Update: This video and grinder recommendation is still relevant in 2023 for the Pax Plus and the Pax mini.

What’s the best grind for the Pax 3 or Pax Plus? Internet wisdom claims FINE grinds are best for all things conduction.

I’m not a big fan of swallowing information without evidence, so I decided to test.

Grind Comparison Test

To make things as scientific as possible, the grind consistency needed to be the ONLY variable.
I vaped 3 sessions, one for each grind. Each session consisted of thirteen 10-second draws at the 3rd temperature setting. The Pax 3 started fully charged. I used the Pax 3 in normal mode.

Hypothesis

I believe the Pax 3 doesn’t require a powdery fine grind to produce good vapor. A tightly packed medium grind should perform just as well.

Materials Used:

• Pax 3
• Sunset Sherbert from Fyre Haus Irvine
• Phoenician grinder (for coarse grind)
• New Vape coarse grinder
• Santa Cruz Shredder (for medium grind)
• New Vape Fine (for fine grind)

Test Results

I scored the vapor quality and flavor of each hit on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the perfect hit that a Pax is capable of producing.

Pax 3 Coarse Grind

Phoenician and NewVape Grinder (Coarse Grind) – For this session, I used both grinders and chose the chunkiest of nugs to load. Mediocre is the term that best sums up the results of the coarse grind for the Pax 3. The average bowl rating was 3.9 out of 10.

Looks like it had some life left to it. Not very well extracted, definitely the worst performing grind from the three. It was flavorful at first, but that declined quickly after the first few rips.

The entire coarse ground session took 13 hits. It started off okay. Flavorful, but not very satisfying. The flavor started to decrease each hit. The average score per hit came out to a whopping 3.9.

Pax 3 Medium Grind

Santa Cruz Shredder (Medium Grind) – This is my all-time favorite grinder! It provides a grind that’s not too fine, not too coarse, it provides a nice fluffy grind that performs well with most vapes I use. After testing the bowl packed with the medium grind, it performed significantly better than the coarse grind. Although there was some reduced airflow, the flavor of each rip was definitely more robust!

The medium grind had almost as good vapor flavor as the fine grind, however it was much easier to extract rips from the Pax 3. For this reason I had a general better experience using the Pax 3 with a medium grind when compared to the fine grinder. This was the clear winner for me.

Pax 3 Fine Grind

New Vape (Fine Grind) – Rather than use up a new nug, I opted to recycle the unused weed from the coarse grind test. Looks just like the medium, little darker, nicely toasted. The fine grind performed best as far as vapor flavor goes, but added air resistance as a result of the fine grind made me appreciate the medium grind better.

With a fine grind, you can really pack more material into the Pax 3 oven, but the draw resistance is dramatically increased. Packing too tightly with a fine grind dramatically increases draw resistance. The vape quality per hit of the fine grind averaged out to 7.6.

Conclusion

Although the course grind started off very flavorful, it performed the worst out of the three. The fine grind produced the best vapor overall, but the added draw resistance made it the vaping experience less enjoyable.

My favorite is the medium grind with the Santa Cruz Shredder, as it provided the best balance between airflow and flavor.

Let us know which grind you prefer with your Pax Vaporizers in a comments below. Thank you for checking out our guide.

Best Grinder for Pax 3 Video Transcript

– What’s the best grind for your Pax 3? We’re gonna find out in this video.

What’s up, guys? It’s Troy with 420 Vape Zone. Today, I’m gonna take the Pax 3, and I’m gonna vape a bowl of fine, medium, and coarsely ground weed, and we’re gonna compare the results, and once and for all figure out how should you be grinding your weed with the Pax 3.

So what I’m gonna do for the test, is I’m gonna grind up some of the Sunset Sherbert that I got from one of my local dispensaries here in Orange County. For the coarse grind, I’m either gonna use the Phoenecian or the New Vape. Both of these produce a nice, coarse grind but I’m not sure which one I’m gonna like better. So, I’ll just take the coarser of the two.

For the medium grind I’m gonna use the Santa Cruz shredder. And for the fine grind I’m gonna use the New Vape Fine Grind. This is a two piece grinder. Both of the new vapes are two piece grinders. I’ll start out with the coarse and then I’ll vape a bowl of medium, and then a bowl of the fine. And I’ll keep track of the vapor quality along the way, just so we can kind of understand what the vapor feels like. I’ll take the first and the last few hits from each load directly from the mouth piece so I can really understand what the vapor is like. But the middle hits, I’m going to use a water pipe just so I can save my throat, because I’m going to be vaping three bowls here. Three of ’em. Let’s get started.

If, at any point in time you like this video, give me a thumbs up. And if you like weed videos and weed vapes in general, subscribe because I make a video like this about once a week. Really appreciate it guys. Thank you. So we’re going to start out vaping some of this Sunset Sherbert that I got from The Firehouse in Orange County, California. Look at these beautiful nugs. So I’m gonna vape the same weed with all of ’em, and I’m gonna try to find some nugs that all look about the same and feel about the same. So there’s a nice one for there, and there. These two are a little bit bigger than this one, but they all have about the same size and they’re all about the same squishy-ness as well. I’m gonna chunk up half of this for the Phoenecian and the other half for the New Vape. Oh god. Going into the Phoenecian. I’m a big fan of this Phoenecian grinder.

