4 Vapes I Don't Use Anymore Pt.2 Hasn't aged well, missteps, and lemons.

Hey guys, it’s Sneaky Pete here, and today I want to talk about four vapes that I just don’t use anymore. Often, we focus on the best device for this aspect, the best overall devices, but today I want to switch that completely and talk about vapes that are collecting dust on my shelf.

A few of these I enjoyed for quite a while and have just fell out of love, and others the honeymoon period lasted for a shorter period, but either way, these are only vapes I would only ever use again for nostalgia, though I do enjoy having them in my collection. 

The Dr Dabber Switch

The Dr Dabber Switch was the first induction heated units to hit the market, and I reviewed this one over 4 years ago back in May 2018, so that’s impressive. It was primarily designed to be a concentrate vaporizer, though via the switch on the front, you can also change it to dry herb mode.

It uses different induction cups for dry herb and concentrate, and it gives you several options for the concentrate induction cup that you can use with the Switch. It has a basic mode with 5 temperatures, as well as an advanced mode, and in the advanced mode, it lets you select from 25 pre-set temperatures giving you a massive range.

For concentrate, the induction technology works quite well. It heats your dab up in under five seconds, and it can deliver hugely powerful hits if you want to push it hard at the higher levels. I like to do smaller dabs on lower temperatures though, and it does a great job when you use it like that.

It has a built-in cleaning cycle as those induction cups get dirty quickly. You can also use it with quartz induction cups if you don’t like the idea of the metal cups. The one thing it doesn’t have, though, is a screen, which is too bad as there are a lot of things you can control and adjust on this unit. For example, I haven’t use this for a while, and I needed to look at the instruction manual online to remember exactly how to do everything. It’s not that it’s not baseline intuitive, but when it doesn’t have a screen, you are left to remember how do use the more advanced functions.

While it does work with dry herb, it doesn’t function like most other flower vaporizers do.

When you vape the flower in this device, it essentially gets it to a point where it is blackened without being burnt. You can vape it less than this as well, but I find the hits way too wispy unless you turn it up high. If you are the kind of person that likes to push their ABV to the absolute maximum, you might find this an ideal system. For me though, I find that the flavour and overall experience is not great, so I would only recommend this for a concentrate vape.

My first real complaint about the Switch is the overall size. This is a massive portable; it’s heavy and it has a large footprint. While you can certainly put this in a case and take it with you, it is more of an at home portable, rather than a true portable vaporizer. I find the whole thing overly large, and I’m sure that the next version of this will be much smaller with the improvements that have been made in induction technology.

The second thing I don’t love is the induction cups. They get dirty very quickly, and even though the heating cycle works well, it’s never going to get it 100% clean, especially over time. I find I need to get a Q-tip with isopropyl alcohol down in the glass to try and clean that, and you need to run the cleaning cycles very often to keep the cups delivering decent flavour. I think that the vape was a substantial release for 2018, but it’s a little tired at this point. They need to deliver a V2, as this one is showing its age a bit by now.

Magic Flight Launch Box

The Magic Flight Launch Box is a classic vape that every enthusiast should have in their collection. The Launch Box has been around forever, I reviewed this one back in May 2015, and the device has remained unchanged up until this point. It features a tried and tested design; it has an “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” type of build. The vaporizer consists of a wooden body, which contains the stainless-steel trench which is your heating element, and it’s covered by an acrylic panel that slides off to the side when you want to load or unload it.

The device itself is tiny at only 2.5” x 1.25” x 0.9”, and it will easily fit in the palm of your hand. However, that is a little misleading, as you do need a glass, or it could be a wooden or even acrylic, straw to inhale the vapour from, and you also need a battery to heat it up. So, while the total package is still quite small, it is going to come in three different pieces.

The Magic Flight Launch Box is very easy to use once you get a handle on it, but it will have a bit of a learning curve as it has no temperature control, outside of how you use it. To use the device, you are going to put some ground material into the trench. You don’t want to have the material above the sides of the trench, and you want to have as much contact as you can, as this entire stainless-steel section will heat up and that will provide the vaporization.

You can control the temperature with two factors, how long you hold the battery in, and your inhalation speed and technique. To heat up the device, first you’re going to place your battery into the opening in the side of the vaporizer, and then when you are ready to heat it up, you are going to push the battery in to make contact. There is resistance to notify you when contact has been made, as well as a small light inside which illuminates while it is heating up. In a few seconds, vapour will start to form, and then you are going to lightly inhale. If you inhale too slowly, you can get hotspots forming, and if you do it too fast, you will pull the heat away before it has a chance to properly vaporize. It works good with cigar puffs rather than long ones, but once you get a handle on it, it’s a very analogue device for something that uses a battery.

I find the hits are overall a little too light for my liking. The effects are always way stronger than I expect them to be, and I have got way more medicated than I had planned to, as I kept taking additional hits because I wasn’t blowing out large clouds. If you are looking for a lighter experience or just for some straight flavour sipping, you may really like how it performs. It’s also easy to stir, just give it a shake after your session, pat it back in place, and you are ready to go. It is a cool piece of vape history and still something you could use today, but for me I feel as though technology has moved on a little bit, and for me there are other ultra-portable vaporizers that I prefer to pull out that this guy.
 

