[Editor's Note:  Editor, being me.  I wrote this on September 24, 2003.  Today happens to be May 23, 2010.  It still applies as much today as it did back then.  If you want to see more about this recently, check out: http://bbs.wiredminds.org/viewtopic.php?t=917]

The story of the Heat-Gun Vaporizer

Alright, jesus, this is going to take me a while to remember, let me take about 8 ginkos, and i'll try to remember.  Running low on ginkos...  (By the way, this is just a modern way of calling upon the muse).  With respect to Homer, it may all be psycho-somatic, but I perfer speculative results over spectural ghosts.  First, some pictures to pique interest. 

What is this mysterious tube?  It seems to be eminating from a drawer of some kind.

It is a drawer of some kind!  Perhaps we should follow the tube and see where it goes?

The tube disappears and then reappears from behind a leg.  Somebody should move that leg.

Well, that was anti-climactic.  Let's go back to that drawer.

A hand enters.  His role is minor, but vital.  What is in the drawer?

Why it is a heat-gun vaporizer!  This deserves closer inspection...

Get ready.  The hand is about to make another cameo appearance.

Curious...  I wonder what is in this chamber?

Well...  We'll get to that in time.  But I assure you, it is the darkest, blackish-brownish, baked-dry, no ash, only slightly burnt...

In due time.

Unrelated, totally, to this, there is the story of a guy I kinda know, named Em.  (These are his pictures, btw.)

He was very studious in high school, he never did anything but read and write, never drank, never smoked, even once.  Well, that's not entirely true, Em and his friend Toot, tried it once Senior year.  But to no perceived effect.  Em finished high school with more than 10 APs under his belt, and an SAT over 1400.  He went to a major university with enough credits to finish in maybe 3 years.  Em recently just finished, with a BA in Visual Arts.  And it only took him 5 years.

Em picked up a few hobbies.  His curiousity was piqued with one in particular.

The literature available on the internet was extensive.  Fellow hobby-enthusiasts had ways to grow, ways to smoke, ways to hide, the ins and outs, the laws and litigations, etc. etc.  But Em was only interested in ways to smoke.  He tried them all, the waterfall, the gravity, the soda can, the piece of fruit, even knives...  Though knives didn't work very well at all, Em was interested in the idea of heating instead of burning.

This was back in, perhaps...  '99, '00?

Em isn't sure, and neither am I.  Em kept reading about his hobby online.  He became interested in vaporizers.  He read enough to distinguish hype from reality.  For one, the toxins and carcinogens come almost entirely from the smoke.  The smoke of plants that are burnt and inhaled contain carbon monoxide and tar (and the percentages are the same regardless of the type of plant).  The percentages only change with a filter like water or cotton.

The only way to completely remove those toxins and carcinogens from smoke is to not smoke.  Instead heat the plant until it reaches the specific point of volatility for the oils within it.  The oils of the tobacco leaf contain nicotine.  The temperature at which the volatile oils become gaseous and excape the tobacco leaf is 160 degrees Celcius (or around theresabout).  The temperature Em was interest in was 200 degrees Celcius.  He learned this is the point when the oils become volatile, and around 400 degrees is when the plant combusts, or theresabout again.  And at the thousands of degrees after combustion, the molecules Em cares so dearly for (he's read) start to break apart.  Thus not only is he normally inhaling dangerous smoke, he's getting less of the molecules Em wants to get.

Alright, now he's not quite positive on the degrees and all the science behind it.  But he assures everyone that there is plenty of information on that online.  One can buy a standard "vaporizer" which will heat a heating pad roughly to this temperature, capture the vapors within the glass container, then transport them via hose to your mouth.  But aside from being expensive, these heating-pad vaporizers also "reportedly" (though not necessarily by disinterested parties) taste like "burnt popcorn."  So then Em read about what a few people were using instead.  Heat-guns.

Now this heat-gun is the cheapest one you can get.  It's always available for $39.95 at your local "House Despot" (again, names have been changed) in the paint department.  But from what Em was reading, this heat-gun would never do.  The heat-guns people were using costed about $250 and had very German sounding names.  You see, the average cheap heat-gun has a lowest temperature setting roughly twice that of what you need.  That is, the lowest temperature that will peel paint.  This particular heat-gun has two settings.  The low settting is roughly 400 degrees Celcius.  If Em could only make this cheap, easy-to-get heat-gun work for his purpose...

Em found a very good design to work from to make the rest of his heat-gun vaporizer...  Except, it was all written in German.   He used a web-translator, and eventually had a proto-type for his design.    It showed a heat-gun using copper piping to enter a bowl of water, then a tube inhales the vapors that filled the chamber after being cooled by water.  Only the design calls for one of those expensive German heat-guns with a setting of 200 degrees Celcius.

Em thought, logically, that without openning up the heat-gun, he would have to reduce the electricity being received, to reduce the power of the heat-gun, and effectively reduce the temperature of the air it would expell.  He didn't know for sure this would work, but he would give it a try for 40 bucks.  He thought about transformers, splitting the currency...  Finally it came to him, like a light-bulb in some respects.  A dim-bulb, might be more a propos.

Dimmer switches!

Perhaps one would recognize our surprise guest from previous pictures?  This lamp dimmer switch costs about 12 bucks and you can also get it at your local House Despot.  Right now the switch is set at the half-way point, the optimal position for Em to explore his hobby.  If one notices the connection, this particular dimmer switch is nice because it attaches to the outlet, unlike other dimmer switches where one cuts into the wiring.  However, as most lamps are two pronged, a "cheater" plug (the grey piece in the second picture) is necessary to attach it to the three-pronged extension on the heat-gun (the black cord)--the brown cord is simply an extension to the outlet.

