The Double Barrel v3 from Squid Industries - a Shanghai Vape Review
The Double Barrel v3 from Squid Industries has arrived!
Quite possibly the smallest dual-battery mod that will happily fit your 25mm tank on nice and flush. We’ve been excited for this to arrive with us, and we’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on some of the first batch to leave the factory. It’s been a bit delayed because of production issues of the chip in the USA, so even though the Chinese manufacturing facility have been sitting on some chip-less bodies for a couple of weeks but they’re with us now!
At a glance Simplicity. No USB. No temperature control. Wattage adjustment in one-watt increments. Dual 18650 mod, 5 to 150 watts output. Improvements from v2.1 – updated battery door (thank the lord), flush screen, 25mm diameter, liquid proof 510 thread. New colour options.
Looks Looks are pretty subjective, and there’s something to be said for the design choices made by Squid Industries. Small, compact and slender – the name double-barrel gives you some indication of what to expect. If you’ve ever stared down the barrel of a dual gauge shotgun before, you’ll be in familiar territory. The distinctive shape is about more than just aesthetics though. The shape, curving around the batteries, helps to keep the weight of the mod down considerably and the placement of the screen and firing pin on the top of device also go a long way to saving space and keeping the mod compact. This is a device which is designed with the need to remove bulk and unnecessary fuss, and although there are definitely better-looking mods out there we do feel that the Double Barrel makes itself stand out next to other mods by how much it removes from a traditionally shaped box. The rounded cylindrical columns (with a small vent gap between them) holding your two batteries make this look like two tube mods welded together. As a cleverer man than I once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”…and the Squid Industries Double Barrel v3 absolutely nails it in terms of sophistication by that standard.
Performance We need to shoot some damn big elephants in a very small room when it comes to Squid Industries and the Double Barrel v2.1… We loved the look of the v2.1 – it’s essentially exactly the same as the v3 - and we wanted so much to say that this was the mod for anyone who wanted to keep using two batteries but reduce the footprint of their mod. But we couldn’t. The battery doors were too easy to lose, or even worse break. There were many reports of juice leaking into people’s screens and damaging the internals. The paint job was nice – while it lasted… Thankfully, the owner at Squid Industries (a US Navy veteran who donates a portion of all proceeds to non-profits) took all these issues into account when updating the v3. The look was what people fell in love with, and with the upgrades to the v3 we feel now that this is a product we can recommend to our friends without worrying that at some point they’d be unhappy with their purchase. An upgrade to a hinged battery door dealt with the first issue. A liquid-proof 510 connection and flush display screen the second. Finally the powder-coat paint job sees to the last. On top of that, a slight diameter increase to 25mm to let the newest generation of tanks fit flush on top is a nice bonus. That’s a double barrel to the face of those elephants – pow!
The basics of the mod’s functionality stay the same – click the firing button (which doubles as your wattage control through a sturdy rotary control) 3 times and the screen display inverts. Click four times and it locks your wattage output. Click five times to turn on and off. That’s it. No weird menu systems, no temperature control, no touch screen. The wattage control goes up and down in one-watt increments so no fiddling about with decimal points. Wwe all fire our mods on round numbers anyway though, right? This ‘bare-bones’ attitude does mean however that you’ll need an external battery charger to charge your batteries (no USB port on the mod) and are giving up some of the fiddly stuff that makes vaping fun, but we feel those are not even sacrifices when it comes to the ‘sophistication’ of this device. well worth making.
The Takeaway The v3 keeps everything that was good about the v2.1 and fixes all the complaints that came about from real-life usage of the v2.1. Simplicity of design and functionality means this is now our favourite mod for day to day use with our big 25mm tanks.