[Troy Voiceover] And it was at this point in the video where I stopped talking. Was it awkward that I stated my enjoyment of the Phoenecian grinder? Oh god, someone on Reddit’s gonna tag this as Hail Corporate or some shit like that. I think the reality of it was I realized I was about to vape three frickin’ bowls of weed in the Pax 3. And of course I frickin’ hate two piece grinders and I didn’t know where to put the weed now because, the two piece grinder. Luckily, I had a piece of paper layin’ around with nothing personal on it. At least, I hope. Fuckin’ two piece grinders. I guess I’ll have to narrate since past tense me was a dickhead and didn’t actually say anything out loud. I wasn’t really sure if the Phoenecian grinder or the New Vape coarse grinder was going to produce the more coarse grind, so I just decided to use both then pick the chunkiest of the chunks when I had load the vape. So that’s from the New Vape, and that’s from the Phoenecian. This looks like a pretty coarse grind. Of course I could have just taken the chunks of the nug and just broken it off, but I’ve done that before in the Pax 3 and I know that it sucks already, so I’m not going to bother with that. So I’m using this little scooper from NewVape.com to scoop and load the weed. When I first got it actually, I didn’t like it. I think I unboxed it and pretty sure I called it worthless. I have to take that back. I’ve actually been using it, it works pretty well as long as the weed is not wet or sticky or super chunky. Alright, so the coarse one is nice and packed. I’ll be keeping track of the entire session length with the timer, and I’ll also accumulate all of the hits. So I’ll time all the hits and add them together and keep track of that as well.

[Troy Voiceover] I’m doing my best to make sure every hit is exactly ten seconds using the time stick here. I scored the vapor quality and flavor of each hit on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the perfect hit that a Pax is capable of. I did stop to stir halfway, but by then the bowl was pretty much spent. Yeah, and even the bong hits were pretty mediocre here. The entire coarse ground session took 13 hits, and the average score per hit came out to a whopping three-point nine. That’s really not very good. And at one point, I actually did turn the Pax off accidentally in the water pipe, but it really didn’t make a damn bit of difference. Okay, so I got about 13 hits out of the coarse grind. It started out okay, it was pretty flavorful, but not very satisfying. The flavor went down throughout the entire session. Let’s dump the ABV into this little coarse area. And then let’s pack up a medium grind.

For the medium grind, I’m going to use a Santa Cruz shredder, one of my absolute favorite grinders. Santa Cruz seems to work really well with pretty much all vapes. It just has a nice, consistent medium grind. It’s not too fine, not too coarse, and it’s a great build, lasts forever, and it’s super sharp. Here’s the grind from the Santa Cruz. It’s a nice, fluffy medium grind. And I’ll pack this with about point three or point four grams of this Sunset Sherbert. I have the Pax 3 all packed up with a medium grind from the Santa Cruz shredder. I’m gonna go ahead and vape this entire session and we’ll compare the ABV and the results afterward. Cheers guys. ♪ Shut up and sit down ♪ Alright, so I’ve finished with the medium bowl.

The bowl with the medium grind was definitely more enjoyable than the bowl with the coarse grind. It had slightly less air flow, but the vapor was more robust and it was more there, it was more present. With the coarse, it always had a little bit of wispiness to it, although the first few hits of the coarse were very flavorful. The first few hits of the medium, or “mideum” as I spelled it on my paper. So let’s dump the ABV into our little medium thing here. Now, to grind the fine grind, rather than break up another nug, I’m just gonna use the leftover from the coarse grind. ‘Cause nugs are precious. There we go. Probably should have chosen a less purpley weed for doing ABV comparisons. That’s a lot of weed. I don’t know if this fine grinder can handle it. I’m not sure. This grinder is so smooth. I almost wish I used the fine grind more often, just because this grinder is such a pleasure to use. This is buttery, creamy, and it makes a fun sound. So let’s take a look. Alright, so here we have the grind from the fine grinder. I like that it’s still kind of in little cut up chunks rather than being all powdery, like the finishing grinder. Those electric things, ick. So I wanna see if I can load this into the Pax without making a giant mess. This feels so complicated right now. With a fine grind you can really pack a lot in there, but the more you pack in there, the less air flow you’re gonna have. Okay, so there’s the… There’s the tight pack with the fine grind.

Alright, the Pax 3 is loaded up with the fine grind and I am not ready for this, but I’m gonna do it anyway. So here we go, let’s start the session. See you guys on the other side. Woo, that’s really punchy. Alright, so I did that, all three. I don’t know why. Let’s get the ABV out and compare. Alright, real quick, let’s look at the ABV. The coarse grind here looks like there’s still some life left in it. I could probably grind it up and pack it back in there or put it into a different vape and still get some life out of it. Not very well extracted, in my opinion. The medium grind, nicely extracted, looks really even. There are some light chunks. Those were the ones that were on top at the end. And then the fine looks just like the medium. Same color, maybe a little bit darker. Nicely toasted. So the coarse vapor wasn’t very nice. It was flavorful at the start. It declined halfway through the session, and by the end was, you know, it was meh.

The medium grind was really nice. The third hit was the best hit. The medium grind had a really good, enjoyable session right up until the stirring point. So the fine grind performed best and had the highest quality vapor overall or the highest flavor vapor overall. But it also had the highest air resistance, and it was pretty difficult to pull vapor from. The medium grind had almost as good vapor quality and it was easier to draw from. I think, overall, the medium grind performed better for me and I would prefer it with the medium grind, even though I didn’t get quite as much vapor as I did in the fine grind. Seems like the best grind is either a fine or a medium, closer to the fine, somewhere in between. I’m too high to finish the video. Thanks for watching. Thumbs up if you liked this video. Subscribe.

I try to make a video every week about weed vapes. And this is it. This is it, this is the video folks. I’m high as balls. I gotta go.