Remember this:  Dimmer switches are meant for lamps, and heat guns are meant for paint.  The dimmer switch says to only use it with appliances running under 300W.  The heat gun opperates at much higher wattage, and says clearly not to use it any other way than it was intended.

In the 3 years or so since Em "invented" it, his has never once caught on fire or sparked or done anything weird.  However.  He has had to replace the heat-gun and the dimmer switch, once each, on two seperate occations.  Both times it was because the switch was at too high a setting and the heat-gun was left on for too long.  But nothing dramatic happened, the piece just stopped working, refused to work again, and had to be replaced.  People have burned themselves on the tip of the heat-gun or the copper piping, carpets have been singed, but Em has never burned himself seriously, and has sinced learned to keep curious fellow-hobbyists at bay.

Em has never had an incident because Em is not an idiot and follows basic safety at all times.  But Em does not trust that other people, indeed fellow hobbyists, will have the where-with-all to not burn down their houses.  So Em cannot endorse other people following his lead.  Em can only tell his own experience, and if others think they can keep themselves from self-immolation, that is their own business.  Again, neither I nor Em are suggesting anyone make one for themselves, this is not a how-to on heat-gun vaporizers.  I'm (we're) simply telling a story.

That said, here is the what the pipe going through the middle looks like:

The silver metal piece is actually an attachment that Em kept that came with his first heat-gun.  The top of the piping was the perfect size for the old one, but this attachment proved usefully later with this second one, which has a smaller nozzle.  The specific dimensions of the piping aren't necessary.  But Em'll tell you the general thinking.  Em knew the heat-gun's nozzel was yea big and the pipe was to be sufficiently skinnier.  So, Em (still in House Despot) got one long, thin copper pipe, at least as long as the bowl was deep, and with a little extra on the top.  Then he got the two converters, seen clearly in the second picture, to widen the piping to fit the nozzle of the heat-gun.

Between the two converters, though you can't see it, is a screen.  This Em did not get at House Despot, this he got at a head-shop (a place that sells smoking paraphenalia--Em believes the screens are for hookahs; he doesn't know), he got a couple for a dollar.  He got a size slightly larger then the area between the two converters.  He then put it on the most-narrow end of the bigger converter, placed the widest end of the smaller converter atop it, then hammered a few times to get it tofit in place.  Em says the head-shop screens are very durable, since he started to use them, he has to had to replace the screen only once.

Anyway, he puts the smokable--er, vaporizable, volatile, whatever--on top of the screen.  Then he puts the heat-gun snuggly atop it.  And before he had an attachment to make it fit snug, Em would place the heat-gun as close as possible to the whatevers, wrap the metal nozzle of the heat-gun and the widest part of the copper-piece in aluminum foil, and make it airtight.

This is the top of the glass bottle.  Its made of cork.  All that matters is that the glass container is large and has a cork top.  Em bore a hole into the middle of the cork top using a screwdriver (though there are definitely many better ways to accomplish this).  The hole was the perfect size for the copper pipe to fit thru.  He also had another, very short piece of copper pipe, same width as the long piece, and a hole of the same width.  He put the long piece through the middle hole, and the shorter piece (attached to a long plastic tube a few meters long) through the hole off to the side.  He got all the tubing along with the copper piping at House Despot.  Em thinks a non-plastic, hookah tube might be better.  Em has gone through three tubes.  The other two had to be replaced because someone let the copper piping touch the plastic tubing while it was hot.  That will melt through the plastic tube.

The duct-tape is on the piping and the cork top because over the years the hole in the cork has widened, and the duct-tape was an easy way to make the connection more snug.  In case it is also not clear, the heat-gun is being held up by a tripod, the heat-gun is duct-taped to the tripod handle.  Em finds a tripod to be most effective for holding up the heat-gun, but other methods could be used.  Here is an older picture, the random chick in the background is just for effect.  Not needed for operation.

Finally, Em says, for him, he finds that everything is times 2 with the vaporizer.  "It takes twice as long to come on, twice as good, and lasts twice as long."  Whatever that means.  He says its simply more economical when he enjoys his hobby to use his heat-gun vaporizer.  "Everyone agrees its the shizzlienizzliefrizzlepop."  Em is an idiot, but he thinks his little apparatus might actually do doctors and society some good, the whole thing can be made for 50-75 bucks, and were he not afraid of black helicopters, he would have told the world about his experience a lot sooner.  Like I said, Em's an idiot...  we hope...

EM'S TOP TIPS TO USING THE DIMMER:

1) Em rarely needs to push it past the half-way mark.  Over that it will burn, if left in that position for more than a few seconds.
2) Expect delay, if you turn the heat up, and perceive no effect, turn the heat down and puff and expell 3 more times, it might finally reach you by then.
3) Don't burn.
4) The heat-gun takes about 30 secs. to heat-up.  Don't get impatient and increase the dimmer, it will come.
5) The dimmer might get warm to the touch, its normal, but eventually, let it cool, as it can stop functioning from over-use.

Advanced Dimmering:

Here's what Em does.  Em actually push the knob slightly past the half-way mark, inhales half a breath through the tube, then immediately turns it down to the 1/3 mark.  He keeps sucking till the first puff eventually comes, that half-breath is what gets it going, the lower temp is fine to keep it going, without burning. Then he slowly nudges the nob up every 4 inhalations or so, until he gets to the half-way point.  Then he pushes it silightly past, inhales half a breath, and then turns it down to the 1/3 mark again, waits to see if there's any mist.  Repeat.