@Ratchett ... a thought on the mouthpiece screen ... do you think you could design and have made a SS 3-prong tool to remove/insert mouthpiece screens? (really just a round disc w/ 3 small rods sticking out the bottom and a handle on top (if you can't picture it I could draw it--badly--and scan it) ... just something I was thinking about
On another note, I've been thinking about my hopper's reliability issues ... it's still going strong, and whenever I start to notice any drop in performance, I rotate the temp dial ~10 times when replacing the battery. I'm getting 2 good chambers on one battery, and it is performing I'd say at a good 80-90% still. (much better than the maybe 40% it was performing at for days before I figured this out). I'm now many days of usage since getting this working again, and still going strong while waiting for my SS RMA to return.
This has had me thinking about why this works and what is going on? I
think a lot of the issues are indeed in this temp control (just a hypothesis). Now for some math:
The GH has a 45W heater, so at peak it could be drawing 10.7-11.8 amps @ 4.2-3.8V. This is a lot of current to put through that dial switch ... if this heats anything up in there and creates some tarnish or other such things reducing conduction, thus worsening the issues, the ability to draw the required current would suffer. The batteries would get pushed harder, the heater would get less current and be overworked, and a lot of the power would be lost to heat. The kicker here is that the worse it gets the quicker it gets even worse!
So to translate this to my situation, at it's worst, the back-end, and everything in consequence, got really hot. A battery wouldn't even really last a session. The flickering blue lights started (lack of power to heater). etc. etc.
So why did rotating the dial over and over and over until it smoothed out work?
My
theory here is that perhaps there is some build-up inside the dial switch on the potentiometer switch surface ... so this creates the conduction issues, which result in under current issues and excessive heat. Rotating the dial many times until it smooths out works because it is "scraping" away the build-up on the surface with the switch contact. It smooths out when the build-up is mostly gone. Then when you use it again, the potentiometer has good contact between the contact and the surface, and everything works as expected with normal heat and proper performance.
The issue I see with this is you are wearing down your switch a lot through the action of using it to do the scraping/cleaning; which means it will fail way too quickly (although if you have to do this it's really already failed so you are just extending it's life somewhat).
Keep in mind ... this is merely a hypothesis grounded in no more than observation and a small amount of electronics knowledge. Without being able to look inside the switch it really can't be proven. Contact cleaner of some sort sprayed in the dial I imagine might fix it much better, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea, or which ones would be safe, etc.