So how’s the vape off the new Gas Mods Kree RTA?
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience where we see a new device for the first time, and just think “I have to have this!”
I am an absolute sucker for clear top caps, bell caps, and all types of tanks and devices where you can see straight through them, and the glass top cap on the Kree looked amazing in pictures!
What Can We Expect From the Gas Mods Kree RTA?
I’m pleased to say that in the flesh it’s even more good looking!
Gas Mods is a Chinese company that has tried to bring more of a high end feel to their atomizers. And I believe this is the first time that we have had one of their products in for review, so I’m really curious to see what it’s capable of.
They’ve mostly created RDAs previously, with one RDTA. So can they translate their experience in RDAs to RTAs? Let’s find out!
The Gas Mods Kree was sent in for review by VapeCiga (thank you) and as always I will report back honestly on what I find, and I am not influenced by freebies.
Inside The Box
- Gas Mods Kree RTA, Glass Topcap, Clear Drip Tip, 2.5mm Airflow – Preinstalled
- PC Top cap
- Black Drip Tip
- 510 Adapter
- 5 Extra Airflow Adapters (2.0m, 1.5mm, 1.2mm, 1.0mm, 0.8mm)
- Spares Bag (including extender for using PC tank section)
- Blue Handle Screwdriver (not pictured)
Specs
Specs- Coil – Single Coil
- Dimensions – 22mm x 40mm
- Capacity – 2ml (glass) 3.5ml (PC)
Design and Build Quality
Before I start taking you through the bits and pieces of this I should take a moment to describe how the drip tip/top cap/chimney go together. The top cap is held in place by being sandwiched between two pieces that screw together.
One of those is the interior chimney of the evaporation chamber, the other is either one of the two drip tips that it comes with or a a metal 510 drip tip adapter.
The chimney screws onto the deck, and the top cap sits on an o-ring at the base.
Gas Mods Kree RTA Drip Tips
You have a choice of two drip tips. One is clear plastic, and a wider bore more suited to a restrictive DTL draw, and a black drip tip with a thinner bore. Interestingly these have a thread on them to screw onto the chimney which is the same as a 510 thread. Also the drip tips themselves are 810 fitting (with an o-ring) which should fit on other tanks.
If you don’t like either of the two drip tips that it comes with, then you have the option of using a little metal adapter that has the thread to screw onto the chimney, and space to put on any 510 drip tips you like.
Gas Mods Kree RTA Tank Section
Like with the drip tips, you’ve got two different tank sections in the box. The one that comes preinstalled is made out of glass, and looks absolutely stunning! If you want a little bit more capacity (3.5ml) you can always swap that out for a polycarbonate tank.
It’s not nearly as nice looking as the glass tank, and I would be careful with using it as some liquids are known to react with PC and could cause them to crack.
If you use the larger capacity tank you will also need to attach the little chimney extender between the chimney and your drip tip.
Gas Mods Kree RTA Deck
It’s a nice simple single coil deck, but I’ve got a couple of issues with it.
For starters it’s using flat head screws, this is a personal preference, but I really hate flat heads on build decks.
More annoyingly are the walls that are on either side of the screws. They’re placed so that there is quite a big gap between the head of the screw and the wall.
Especially if you’re using a simple round wire, this means it’s not as simple as popping in your wire and screwing it down.
Instead you’ll need to make sure that it stays under the screw head, and I found it was more like building a much older type of device where you need to wrap your wire around the screw.
Underneath where your coil sits you’re airflow is controlled by a selection of 6 plugs that you get in the package.
The 2.5mm airflow hole is preinstalled in the deck, and if you want to swap it out I recommend you use a little bit of e-liquid on the o-ring to help lubricate it. Make sure you place it with the o-ring facing down, as this is what holds it in place.
You also have two generously sized wick holes to drop your wick into, fed by three little juice inlets.
Gas Mods Kree RTA Base
The base of the tank has some nice knurling on it, but this isn’t to help you change your airflow.
As there’s no airflow control ring, the airflow holes on the outside are static – but it does make it easy to unscrew from your mod!
How to build the Gas Mods Kree
- Choose your airflow hole and put it into the deck. I would recommend putting the tank together and testing it out to decide on your preferred draw. Just remember that it will be a bit more restrictive once you have a coil in place.
- Unscrew your post screws to place your coil. Then tighten them up, making sure to keep your coil legs under the screw head. You can wrap it round the screw to help.
- Trim your coil legs close to the screw to avoid shorts. Be especially careful of the positive post as there’s no cut out for it, instead it’s set back from the wall that the chimney screws onto.
- Dry fire your coil gently, and strum as necessary to remove any hot-spots and check it’s glowing evenly.
- After it’s cool, get you cotton and feed it through.
- Trim you cotton so that it will reach down to the base of the juice intake. Try not to compress it down too much. You can thin it out a bit, but it doesn’t require much raking as there’s so much space.
- Wet you coil with e-liquid.
- Screw on the evaporation chamber tightly to the deck. When you do this, make sure that the resistance doesn’t drop indicating a short. As you won’t be able to fix this once filled with e-liquid without emptying it.
