How Clean Is Your Titanium Wire?

[Mr Numpty]

I had read that it is best to clean Ti wire before using it, so I bought a bottle of white spirit and wondered what I would find on a little 2.5cm x 1.5cm piece of white-spirit-doused Muji after rubbing it a few times over a 20cm length of 0.4mm Ti wire from The Crazy Wire Co.

This, apparently:



Pretty grim, huh? I guess it's machine oil? Anyway, it seemed to do the trick and the resultant coils produced a nice clean flavour, where the previous set, which I forgot to wash by my previous soapy water technique were definitely a little funky. The Ti wire from Sweetspot Vapors is supposedly "cleaned in an ultrasonic/steam bath, using food safe degreaser, followed by a rinse in distilled water" so it might be an interesting experiment if someone could reproduce the above test with it, but certainly if you are getting your Ti from TCW Company, best give it a bit of a rubdown before using it.

 

[nacmacfeegle]

I wipe mine with a little vodka, get a similar sort of stain as you. My Ti is from stealthvape .

 

[steves]

the cleanliness of Ti wire varies a lot between suppliers (and even different batches of the same guage from the same supplier). Its not machine oil in fact. Mostly it is graphite! Not a problem and easy to clean with enough isopropyl alchol an patience, but always a PITA!

 

[danb]

Good to know. I was planning to build with Ti for the first time today and probably would not have bothered cleaning it...

 

[Mr Numpty]

Good to know. I was planning to build with Ti for the first time today and probably would not have bothered cleaning it...

Did you get .5 Ti? Seems to perform so much better than the .4, ime. Good luck!

 

[danb]

Did you get .5 Ti? Seems to perform so much better than the .4, ime. Good luck!

No, I got 0.3 mm. I can't stand thick wire - I have a spool of 0.4 mm kanthal and I hate it. I imagine 0.4 Ti (or thicker) would be hell for me!

I will try it out over the coming week, so far I just wrapped a quick coil and poked it about a bit, but I didn't install it on anything - I woke up with a really bad stiff neck yesterday morning and hunching over build decks has been too painful this weekend. It's much better today so I should be tinkering away again tomorrow evening.