Obscurity

I don’t lament the passing of the CE2 top coil atomiser in my affections any more than I miss spending hours carefully splicing out the ruined sections of a C90 cassette before manually winding miles of tape back in. Actually, stop right there, upon reflection the tape splicing kit I got one Christmas was an awesome gift. I’d no idea how to use most of the bits and the tape was inevitably gone beyond retrieval…but it was the nearest thing to my first ever toolkit.

And while I’m on about C90s – I really miss my ghettoblaster, my Amiga and my Minidisc player. Minidiscs were awesome: write, rewrite, digital and all wrapped up in a nice protective case. So awesome, in fact, that I still don’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t buy into the idea.

Coming from a dim and distant time when Top of the Pops albums were as authentic as the bands appearing on the show I really love gadgets and retain a love of almost all of the ones that are no longer with us.

Which is why I’m concerned in vaping terms.

My first step up from clearos and basic regulateds was to a Kayfun on top of a Nemesis. I remember asking people why anybody would bother with a mech mod when my Vamo appeared to deliver everything anybody could want. A thought echoed by my wife who believed that such expense should not be repeated.

But move to mechanicals I did, and loved it. There is something delightfully basic, forever ready for the apocalypse, about them and yet they display a range of design features from functional to the aesthetic. At one point I was holding over twenty on the desk, some I’ve even replaced after selling on more than one occasion.

The thing was I could, we all could, because once you bought into the concept of getting a ridiculously expensive metal tube you always knew you’d be able to move it on or swap it with someone equally deluded.

But deluded no more, so it seems. I’m looking at the sales section of a popular forum. I’m looking at it and seeing brand mechs struggling to sell for £50, mechs that used to fly out of threads the second they were advertised for double that.

In one, a once rare and highly sought after “elitist” brand is sitting without any love being expressed. Not for the first time, a Hellfire struggling to find a new home; it has been the same story for a few months now. The writing was on the wall once the Nemesis ceased to obtain £100, then £80 and now an asked for £60 seems optimistic.

We live in a new vaping world, progress in chip output and features have killed the mech market, in conjunction with a shift in the way most vapers vape. Only a handful of us appear to enjoy just vaping for taste with 1.2Ω+ coils. Atomisers being released onto the market come with ever-larger air holes and vapers pump as much power as they can manage through coils.

But I still love my mechs, they do the job I want them to. I don’t burn cotton on top of mechs and I love the physical interaction with the battery, as I, via the sense cells in my mouth, become a biological voltmeter.

The powers that be in tech refer to the decline of products in terms of decreasing “windows of utility”. Although the satnav is as dead as Python’s parrot satellite navigation continues. Is the window of utility being closed on mech devices? Will we now see companies switching off their lathes as demand ebbs?

In a spirit of defiance I’m going to pop an Igo-W onto the Petit Gros and go off to the garage – somewhere up there is my old Minidisc player.