They sent me a $500 ball vape to review, and it benched the best friend I’ve had for three years. I’d do it again tomorrow.
There’s a vape that’s followed me around my duplex for years like a loyal dog. The Cannabis Hardware B1.
In the living room for a movie. The desk for the long nights of empty pages. Or my laundry room, getting bouldered, wishing my Fruit of the Looms would fold themselves. I’ve got a Volcano Hybrid and something like fifteen vaporizers in this house right now that have survived the Hunger Games that buried 30 or 40 other vapes in the dirt over 20 years.
But I’d been circling TCC’s Universal Baller for the better part of a year now. Reading forums at hours when no healthy adjusted man is awake. I’ve killed more 3 am carts before checkout because $500 is $500. Plus, I already owned a ball vape I’d have taken a bullet for. Why spend my life savings on next year’s Bugatti when I got a 2017 Honda Pilot at home?
Then High Times asked if I wanted to review it, and a few days later, boom, there it was. I couldn’t believe my luck. I pinched myself hard and I opened the box and thought: that looks awesome.
Then right on its heels, what have I done? In minutes I had parts everywhere. Screens. Rings. A coil. A fistful of dainty little tools laid out like a field-stripped rifle on a poncho. I’ll admit, it looked worse than it was. Most of that stuff just screws on and plugs in.
Little Red Balls, Big Black Coil
“What the hell is that, a steampunk soldering iron or some sort of Iron Age adult toy? What? A ball what now? Oh… well, what the hell’s a ball vape?”
The Universal Baller is that thing. It packs a chamber with tiny pigeon’s blood rubies and blasts them till they undulate making every drag a breath of pure convection with not even a lick of that hot plate heating you get from conduction like a dutch oven searing one grey side of a ribeye. The technical case for the UB has already been made on this very site. I’m here to tell you what it’s like to live with it.
Off the rip, wireless quartz mode, the way it ships, is idiot-proof. I say that as a certified and practicing idiot. But I needed to test everything, which meant swapping out the metal and quartz-path wired setups and I swear to Tommy Chong I watched the same ten seconds of a YouTube tutorial 15 times before my brain went “oooOOOOOoooooh.”
The Learning Curve is a Hairpin Switchback
I’ll admit to maybe 20 minutes wrestling with the bastard. Ok, fine, gun to my record collection, 30.
I’m a self-crowned vaporist, and I was stressing this like an IKEA kitchen reno with no Allen wrench. Though once I’d clawed my way up that hill, everything past it ran downhill and greased. The ring swap’n and bead-load’n between modes I’d braced for like a root canal turned out to be nothing.
The single blip on my radar is that this thing is unbothered by my self-imposed tight schedule. Eight, nine, 10 minutes for a cold start depending on the mode. Waiting for the heat-soak feels like aging in dog years and my wife has the patience of a struck Diamond match. She won’t wait even five minutes. I’ve watched the woman poach her first pull at the two-minute mark, temp be damned. But once fully heated, wireless, you can steal three, four, five solid hits bang bang bang before it needs a recharge.
I expected to like wireless mode. But I saw it as a neat party trick. Something I’d flash twice and abandon for the serious business of the cord, but I was dead wrong, dead wrong, about why I’d end up loving it. Every ball vape I’ve ever run has kept me leashed to a wall like a donkey on a run line but wireless mode drowns that misery in the bathtub.
Wired mode means the PID, cord, and two or three feet of slack and not one inch more. I’ve been a half-melted, soft-serve lump of man on a friend’s couch sliding a ball vape bolted to a rolling Lazy Susan like a haunted tea cart. A scalding coil crossing open upholstery and six adults stoned to the gills tracking it in pregnant pauses between rips, waiting for it to make a break for the pillows. A genuinely deranged way to get high, and the reason I’d so often just grab a portable at home. But now? Even parked on the La-Z-Boy, a wireless wins hand over fist every time. Before, using my ball vape meant the Muffin Top of Doom. Doubling over the coffee table with my gut folding over my Dungarees. It was either that degrading ritual or standing up every single time and screw standing up, am I right?
None of that makes wired moot, though. Wired is a party that flattens a room faster than anything short of a gravity bong filled with carbon monoxide. With Deathstalker 2 queued up on the tube and D&D sheets fanned out on the table like war plans, I can get eight grown adults ripped to the studs inside of fifteen minutes. The UB. Wired. At 530. Does exactly that. Buuuut, I don’t typically throw parties on a Tuesday morning with an ice-cold matcha tonic, so for the daily grind, I’m too far gone on wireless to ever crawl back to the golden handcuffs of wiredom.
The Flavor Turned Me Against My Own Collection
“So good, so good, so good. I can taste it. Not one drop will be wasted.”
I picked SFV OG from Radicle Herbs as my control between configs cause it’s a bio-dynamic, loud, layered, sungrown cut out of Mendocino that throws flavor like ‘91 Cal Ripken. The UB in wireless quartz mode is an unbroken glass path. Glass air into glass bowl into a spotless glass bong. Very un-stonerish of me. Not one molecule of metal Osmosis Jones-ing itself between my lungs and the truth. The first hit came through cleaner than the B1 or any other hunk o’ junk on the shelf. It’s kind of not even fair. The UB is King of the Mountain in every weight class and in just one puff, it grabbed the B1 in a clinch, my own, my precious, and put it on its pockets.
