| Stoner MacGyver. |
Now and then, companies send us medical marijuana-related products ranging from vaporizers to board games to books. We’ll be showcasing them in our new, quasi-regular product review section, Stoner MacGyver.
The latest? The Magic Flight Launch Box.
What is it, dude? The Magic Flight Launch Box. It’s a personal vaporizer made by some hippies that know what they are doing.
How much coin will it run me? $80 to $150 depending on the type of wood and where you find it.
Where can I get one? Our version (Cherry wood) came from the folks at 1percent.com and would run you about $140.
Personal vaporizers have come a long way in the last few years, but the Magic Flight has stood the test of time (at least, over the last few years) as one of the most functional, least-technical examples of non-combustion consumption.
It’s goofy looking compared to the streamlined, slick vapor pens that are on the market right now. But none of those vapor pens comes close to being this effective at vaporizing flowers. Everyone I know that has one loves the thing and uses it over pipes around the house.
The design is simple: A trough made of fine-mesh screen is suspended over heating elements inside a small, milled wooden box the size of a Matchbook car. You put your ground up herb in the trough, loading up to the top, then slide the plastic lid over the bowl. The small hole below the carved-out bowl is the mouthpiece and the larger hole around the side is for the battery.
Pressing in on the battery powers up the unit, heating up the coils and the screen where the herb is sitting. Give it a second to warm up, then toke on just like you would a regular pipe. It also comes with a small glass tube you can insert in the mouthpiece hole to use as an extender. Shaking up the box between hits keeps the herb fresh.
For our Completely Unscientific test of the Magic Flight, we left the Launch Box on our desk and smoked it daily for the last three weeks. It also made a trip up to the hill for a day of snowboarding, where it held up great and allowed me to keep my gloves on instead of fumbling numbly with a big lighter and a one-hitter.
Overall, we here at Stoner MacGyver were pretty impressed. It functioned exactly how it should with no problems or clogging. Battery life was okay and one charge lasted for a day or so. They suggest you change the battery for every load, and these aren’t your regular AA batteries either. Though it doesn’t have a temperature control, the thickness of the vapor can easily be controlled by how hard or soft you inhale.
It’s stealth and easily fits in a pocket and the palm of your hand, though again it’s not as inconspicuous as a vapor pen would be. Without the heavy scent of smoke and no lingering cherry in a bowl, it was easy to stealthily use the Magic Flight out in public without drawing attention to ourselves – except the guy in the Winter Park parking lot who saw it, asked us for a hit and told us he had one at home.
It’s some hippie stuff, too. Aside from being made of sustainable wood, the quote on the back is an old one found in a rare metaphysics book by Forrest Landry. It signifies the “one simple idea” of creating a better way to smoke. Groovy.
Among the few downside is that the air you are drawing in is hot. Positioning the glass nozzle wrong heats up your teeth when inhaling, which is oddly exactly what you’d expect the opposite of a Slushee brainfreeze to feel like.
Also, it’s not the most discreet thing in the world, nor are the kinetics of it all that functional for stealth use. By having to take the rubber lid off the battery, put it in the hold, then press on it to get the thing to heat up, you find yourself going through a lot of fumbing around with the pipe as opposed to other handheld vape designs with a built-in battery and single button operation. There’s also some scary warnings about how the batteries can overheat if you don’t re-cap them when not in use.
And finally, while amazing for smoking bud the Magic Flight is not a good option for smoking concentrates. There’s no way to remove and clean the screen if it were to get gunked up with hash residue and it doesn’t really evenly burn the hash due to the design (despite their warnings, we tried).
But if you’re just a flower smoker looking for a more discreet way to puff through the day, the Launch Box should definitely be on your short list of vapes to look into.
We can’t guarantee all products sent in will be reviewed here at Stoner MacGyver, but if you’ve got something you think is the greatest invention since sliced pot-bread, send us an e-mail at [email protected]previously ran over at Westword.com>