Clapton coils are all the rage right now with many manufacturers shipping stock Claptons with their clearomizers, promising “huge vapor” and “incredible flavor”.
A “clapton” is a coined term that basically means coiled wire. You have one wire coiled over another. But of course a sexier name helps sell it!
The idea and story behind the clapton coil is that someone got the idea to build a wire that mimicked a guitar string (E,A & D). He did it, and named it Clapton after his favorite guitarist, Eric Clapton.
It was a hit, and now everyone is into the clapton coil bandwagon. You can get clapton wire cheap, and even pre-made clapton coils that you can just plug into your RDA & start vaping.
But what is a clapton coil, really?
At the very basic, you have:
- One thinner gauge Kanthal wire (usually 32g or 34g) coiled around one thicker gauge Kanthal wire (usually 24g).
- You can do this by claping the thicker gauge wire in a drill, and coiling the thinner gauge wire over it
- The thinner gauge wire (core) has a higher resistance, while the thicker wire has a lower resistance.
- The core wire acts contributes more as a heating element that the outer coil, which does not conduct electricity as well.
- In a way, the other coil distributes heat from the core wire, evening out the overall heat of the wire.
- Sometimes, Nichrome is used as the core and coiled wire instead of Kanthal. Nichrome conducts heat better than Kanthal.
Wrapping them together evens out the resistance making it easy to build larger coils while maintaining the resistance between 0.5Ohm to 0.3Ohm, which is a great sweet spot for lots of vapor.
In the video above, I do some very basic (and unscientific) experiement to show you the secret behind clapton coils, and why (almost) everyone seems to love them.
Table of Contents
Pros of the Clapton Coil:
- Coiled wire creates much larger surface area, meaning more vapor
- It is supposed to create better flavor as well, although opinions on this are divided
- Some people claim to get no better flavor than regular micro coils
- It gives you something new to try once you get bored of regular coils
- It looks cool, so vaping nerds can feel important about themselves and their achievement
Cons of the Clapton Coil:
- Long ramp-up time, slow cool-down time, makes it easier to singe your cotton
- Requires a lot more power (Watts) that drain your batteries faster
- More energy used, makes your tank / mod heat up quickly
- Gunks up very quickly when left unused for a while, altering the performance of the coil until you clean it up / dry burn it
- Too bulky for older tanks that clamp the wire with the deck screw instead of having a post hole for the wire
- Quite difficult to create manually (but now you can buy them pre-made)
Other variations of the Clapton coil such as fused claptons, twisted claptons staggered-fused claptons differ in the number of wires forming the coil, the gauge of the wires, and how its wrapped / coiled.