Are you sick of sucking? best AD ever

[coach]

Originally Posted by wildcard

I still want a 40mm launchable nades

Yes yes! I as well. Many of them!!!

[R.I.T.Z]

[Crunchmeister]

I like the "Powerthirst" feel of the commercial. lol Awesome work guys.

[Dart]

Originally Posted by Gato

You ever used one? They freakin rock!



AI, great video, had me laughing the whole time. AI Grenades are on my list of wanted items for christmas :P

yup I have, I own one. Its a $100 piece of plastic and metal on my desk now because after 3 times it leaked and shredded it self... really horrible product.

[diamond_SEA]

Originally Posted by Dart

yup I have, I own one. Its a $100 piece of plastic and metal on my desk now because after 3 times it leaked and shredded it self... really horrible product.

Email AI. they sent me free replacement parts when mine broke on me.

[kullwarrior]

Originally Posted by L473ncy

... So is that portable refilling thing actually in development? Surprisingly I'd actually like to see one made. I don't doubt there'd be inefficiencies in it but still....

The biggest thing I want is effective Duster adapter. The current one always snap off the plastic white base and then you just destroy your can.

[Cleric]

Originally Posted by Dart

yup I have, I own one. Its a $100 piece of plastic and metal on my desk now because after 3 times it leaked and shredded it self... really horrible product.

I've got four that work very well, and have had them since AI started retailing them. Sounds like you got a dud. Do as diamond SEA suggests.

Originally Posted by diamond_SEA

Email AI. they sent me free replacement parts when mine broke on me.

[MadMax]

Originally Posted by wildcard

I still want a 40mm launchable nades

You have no idea how much I want to finish my work on that project. It's on backburner until I can work out the financing to pay for the injection moulds. I get my moulds made here in Canada where my mould makers are within subpoena range. It would be very nerve wracking sending my hard won design data to a econo mould shoppe in China where my design data could go out to anybody. I have colleagues who have found themselves competing against duplicates of their own products when their mould maker made "backup" moulds that went into production in copyshops. Not my bag baby.

I also like to spend much of my manufacturing dollars here in Canada and the US. It's not easy keeping prices down, but with careful shopping I find suppliers who are only a little more expensive than Chinese machine shops and I find it a lot easier to handle defective part issues. That being said, I do have a couple very good Chinese suppliers helping me out with certain specialized items. Anything I can't get machined in North America at a price that is competitive with China, I end up tooling up and machining in house. The bulk of our machined parts are CNC'd in house where we can closely monitor quality and make design tweaks rapidly. While our cost of machined parts is good, it takes a lot of patience to amortize a heavy capital equipment purchase.

The cost of acquisition of capital equipment like CNC equipment or custom moulds factors heavily on when I can work out the finances to launch a product with high incremental capital cost.

The biggest thing I want is effective Duster adapter. The current one always snap off the plastic white base and then you just destroy your can.

I got really frustrated with that in my early days of airsoft. Some years ago I made a hub which pressed onto the outer diameter of the crimped end of a can. The hub supported the adaptor to prevent the stem from getting snapped off.

Are other players interested in a doohickey to prevent stem snapping? I didn't think there was interest in such an item given the low usage of duster gas (hard to compete with propane) but maybe I'm wrong. How many of you guys use duster gas? Would you buy a $7 adaptor tip support?

Originally Posted by Dart

yup I have, I own one. Its a $100 piece of plastic and metal on my desk now because after 3 times it leaked and shredded it self... really horrible product.

We do offer comprehensive product support. Shoot an email to: exceptions@gungas.com to arrange a RMA repair.

Manchovie did an incredible job on this opus work. It was an exhausting project that came together really well. I only wish we had our new site up to accompany this new video. We were supposed to do a big triple announcement with this video, a completely new site, and a product announcement (refill reservoir). Site is behind for some reason and the video got uploaded accidentally. We're still a small company, but if you have three people semi-independently working you get some funny hiccups. Myself, I'm only lightly involved as I'm eyeballs deep in technical crap. We just moved to a bigger shop to accommodate a new 5 tonne CNC mill. I'm starting another company making a non airsoft product. Location moves are really gruelling. We moved 15 tonnes of CNC equipment and I'm in the midst of wiring it all up (3ph 208v is scary sh*t). We've started levelling some of the machines.

