'The Machine'

Intro

My first vape tool was the Gordotek DreamMaker but despite much persistence, I achieved little or no success,  so decided to bin it and try something else,  enter "The Machine"

The design is simple enough.  A worcester sauce bottle with a hole drllled in the bottom into which an electrician's grommet is secured with cyanoacrylate glue. A short piece of 10mm microbore heating pipe was inserted as a mouthpiece.  I then pushed a piece of stainless steel pan scourer into the neck, onto which the crystal Dimitri was loaded.

Technique

From my first try, I could instantly tell it was going to be vastly superior to the DreamMaker. And once I'd developed the technique, for an entire year I spent many happy nights using it for some utterly magical trips. I just couldn't believe why anyone would want to use anything different, and often poured scorn on those shelling out big money on electronic vapes. How times change!

Typically, I'd load with 250-300mg, melt it into the top of scourer, and this would be good for 2 sessions of tripping, generally split between two nights.  Using a candle I'd pre-warm the mouthpiece end of the bottle and get it hot enough so the gentlest toke would convect sufficient heat to produce a good vapour from the spice above it.  The warming was a time-consuming task but without it, the inhaled vapour seemed cool, weak and with alarming quantities of Dimitri coating the inside of the bottle.

Achieving reasonable consistency always defeated me, and I never really knew how intense a trip would turn out until the comeup.  Quite often I'd completely blow my socks off unintentionally, and this became more of an issue once I began experimenting with MAOI-augmentaion, aka vapourhuasca.

Retirement of "The Machine"

In my ignorance, the only reservation with The Machine was its dimitri vaping efficiency which, at the time, I considered quite bad (although in reality it's far superior to any form of d-juice). And upon hearing the media psychonaut, Dick Khan, speaking about "incredible efficiency" with electronic vapes, I searched around and stumbled on a confusing Nexus page describing a technique based upon these new-fangled vape mod gadgets and Mesh RDA.  I never used The Machine again.

Epilogue

This is not quite the end of the story.  Some years after its retirement I decided to try out The Machine once again.  This was to see if I could restore the tripping visuals to what I'd experienced in the early days.  So feeling very nostalgic, I dug out and dusted off the old relic, cleaned it up got it all ready for an expic return.  However, I'd forgotton what a pain it was to pre-warm, and during toking it was very difficult to get the heat source to bottle distance correct.  And oh my goodness, when the vapour did appear I just couldn't believe how horribly harsh it felt.

So perhaps sad to say, I abandoned the attempt and retired The Machine permanently.   And although I could never be persuaded to use it again, it will forever hold a special place in my heart which marks a very significant milestone in my life journey.

For anyone interested in further details of construction/useage, see my 5 year old post on Reddit