Purchasing first vape pen.

I went through the same thing, and admittedly I didn't get a lot of help (not so much because people weren't helpful, but there still doesn't seem to be a lot of quality products to talk about).
 
Were you going to use cartridges of some sort? Or did you have a means to acquire oil/wax/what have you straight up from someone?
 
If the latter is the case, I can offer you up my own personal take, which ended up working out decent for me thus far:
 
I already owned a Volcano and a Pax for dry herb, devices which I felt were top of their class for portable and non-portable dry herb vaping. For my purposes, I wanted to find the same thing in a portable dabbing device, and largely, I could not :/ . This may change, in fact, it probably will change while I'm not paying attention if anything, but for now, the best pen I found and settled on was the Atmos Raw/RX (as far as I can tell they are the same thing and the name changed at some point from one to the other).
 
It can technically do both dry and oil, but I would probably not do both with it (I havent even tried it with dry stuff, and probably wont, even if it is decent). The main other thing you'll need to know if you get that pen is that it kind of sort of needs to be modified depending on what you want to put in it, and the directions are not very clear about it. Basically you just need to remove this spring, and specifically not use this little glass button shaped screen that you'll probably get separately with it (that if you don't use, and do try and smoke the dry stuff, you'll be very unhappy, which explains many of the negative reviews the product got...which if they still concern you, keep in mind this pen did get the highest score among the dab pen roundup in High Times that got posted recently).
 
Anyway, whether you go with what I have or not, I wish you luck!

 

Well unfortunately I don't know much about making your own pen. And I only really got to try out an Atmos (well, and the micro G my friend had sometime before that...oh and his 710 Oil pen ) . I got to compare my experience to an actual nice glass dab rig (that a friend also had) and I felt pretty good about my Atmos purchase. The thing is easy to use, it's very modular, and overall just works solid. Until the market produces something more pax-like or something, I'll probably hang onto this one.

 

 
Well, while the process of changing it for either oils or dry herb mainly involves the removal or reinsertion of that little spring that I think was attatched to the mouthpiece, and then the screen that sometimes comes seperate, it's because wax can really gunk up the heating chamber. I feel like once you use it for oil, it's kind of pointless to switch back to dry. And, honestly, I don't really feel like that's the worst thing because, again, probably best just getting a dedicated device for that (like in my case my pax, which is good enough that I dont even have the urge to go through the trouble to re-modify my pax for dry herb, in fact I think I already lost that little clear screen anyway ) .
 
And, while I'm sure you know this, I would probably abstain from using that optimus cartridge that it may come with. I think that's more for the flavored oils. I wouldn't waste the wax trying to stuff it in there.
 
And yes, the parts are very replaceable, that's what I meant when I said it was modular. In fact, my headshop thankfully just started carrying all the parts for that, so I went in and got another battery already (the only feasible downside I feel for the Atmos is that you don't really know the battery is low until it's low, and it blinks 8 times to tell you, but not only does a second battery solve that, you already have a charged one ready to go in that case).
 
But yeah, the mouth piece portion, the heating chamber, and the battery itself can all be swapped out.