Thunderhead Creations Blaze RTA Review
Mike Vapes has been one of the most prolific and popular vape designers over the last few years and now he’s teamed up with Thunderhead Creations to bring us the dual coil Blaze 24mm 5.5ml RTA. Mike’s rebuildable atomizers have gained a fairly good reputation.
Unboxing
The Blaze RTA comes in a small presentation box with the RTA behind a clear window so you can easily see the colour you’ve chosen. Inside the box you will also get a 5.5ml bubble glass (2ml straight glass pre-installed), a small user leaflet, two premade fused claptons, a bunch of spare O-rings and deck screws, and finally a coil cutting guide.
Build Quality
The Blaze RTA is 24mm at the base but this flares out to 26mm with the 2ml straight glass and 29.8mm with the 5.5ml bubble glass. As this is a dual coil RTA, I have opted for the larger capacity, the glass is held firmly in place with an O-ring at the top but changing it over was easy and spare glass sections are available should you need them. It’s only 37.8 mm tall excluding the drip tip and 510 connection so it’s fairly stubby if you’re not a fan of tall tanks. There are plenty of exterior design details like the bold vertical lines and diagonal slashed around top cap and base but nothing that looks too busy or out of place. You also have a Blaze logo on the chimney section which does unfortunately become slightly obscured when the bubble glass is fitted.
The Drip Tip
On top we have what is supposed to be a standard 810 drip tip however this isn’t the case, it’s too small. It’s close but this non-standard size means that you can’t use your own drip tips here and you’re in a bit of trouble if you manage to lose this which would perhaps explain why it’s also available as a separate purchase (Blaze drip tip).
Top Cap
The top cap has a few threads and requires a full one and a half turns to expose the large kidney shaped fill ports underneath, those diagonal cut marks around the base of the top cap make this easy to get a grip so they’re actually functional rather than being purely aesthetic. The fill ports are a little recessed into the top of the RTA, but even so I didn’t experience any difficulty filling this up. You might just need to exercise a little bit more patience when using e-liquid bottles with larger nozzles.
Airflow Adjustment
Below this there’s the adjustable dual cyclops airflow ring with hard stops at the fully open and closed positions and a nice amount of resistance to the movement. These are 12.9mm by 2.6 mm and have an angled section at the top to help direct the airflow down towards the build deck.
The base
At the base you have a few Thunderhead Creations logos, serial number and a nicely protruding positive pin so I’d say this one is probably hybrid safe if you are using a hybrid Mechanical mod. The base is 24mm but as this flares out smoothly, particularly with the bubble glass fitted, I’d say this is going to be better suited to larger mods.
Unlike a lot of other top down airflow RTAs, the chimney section is removable rather than being fixed in place inside the tank. The advantage here being that you can align everything and then screw the tank on rather than trying to line things up blind with a fixed chimney section which can be quite awkward. Another great positive about a removable chimney is that it is a lot easier to clean and rinse. There’s a bit of doming going on inside the chimney section as well which should enhance the flavour.
The build deck
The build deck is fairly large with 270 degree airflow coming from the sides and underneath the coil with two very large wick ports. This is a post-less design and you shouldn’t have issues with the screws deforming coil legs.
Included in the box
There are a nice set premade multi core fused claptons included in the box but as usual these are Nichrome (ni80) so they can’t be used on Temperature Control. The included coil cutting guide suggests a leg length of 5mm and this seemed about right once I’d got the coils in place. Securing the coils were straight-forward but I’d suggest using a coiling rod to help prevent them from getting deformed, this will also help you position the coils more easily as well. The cotton needs to be cut slightly outside the base as it’s quite a distance down to those large wicking ports at the base. As I tend to use 3mm inner diameter coils, I actually found that I only needed to fluff the cotton lightly but you may need to thin things out a bit more if you’re going for 3,5mm ID coils.
My Settings
With everything in place and juiced up I discovered this is pretty airy but even fully open I was getting excellent flavour, the wicking was keeping up as well even at 100 watts on my 0.15 ohm build. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on having the airflow about three quarters open with the power set to 75 watts and it’s stayed there ever since. Whilst this is hardly silent, the airflow is smooth and I’ve really been enjoying a nice cloudy vape after all the pods I’ve been using recently.
I take my hat off to Mike Vapes and Thunderhead Creations for bringing us another great RTA. It’s great to see a decent rebuildable amongst all the stock coil pods so if you’re in the market for a dual coil RTA, then this is well worth putting on your list.
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