510 carts. The Whats and Whys of Them.
SmokingCaterpillar November 25 2024 06:00:00 PM
You may have heard of 510 cartridges in the context of cannabis. I've written a piece about the CCell Palm Pro vaporiser here: 22112024134602SBOJ6C.htm, which uses 510 cartridges. This purpose of this piece is to lay out their constructions, purpose and use for people who may be new to this subject.What is a 510 cartridge?
This is actually quite easy to explain. When vaping generally, there are four main components to consider. These are:
A tank to hold a liquid to be vaporised. This liquid can vary widely in its viscosity.
A wick to vaporise the liquid
A mouthpiece to allow vapour to be collected by the consumer
An electrical power source. This is a type of battery
A 510 cartridge integrates the first three of these.
The top portion, coloured white, is the mouthpiece. Depending on the way in which the cartridge is designed, it may be removable once only or many times. The central portion is where the cannabis oil is stored. Towards the bottom, you can see a couple of holes that allow the oil to flow into the wick. At the bottom, there's a threaded connector, the 510 thread. Now, this oil is very thick. Roughly similar to the viscosity of Tate and Lyle's Golden syrup when it's cold. The good news is that like Golden Syrup, cannabis oil's viscosity is inversely proportional to temperature - the warmer it gets, the easier it flows. Some 510 vapes like the CCell have a pre-heat feature. This activates the heating coil for a short period, about 10 seconds. This warms the surrounding oil and helps it to flow into the ceramic wick area. If the ambient temperature is over 20C, a pre-heat cycle isn't really needed in my experience. If you warm the oil to 30-40C, it's generally easy to work with when filling cartridges. That sort of temperature is not high enough (pun not intended, but I'll go with it) to affect the active ingedients.
One issue I have seen is clogging of the unit. Generally speaking with the CCell vape, this is fixed by running a couple of pre-heat cycles. If that still doesn't fix it, it might be that the clogging is in the mouthpiece. Removing it if possible and cleaning it out with an isopropyl soaked pipe cleaner works here. In my experience, the mouthpiece can get blocked with condensed oil. After all we are vaporising the oil at the bottom of the unit. By the time that vapour gets to the mouthpiece, it will have cooled significantly and will be starting to condense.
Why is is called a 510 cartridge?
Opinions on this differ somewhat, but a common one is that It's called a 510 cartridge because the thread at the bottom, which allows the cartridges to be connected to a power supply, has 10 threads, each 0.5mm apart. Seems reasonable to me, but then, it doesn't really matter overmuch as long as the standard is adhered to on a consistent basis.
Re-using 510 cartridges
There seem to be two classes of cartridges. some of them can be filled once - once the mouthpiece is snapped on, it cannot be removed without some degree of damage. Some of them are designed to be removed - generally they can be screwed on and off multiple tomes. If buying empty carts, I've found that generally, they are of the second class. You can indeed re-use 510 cartridges, though it's not entirely without problems. The first and foremost problem is the vaporiser. This will gradually degrade as it vaporises oil - the pores in the ceramic element will clog up, reducing the efficiency of the vaporiser and also the flavour of the delivered vapour. I have used carts twice with no apparent problem.
510 Cartridge sizes
510 cartridges (or 'carts') come in various sizes. The main ones are 0.5ml and 1.0ml. Though 0.8ml and 2.0ml units are available too, Some compact vaporisers like the CCell unit will only accept up to 1.0ml carts - 2.0ml carts have a slightly larger diameter than their smaller versions and won't fit into the cartridge dock of the CCell Palm Pro. When using cartridges, there's a bit of a trade-off. The larger the cart, the cheaper the oil by the millilitre. For example, two 0.5ml carts will cost more than one 1.0ml cart. If the cart fails for any reason, the only way you'll recover the oil is to empty the cartridge contents into another cartridge. That's fiddly and potentially messy. By splitting the risk between two cartridges, you tend to mitigate the risks.
- Comments [0]