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Hello everyone. Not sure where to put this, my first post, but just want to say that I'm brand new to DIY e-juicing and discovered this e-juice calculator from one of the e-cig or DIY forums. Don't remember which one since I went into a frenzy researching how to do it, but I'm so glad I found your calculator. It's the first an only one I've used, an excellent tool and for me was very intuitive and I picked up exactly how to use it within a few minutes. Thank you so much for sharing this great piece of software. I made my first batch of a Five Pawns Castle Long Clone last week and just made another batch tonight. I found the recipe on another forum so I hope it's okay to talk about clones here. According to the poster who developed the recipe, it's not really a clone but something very similar. So my new bottles are cooling in a bowl of hot water as I type this. Somewhere on this forum, I think, I found a recommendation to put the newly mixed bottles in a bowl of just boiled water. I took the bowl of water out of the microwave, let it sit a minute or two so it wasn't still boiling and then put my juice bottles in. Temp was just over 150-degrees F a few minutes later when I initially put my thermometer in the bowl with the bottles and cooling now into the 120s degree F right now. For those that may not be familiar with Castle Long, it's a Kentucky Bourbon based liquid with toasted almond, coconut, brown sugar and two kinds of vanilla. I got hooked on it a few months ago and has been my ADV for a while now. It's been said that Castle Long is similar to The Steam Company's Gentlemen's Reserve, but I've not tried that one. Five Pawns is based in Southern California where I'm from, and The Steam Co. is based in Connecticut, so it may be more common back east. Five Pawns make a variety of Castle Long called Reserve that is aged for 3 weeks in oak barrels and is a very good vape, though a bit pricey, so I'm so glad I got into DIY. I've probably made over $150 worth of liquid at retail cost for penny's on the dollar, and it's quite tasty. Needless to say I'm so stoked. So this is what I've got so far: one 50 ml graduated cylinder, one 150 ml beaker, one 125 ml Erlenmeyer flask, a bunch of 1 ml and 3 ml syringes with blunt tip needles, a funnel, a liter each of Kosher USP-Food Grade PG and VG, 125 ml nicotine at 100 mg strength in 50/50 PG/VG, Anyway, I hope it's okay to talk about clone recipes here, here is what I made:Kentucky Bourbon (TFA) 3.1%Coconut (FlavArt) 2.3%Toasted Almond (Capella's) 2.3Brown Sugar (FlavArt) 0.77%Madagascar Vanilla (FlavWest) 0.77%Vanillin (TFA I think) 0.77% though this could be replaced with French Vanilla which I will do next timePlease let me know what you think if anyone tries this.Thanks again, and I look forward to chatting with you all here on this great forum.Cheers
Thanks for the welcome, Eric. Some good advise and I am ordering some smaller mix ware to experiment with tweaking recipes or developing my own. When I decided to go DIY I also decided that would not be purchasing retail juice anymore. I went with a couple large batches initially using a generally community accepted recipe so that I would have a bunch of juice on hand that has a had a chance to age at least a week or two while I started to experiment with others. I'm about to make another order for a bunch more flavoring to get started on other recipes included in breakthru software while I have a good reserve of my first batches of juice aging now. It's nice having enough PG, VG and Nic on hand so I can just get favors for recipes that seem interesting to me and go for it. DIY would not have been so easy for me without this software. Thanks again to Breakthru!One thing I've been thinking about is making my own magnetic stir plate, for mixing the larger batches at least. There's a bunch of DIY mix plates on YouTube from home brewers using inexpensive parts from RadioShack and recycled computer fans. This far, I've used my wife's kitchen mixer with a paddle wheel attachment that whips it up pretty good but I've read somewhere that using a high sheer method may not be best. Not sure it it really matters that much in the end though. So far, my mixes have turned out allright.Well thanks again and happy vaping.