthal builds on a 5/64 drill bit or a 1/8 drill bit, but again, you can basically experiment with just about anything.

Another great thing about twisted kanthal is it gives you a use for the crappy 32 gauge and up kanthal you might have sitting around in your vape box. I don’t think much of anything over 30 gauge for a standard coil, so this is a perfect way to use up some wire you wouldn’t have otherwise had a use for.

Here’s an example of a coil I recently built using 28 gauge twisted kanthal. I did 6 wraps around a 1/8 drill bit, and it clocks in at 0.8 ohms:

The most important thing with twisted kanthal is to make sure you check your ohms because generally you’re going to be playing in much lower ohm territory than you would be with a more standard microcoil, so it’s super important that you understand battery safety, have the proper device and are checking the ohms on everything you build.

From here, the sky is the limit. Have fun and be safe!