Steve K's Vaping World

For a guy who claims to be a cartomizer fanatic, I seem to have a lot of atomizers in my e-cigarette collection lately.  There seems to have been a renaissance as of late in the atomizer world.  Our latest entrant is a bridgeless model from Kalamazoo Vapor Shop (referred to from here on out as KVS to save my typing fingers).

Design
The KVS bridgeless atomizer sports a two-tone color scheme.  The top portion of the device is black while the bottom part which houses the heating element is a gold color.  Inside the sporty case you’ll find lacking, just as the name implies, a bridge.

Bridgeless atomizers aren’t exactly a new concept. People have been removing the steel wool covered metal bridges that go over the heating coil in atomizers for ages.  Several vendors now offer them with the bridge removed for you (or designed without a bridge at all in a few examples).  The KVS solution offers a little twist to the concept.

Perched atop the KVS example is a little gold colored disc.  The disc has three holes to allow juice to flow past and reach the heating coil.  This little addition is a spatter shield.  Sometimes when e-liquid gets too hot or has water droplets inside it, little spatters of molten hot eliquid will make a beeline straight for the back of your throat.  Usually it’s simply annoying, but if you are vaping at high voltages or low resistance, the spatters can be quite hot and painful at times.

This point is relavant because the KVS atomizer is a low resistance device.  The atomizer clocks in at 1.8 ohms of resistance. This provides a good experience with 3.7 volt and lower devices, but can sometimes result in a pretty warm vape (that equals hot juice, the spatter shield is your friend)

Performance
The first thing I wondered about when I saw the announcement for the atomizer was weather or not the presence of the disk would mess anything up.  After all it is by design an obstacle that sits between you and the heating coils where all the vaporizing magic happens.

I’m happy to report that from a vapor and flavor production, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interference happening.  The one thing I did pick up on was that juice sometimes will pool up on the disc before it fully drains.  This results in me throwing an extra drop or two in the atomizer.

The extra couple drops don’t seem to hurt much, but there is a limit.  I got a little overzealous at one point and reached the atomizer’s tipping point, at which time it lubricated my hand and battery with a little e-liquid.  In general I found that this atomizer isn’t that leak prone, and can handle a fair amount of juice.  I rarely if ever detected the coil complaining to me in the form of gurgling.

In fact, from a noise standpoint, the KVS atty is pretty quiet when it’s doing its thing.  I suspect the spatter shield has a little bit of a muting effect on the heating coils.  Every once in a while I find myself putting my ear close to the atomizer to make sure it’s firing correctly.

The atomizer does respond nicely weather its fed through a drip tip, or up from the bottom via my Boge Revolution bottom feeder.  There was an odd incident where my Boge acted as if its batteries were low when the KVS atomizer was attached, however.  This was a one time thing, and the atomizer didn’t show any sort of short or oddball resistance levels when I checked it on my ProVari.

Performance on the Boge was not much different than on the other devices I tried the atomizer on.  For the most part, I kept things in the 3.7 volt range.  I probably could have pushed it a little higher as the vapor was not overly warm.

The vapor production however was quite respectable.  Flavor and throat hit as I mentioned weren’t really muted from what I can tell.  When the juice supply ran a tad low, it wasn’t overly aggressive in reminding me it was probably time to make things a little more aqueous. In general it performed as well as a bridgeless atomizer should.

Too Long; Didn’t Read
The KVS bridgeless 510 low resistance atomizer is a decent little performer in a sporty black and gold package. If you are plagued with little drops of hellfire shooting out from your atomizer and into your mouth, the spatter shield may be just the ticket for your continued happiness.

Performance at a glance
Vapor Production: Good
Vapor Temperature: Moderate
Draw: Medium
Flavor: Good
Thorat Hit: Good

Pros:

• Attractive design
• Spatter shield works
• Not overly aggressive when atomizer begins to run dry
• Fairly inexpensive