What are Drip Tips?

The high-end Royale Drip Tip by 2 Puffs is made of 304 stainless steel and 510 compatible. Image via Vapor Jedi.

A drip tip is more than a mouthpiece for your atomizer. Vapers who are old enough to remember second-generation e-cigs will tell you a drip tip is an ingenuous invention. It cuts the time you spend dripping nicotine juice into your RDA because you don't need to remove the head to insert the dropper into atomizer and coat the coil with your favorite e-liquid.

Drip tips are made of different materials, such as thermal-resistant plastic, hand blown glass, ceramic and stainless steel. Vapers say the material and length of the drip tip will affect the flavor and temperature of each drag.

You will get a different flavour with different tips, Factors affecting flavour include: Tip material, bore size, bore shape, inlet hole size, outlet hole size, tip length, tip weight, tip surface area. Not a comprehensive list but almost all of them seem to affect flavour.

Some people say ceramic and stainless steel drip tips provide the best flavor while others say Pyrex glass is simply the best because it's "almost entirely chemically neutral in a vaping environment."

The Royal Goblet Drip Tip by Vape Smith Philippines is a wide-bore type made of stainless steel. It's made for Castle RDAs and other systems that use 510 connectors. Image via Vapor Jedi.

One of the threads at The Vapers Shed forum mentioned the following materials as neutral tasting: stainless steel (particularly 316 and 304), titanium (surgical grade), brass (naval or marine grade), stone, ceramic, and glass (either Pyrex or Borsilicate). If it's made of glass, the drip tip must be all glass because the flavor may not be neutral if it's on an aluminium holder, for example.

Materials that may affect the flavor of the e-juice to some extent include: aluminium, thermoplastic known as Acetal Homopolymer or by its popular trade name of Delrin, acrylic, several types of wood, and rubber. In some cases, drip tips with Teflon coating end up producing metallic tasting vapes.

The following text from a Vape Ranks article describes the drip tip best:

Also known as a mouth piece, the drip tip comes in various shapes and sizes, and can be made out of different materials, like stainless steel, aluminum, plastic or ceramic. The material from which a drip tip is manufactured as well as its length greatly influences the temperature of the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette. Steel drip tips, for example, cool off the vapor as it passes through it, but long plastic drip tips are also known to deliver cooler vapor, because of the distance it travels to reach the mouth.

Drip tips are best used on rebuildable atomizers. E-cigarettes like the Evod have drip tips, but they're not replaceable. Some drip tips are short while others are long. You preference on the temperature of your vapes will determine whether a short drip tip is perfect for you or not.