Thick, dense, satisfying vapor dripping with flavor. I get none of that wispy, all-sizzle, no-steak compromise the flavor-chasers like me teach ourselves to swallow. Big hits and big flavor, which shouldn’t be, like, physically possible? The UB is also to thank, and to blame, for ruining my own vape collection. I intend to sue if I can ever stand up again. Suddenly, I vape a bowl out the TinyMight 2 and all I taste is hot steel.
The Venty and the Solo 2 and the POTV Lobo, instruments I’ve loved and gone to bat for and recommended to friends, people who trusted me, now have an idiosyncrasy that I never once caught before. That all-glass has rewired my taste buds, and I can’t go back.
Four or five hits of the pure uncut good stuff, the flavor’s got legs and settles into a gentle taper that stays legibly SFV OG right down to the literally bitter end. For the uninitiated, fully vaped flower always bows out kind of nutty and Orville Redenbacher-ish and a little oversqueezed. I’d take brown popcorn over burnt cookies every day of the week and twice on Sundays, but I can see why for some, it’s a breach of contract.
Not for nothing, that popcorn note showing up on hit one is the sign of a garbage vape deep-frying the flower. But if it kicks in after hit six, when the strain has sung its whole catalog and walked off soaked in sweat like Barry White Live in Belgium? That’s just the taste of an honest empty bowl.
What It Costs, and What It Takes
“Money don’t spend me, I spend money.”
Let’s talk money, cause $500 for a weed gadget is a hell of a swing when a man can get blazed on a two-dollar pack of Zigs and a gas-station Bic. In a climate where eggs cost what a steak used to, half a grand is brutal, and I’m not going to fudge it.
Folks love to tout vapes as long-term investments. Money-savers and make-your-weed-go-longers. But I’m going through roughly the same amount of bud across a day as I did with any other device. What the UB changed was how I loaded it. The flavor’s so good I load microscopic bowls now. Maybe a tenth of a gram. Just enough for two or three perfect hits, then I dump the whole thing and pack another, cause why load a fat bowl, chase a dying high down into the dirt, when I can hit the peak, dump it, and climb straight back up to the peak again? The UB buys me the aristocratic luxury of treating every single bowl as disposable, while wringing out every last drop of goodness from my flower.
Maintenance is a fancy French term for cashing it the second I’m done. I’ve run 50+ bowls through this thing without a real cleaning and the screen’s still clear enough to rip, purely because I brush it out the instant I pull my last hit. If you let vaped flower cool in the bowl, the resin sets in like shit in velcro. But brush it hot, and it sweeps out loose.
So is it worth it? $500 is a genuinely crazy amount of money for a thing that heats plant matter. But this is the best either has tasted in decades, and my Volcano costs more. The UB is the whole package. It’s the greasy, wagyu, Dionysus-of-double-smash burgers with four slices of American and killer abs, salty sweet potato frites and a frosty pint of Bell’s Two Hearted. After that, other vapes start to have the luxe of gas station roller dogs and most of the top-shelf gear that’s worth opening your wallet for runs right up alongside this price anyway.
Who’s Still Throwing Heat?
The Universal part is the whole pitch, man. You can piece together a dozen different and distinct configurations, quartz and metal path, wireless and wired, adapters for damn near any way you like to take vapor in. It’s a chassis you can build your own vape on top of.
The way I like it is convection cranked to Mad Max: Fury Road. In my experience, convection runs more cerebral than somatic. If you’re Elmer Fudd’n that couch-welded, limbs-full-of-wet-sand bunny rabbit a Pax dumps on you, walk away. Convection is the furthest thing from what you’re after. I’d never try to talk you out of your church. Vaya con Dios.
Terp Chasers Club does sell countless adapters for countless ways to vape, one of them making the UB a hybrid experience, meaning conduction and convection together. So if you’re a convectionista who’s shifting to conduction-curious, consider this thing your on-ramp. But if you don’t run a bong at home or prefer something you can pocket and walk out the door with, this desktop monster isn’t your huckleberry. It’s Universal, but it ain’t exactly universal.
If you’re reading this with a ball vape next to your couch this very minute and… is that a portable in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Then the Universal Baller is flat-out worth it. Me, right now, as I type this with a bowl going cold beside me, it’s the only thing on the counter still cranked to temp. I keep telling myself I’ll give the B1 away. Then I think no. Let it retire in a sunny corner of your desk with a rocking chair and a view, except the Universal Baller does the room-to-room walk now, so maybe I box it up. Keep it for parts. I don’t know, man. It’s just sitting there. Staring at me.
It’s kind of freaking me out.
Images courtesy of Lucas Indrikovs.
Sponsored Content Disclosure: Terp Chasers Club provided the Universal Baller to High Times at no cost for the purpose of this review. The product was tested independently by the author, and the opinions, criticisms, and conclusions in this article reflect the author’s own experience with the device.