The Grasshopper

Just hearing the name, the Grasshopper, is enough to inspire rage in a large group of people, and with good reason. As much as everybody wanted to like the Grasshopper, it was a classic case of overpromising and under delivering. On paper, the Grasshopper is an ultimate sort of vaporizer. It is miniscule, the size of a large pen, but it delivers 100% convection vapour in abundance. When this is working properly it will milk up a water piece just like the big boys, but in a package that will fit in any pocket.

Oh yeah, and did I also mention that it is an on-demand vaporizer? So, we are talking about an on-demand, 100% convection vaporizer, in the size of a pen. This is exactly what a lot of people are looking for, a proper vape pen for flower. It’s a super easy device to use, you fill up the reasonably large chamber, screw the mouthpiece back on, and then adjust your temperature via the rotary dial on the top of the vape.

To use it, you click the top just like you would on a normal pen. You will see red lights illuminate, letting you know that the device is heating up, and then after mere seconds the lights will turn blue, and you can go ahead and inhale as hard as you want. The Grasshopper delivers super tasty vapor, and you can get a couple of good hits through a water piece per bowl pack. You can use it natively, but I wouldn’t go past temperature level 3 or so, or it is just way too hot.  They also have a silicone cover you can put on the device, so it works better with a water piece, and it won’t burn your lips as much when you’re using it natively. It’s close to the stealthiest vaporizer out there, as it is very small and discreet, and then it also looks like an everyday item which just doesn’t draw immediate attention, as people just accept that it is a pen.

The LEDs are placed kind of wonky, and you must have it at a proper angle to see them, but it’s typically not hard unless you are in full sunlight. Another big problem with the Grasshopper is that they use their own proprietary batteries, which take up most of the device’s size which is wild when you see it. It is not easy to manufacture batteries, and they were out of batteries for a huge amount of time, meaning if your battery was dead, you were out of luck. As the batteries are also reasonably small, they run out quickly so you can’t have too many hits on the go without needing a fresh battery or a recharge. They also die way quicker than something like an 18650, so they were really a consumable part.

The primary things that killed the Grasshopper, though, were the reliability and the warranty service. There are Grasshoppers out there that people have had going for years of daily use without issue, but that seldom seems to be the case. People ran into warranty issues on the regular, and it took people upwards of six months to get a replacement, which might only last for a month, and then need to go in for warranty service again. You just couldn’t trust the reliability of the device, and the warranty issues really rubbed people the wrong way as you could be without your expensive new device for eight months of the year if you needed to get it fixed multiple times. I think they just tried to do something that technology just wasn’t ready for, but I want to see this idea truly realized at some point.

The Firefly 2

I was super excited about the Firefly 2 when it came out in 2016, and I really enjoyed using this device for a good while. It was miles ahead of its predecessor, coming in with a much smaller size, improved vapour and battery life, and a refined and upscale look. It’s quite a small and handheld device that was designed in Silicon Valley, and it feels like a well-engineered and well-designed portable vaporizer.

You can remove the back of the device to replace the custom battery or sit it in a small dock to charge. It got good battery life for something this size, though the performance seemed to suffer when the charge dropped past a certain point. It also offers full convection, on demand usage, which is pretty much what I am after whenever it is available. Ideally, I don’t want to wait for a device to heat up, and I’ll take 100% convection when it’s offered.

The Firefly 2 consists of two main parts, it has this strong magnetic lid with a mirror like finish, which is also seen on the body of the device. The lid has an exterior seal which is going to lock in and create your vapour path. When the experience was dialled in, you got excellent vapour from the Firefly 2, the flavour was extraordinarily pure and uncoloured, while being smooth and potent. It was usually a great first hit sort of vaporizer, with the experience quickly diminishing from there. The controls were maybe a little too clever for their own good, you simply touched these two contact points on the side of the device which caused it to heat up which was sleek, but this makes it hard and frustrating to adjust temperatures or controls otherwise.

The bowl is quite shallow, and the bottom are a ton of laser etched holes, designed to give you a very even vaporization, but I always found I got a hotspot with this model, and it required stirring between every hit. Because it’s shallow, it’s a pain to stir, as the material wants to jump out of the bowl, and it gets stuck on the sticky mirrored surface. I found the holes would also get blocked after a while, and you couldn’t really clean them aside from an iso wipe, and this may have contributed to the hotspot.

One thing I loved about the Firefly 2 was that it was a dual use device. It included a concentrate pad, and if you only use a small amount, it did a great job at vaporizing concentrate while delivering immense flavour. This is one of those devices that I just fell out of love with over time. Dual use devices are great, but they are rarely better than dedicated devices for each substance, and overall, I felt the effort just wasn’t worth the reward anymore.

From a purist standpoint, you could get some hard to match hits with the Firefly 2 in terms of the flavour, smoothness, and potency combo, but it was a bit too much effort to achieve the consistent great results. Stirring was a pain if you use the device with any regularity, and I found it needing to keep at quite a high charge to deliver great results.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, and check out vapenorth.ca and sneakypetestore.com where you can find all the different products and accessories you see me using in my videos.

Thanks so much for watching guys, I really appreciate it.

KIG KIS