Hello folk. It is Paul here once again with another video for you. This one is not exactly
a how to and it's definitely not a review. This one is more of an opinion piece. This
is my explanation as to the differences between foil and screens, or more accurately, why
Paul hates screens. Most of us started with something like this.
This is a screen for a hookah. As you will note, it's relatively thick metal in comparison
to a piece of foil. The holes are very large and quite numerous, and it is of a fixed size;
you cannot change the size. Yes, there are tabs that can help you to wrap onto the bowl
better, but in general what you're dealing with is one fixed sized.
If you're lucky, if you find a bowl that your screen fits quite nicely, you can just fold
the tabs down a little bit, put some coals on top of that and you're going to get an
okay session. It'll be fine. It'll be very airy because of the size of these holes.
Your coals might have a tendency to overheat. Your tobacco might have a little bit of a
tendency to burn because these holes are so large that it's drawing too much air over
the coals too quickly, but also drawing in too much fresh air. That means you're going
to get very hot coals with very hot tobacco right under the coal but then a lot of fresh
smoke free air coming in and diluting everything and making the smoke weak.
On top of that because the holes are so large, there's not much protection for the tobacco
from the coals and you're getting very direct heat. You'll get an okay session, but you
need to be more careful with your coal placement, your coal rotation and your heat management.
If you take this same screen and try to put it on a slightly larger bowl, it doesn't work.
Even with the tabs splayed out, you can see there is a huge gap here. That's one of the
major downfalls of the screen. It can't fit every bowl.
Here we have the gigantic Tangiers small phunnel, which was an even larger gap around the outside
that is just going to be pure fresh air. If you adjust it so it's right in the center,
there's a gap all the way around the outside. A bad seal means thin weak smoke and that
is why foil wins. This is trash. This can adapt to any bowl
perfectly every time. Yes, this is a ton of layers. I'm just using this as an example.
You know how to foil a bowl at this point but it seals much better and you have the
ability to poke any hole design you want, any size of hole you want, any number of hole
you want, and you're going to wind up with something that looks like this.
You get to choose the number of holes, the placement of holes, the size of holes and
everyone has their own special hole patterns that they like. This is one of mine that I
enjoy, which is essentially a square of holes in the center with rows of holes along the
outside. It's great for a phunnel bowl. I'll go into
details on that in another video, but I just want to point out the fact that foil is the
way to go. It's customizable in every regard. It is a great seal.
It's a much better barrier against burning your tobacco because they contact the tobacco
and have direct interaction with the tobacco much less and it allows you to customize the
amount of heat that gets through this barrier much more easily simply by adding another
layer of foil. You can't do that with screens. That's my list of reasons that I love foil
and I hate screens. If you haven't tried out foiling yet, I really do suggest it. It's
one of the best ways to smoke your hookah. There are some traditional brass screens that
are quite good. They're used more for very traditional forms of tobacco, but they're
great because they more closely resemble foil than they do a modern steel screen. The holes
are not nearly this large. They're much smaller, much more numerous and much more like what
you're going to find and what you're going to poke in the foil.
Another thing is that the brass is very thin and it transfers heat very beautifully, but
you really don't find those anymore. All you find is this junkie, crappy, rusty steel,
which I suggest you pass on. That's about it.
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about hookah.org Once again, this is Paul for Hookah.org saying
thank you very much for joining us and happy smoking.