- Once the evaporation chamber is tightened up, get your tank section and place is over the base, this is just held in place by the o-ring at this point.
- Fill up with your e-liquid.
- Finally screw on your drip tip, or drip tip adapter. Don’t over tighten this, as you want to be able to unscrew it to fill up in the future without unscrewing the evaporation chamber.
- Once you’ve put it all together, you’re good to go!
How To Fill The Gas Mods Kree
Gently unscrew the drip tip/drip tip adapter. Whilst you do this, keep an eye on the engraving on the outside of your evaporation chamber
If you see the chamber start to unscrew whilst you unscrew the drip tip STOP
If this starts to happen, one way to mitigate it, is to apply a little sideways pressure to the drip tip you’re unscrewing. Not sure why this works, but it’s probably to do with torsion, or leverage, or friction…
Once you’ve unscrewed the drip tip you’ve now got the wide open neck of the tank to fill up with, plenty of room!
When you put it back together, don’t screw the drip tip back on too tightly, finger tight is what you want. Screw it down too much, and you risk binding the drip tip to the top cap, and you won’t be able to fill it again without draining your tank.
Because you don’t have any juice flow control, it’s likely you’ll end up with some e-liquid gurgling around in your airflow. A quick way to clear this is an old Kayfun trick.
Hold your vape upside down and hold some paper near your airflow hole. Then blow up into the drip tip to force the e-liquid to come out the airflow.
It’s been a bit of a messy review this one, juice in the airflow hole, juice coming out when I’ve changed the build, definitely not a tank I’d want to take out and about with me unless I had a paper towel to hand!
How Does the Gas Mods Kree RTA Perform?
So as you can probably tell, I have some reservations on what this is like to use on a day to day basis. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a tank where I’ve had to empty it to re-wick! Does it’s performance do enough to mitigate these concerns though?
Gas Mods Kree RTA Airflow
I’m actually a big fan of the plugs underneath the coil. It can be a bit of a pain if you don’t know what you like, and you want to experiment with the different configurations.
However, once you’ve got it dialled in, I think that shaping the airflow beneath the coil is a far better way of controlling airflow than just a ring around the outside.
I’ll be honest though, I haven’t tried all of the possible airflow settings. After a certain point it gets a bit irritating having to take everything to pieces to change out it out!
Remember, you can only do this when the tank is empty, and you need to remove your build to do it.
So full disclosure, I haven’t tried the 1.2mm airflow. I’m going to guess that it gives you a draw somewhere between the 1.0mm and the 1.5mm! I’ve rated them all on a 1-10 scale, where 1 is like sucking a golf ball through a garden hose and 10 is totally unrestricted.
- 0.8mm – This gives a nice restricted MTL draw. 2-2.5
- 1.0mm – Just a fraction more open! 2.5-3
- 1.2mm – Sorry didn’t test it!
- 1.5mm – Noticeably more open, still not a DTL draw, but getting there. 4.5
- 2.0mm – Here we start to be capable of a restrictive DTL. 6
- 2.5mm – More airflow again, and quite a comfortable DTL draw. 6.5/7
- No airflow control pin – Even more airflow and quite noisy. 7.5
Gas Mods Kree RTA Flavour
I’ve tried a couple of different e-liquids in this, both Berry Ice by Vape Simple which is a 50/50 VG/PG, as well as Bango Mango by Big Juice Company at 70/30 VG/PG.
With a simple round wire build at a low wattage the flavour is pretty good. Nice smooth MTL draw with plenty of punchiness from the flavour that I expect.
If you can get a slightly more complex coil though it’s definitely worth it for the flavour increase. I used my normal MTL fused clapton, and it performed really well. I’d still recommend keeping to one of the smaller airflow pins though, as although you can manage MTL off of most of them, the sweet spot for flavour was about the 1.0mm for me.
Wide open, and and there’s a slight drop in flavour, but not too much. As a restrictive DTL tank I was starting to get the separation of the flavour notes. Not as good as some, but they get a thumbs up for the versatility of this tank.
Pros
- It’s a looker with that glass cap!
- Really good flavour
Cons
- Unable to change your airflow/re-wick with e-liquid in the tank
- Big gap between post screw and wall
- Sometimes tricky to unscrew the drip tip to fill up, without unscrewing the chamber
Final Review Verdict
So it’s a bit of a pain to build on, and even more of a pain to review!
However, the flavour really is very good. I’d definitely be happy to recommend this to someone, but probably someone that has been building for a little while, as it’s not totally simple to work around the compromises.
It also looks absolutely stunning with the glass top cap, although I wish they had included a spare rather than the PC tank – as we all know, glass breaks!
I did have to knock a fair few points off for the design though. The gap between the screw head and the wall seems like a basic thing that they should have gotten right. The fact that you can’t re-wick without emptying the tank is another downside.
Although I’m usually a big fan of top fill, having three pieces screwed together using the same direction of threads, and you only want to unscrew one of those joins, is an absolute pain.
All in all, it might be worth picking up if you like the look. Just know what you’re getting yourself in to!
