So yesterday I was perusing the e-cig forum and I came upon an awesome thread about creating Nano Dragon Coils. I’m about a week late to the party on this one, but it is still a relatively fresh concept. The premise is you create a tightly wrapped coil that is small in diameter and rather than threading a wick through it, you surround it with wick, leaving the center of the coil hollow for air to travel through. The result is incredible vapor, and you can really tell the difference from the nic effect as well. Overall it’s amazing. It’s also surprisingly simple to set up.

I have already whipped up several different builds on different atty’s. Luckily I had a fresh RSST burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to twerk it out and fire it up. My build is a .7 ohm single coil and it is a beast. Please note that building sub ohm coils can be extremely dangerous so I strongly recommend you keep it over 1.5 ohms unless you really know what you are doing and have the correct hardware and batteries. ANY custom built atomizer is potentially dangerous and you are doing this at your own risk.

Here’s the result – this is me blowing a cloud of HHV Shadow on my second build:

That out of the way, here’s how to do it…

First off you need to wrap a good coil. I used 28g kanathal. You could also use 30 or 26.

Cut yourself off a nice chunk of Kanathal. Once you have that you will need something to wrap the coil around. For this one, I used a large sized paperclip that I partially straightened. I would probably use a small paper clip to get the coil even smaller in diameter, if I had one. But as you will see it works fine with a large. You can use pretty much anything up to a 1/16 drill bit. Anything above that is likely going to give you too large of a diameter.

You probably already have a pretty good idea of how to wrap a micro coil. Basically you want to wrap it as tight as possible so that there aren’t any gaps. The more wraps you have, the higher the ohms are going to be. If you have never done this before, try starting out with a minimum of 10 wraps, and then adjust from there on future builds.

Once you have that done, it’s time to bust out the RSST.

Remove the stopper on the fill hole and loosen the ground screw.

Attach the coil to the positive and negative posts so that the coil is sitting horizontally. You could also do it vertically, however the RSST in particular is set up in a way that makes it super easy to do a horizontal coil, and I think they are a little easier to set up the wick on so that you get good airflow. Try to get even spacing between the coil and the posts, and try to place the coil so that it is at about the height of the airhole on the outer sleeve of the RSST.

Once you have connected your coil, check the ohms.

Always, always, always check your ohms. I check mine with a multimeter or on a SVD. If your ohms check out, it’s time to apply the wick.

You will need 1 cotton ball. I use organic cotton balls so that I know they are free of any pesticides. I picked up a bag on Amazon for a couple bucks and it will last me a hell of a long time.

Roll the cotton and apply the wick.

Pull the cotton ball apart carefully so that is stays in one piece but is elongated. Then roll it tightly to create a tail for the wick to put into the tank.

Make sure you still keep the cotton in one piece.

Once you have the tail tight enough to fit into the wick hole, thread it into the hole so that it reaches the very bottom of the tank.

If you kept your wick in place you should still have a ton left sticking out of the top of the wick hole.

Next, we need to run the wick UNDER the coil. The idea here is that we will run it under the coil and then wrap around the top. I used a very small flat head screwdriver to press it down and thread it under the coil. If you need to bust off some of the cotton to squeeze it all through, now is the time.

Your cotton should be wrapped so that it is basically covering every part of the coil except the opening on the front and back – you can put the paperclip back through the coil while you are doing this part to be sure the holes won’t get obstructed. That’s what I did.

Once you have your wick wrapped around the top, you are ready to prime it with whatever juice you want to use. Here’s how mine looks:

Hit it with enough juice to completely saturate the cotton. It should look pretty close to the above. You should be able to see the opening in the coil poking out on both sides. Once it has soaked in, fire the atty. You should get a result that looks like this:

Not too shabby, eh?

Actually, this one was not quite complete for me at this point. The wick was wrapped correctly around the coil, but I was getting really hot hits, so the coil wasn’t staying wet enough.

This was a simple problem to solve – not enough cotton.

I took another fairly good sized chunk of cotton and wrapped it over the top of the coil and pushed in all the edges so it all fit on the deck. Then saturated that with juice. The wick size was markedly bigger after that, and I’ve gotten through half a tank so far on this without any more hot hits.

So basically, if you are getting dry hits, add more wick – just make sure to keep the airholes free on both sides of the coils and you can pretty much add as much wick as you want.

Once I finished this step, here’s how it looked:

Sorry the pic is so shitty, but you get the idea – lots of wick, and the coil hole peeking out with no obstruction.

That’s pretty much it. I should note that the airhole on my RSST was bored out to 1/16. That absolutely does play a factor in vapor production. I personally wouldn’t bore it out any more than that, but you could if you want a more airy hit.

Here’s me in my wife beater blowing a huge cloud –

This is Pink Sunburst from Gremlin Juice in a 50/50 blend with 12mg nic. I could instantly feel the effects of the 12mg nic and it is pretty intense, so you might want to use caution with higher nic levels. The video doesn’t really do the amount of vapor this baby puts out the justice it deserves and this is with a 50% vg juice. With 100% VG the vapor is ridiculous.

I’ve only been messing with the dragon coil for about 24 hours so it is still a work in progress for me, but overall the results are fucking incredible so far, and it is relatively easy to set up, so I will be doing a lot more of these.

Again, please don’t attempt a sub ohm build unless you know what the hell you are doing.

Mad props to iTEO and Ecig Forum for coming up with the idea.

Have fun!