If you want to make precision parts, you have to crank on these big screws to support the main casting so it's not twisted. Heavy machinery is so heavy that it will slightly twist when it sits on a floor that's not perfectly flat. You end up playing 6 dimensional battleship tweaking these 35mm diameter screws which push on cast iron feet to compensate for an inevitably crooked floor. After you get the damn thing levelled to within 0.0002"/ft (angular specification) you let it sit for a day and check it again because the floor will settle under the new load. You adjust and check again in a week, then a month. Then every year, you check the levelling. Big crap like this is an infrastructure investment. I don't really live in a plug and play world... [/gripe]

[swatt13]

that was actually pretty awesome. it honest to goodness made me wanna buy one or two.

i esspecially liked the line "or any other of these bullshit items" thats was pretty good lol

[Brian McIlmoyle]

Originally Posted by Dart

yup I have, I own one. Its a $100 piece of plastic and metal on my desk now because after 3 times it leaked and shredded it self... really horrible product.

Bad luck for you, I have several.. reliable long lasting.. I have one with literally hundreds of uses on it.

Personally I think it is a great product.. and strongly endorse it

[Conker]

@MadMax:
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one holding off on the purchase of an M203 due to their lack of usefullness. Something that would definitely change if a working launchable 40mm grenade was released, especially since (for now) there's no competitors.

[L473ncy]

Originally Posted by MadMax

You have no idea how much I want to finish my work on that project. It's on backburner until I can work out the financing to pay for the injection moulds. I get my moulds made here in Canada where my mould makers are within subpoena range. It would be very nerve wracking sending my hard won design data to a econo mould shoppe in China where my design data could go out to anybody. I have colleagues who have found themselves competing against duplicates of their own products when their mould maker made "backup" moulds that went into production in copyshops. Not my bag baby.

Lol. I was actually talking about this in Economic Geography yesterday. Why TNC's will tend to locate in markets such as W.Europe (and sometimes E.Europe since the fall of the Wall since they had a relatively highly skilled workforce with cheap labour) and take hits to their capital as "the cost of doing business" (higher wages, unionized, etc.) instead of producing for cheaper elsewhere. That's a simplified explanation but yeah the making "backups" (and "ghost shifts") and such does come into effect.

[MadMax]

What's a TNC? In my small amount of experience designing products that were manufactured in China, I have learned that it's possible to make high quality products there if you're willing to make regular operations inspections or set up a permanent quality team there. If you're not willing to make the investment of regular inspections then you're opening yourself to a lot of screwups.

A designer has the knowledge of intent in a products design. A good one will pick high performance materials for components with difficult technical requirements (e.g. high strength heat treatable steel for trigger sears) and commodity materials like ABS or polypropylene for less physically demanding parts. There are many ways to appear to meet a drawings specifications while failing to meet the intent of a particular part. For instance I might specify a high grade glass filled nylon (GFRP) material for a part that needs to be resilient. We use virgin Zytel in our grenade shells which is a particularly pricey material made by Dupont. If say we made our shells somewhere we couldn't conveniently audit (china is a 24hr flight away) we might fail to observe that our injection moulder substituted our mat'l with a local brand of nylon GFRP. The local brand GFRP might have the same glass content (30% by weight) but their mean strand length might be much shorter, or more likely their plastic matrix may have higher shrinkage. Use material with very short mean strand length and you don't get the stiffness benefit of the glass fibre or the resilience of the Dupont product. Even worse, use a high percentage of regrind (sprues can be reground and remelted) and you'll lose a lot of toughness because the glass fibres break in the regrind and subsequent remelts of nylon reduce the mean chain length of molecules (less crack resistance).

It's easy to specify a material, make, and zero regrind, but if the plant runs out of Zytel because of a supply issue they might just grab something that's handy and not think it's much of an issue. You have to expect that there will be little understanding of why you have made your specifications.

In another product I worked on, we found a particular grease that provided exceptionally high cycle life on a heavily loaded worm drive made from pretty low cost materials. Good deal! Cheap parts with a measured dollop of expensive grease and you have a cheap but well performing total assembly. Our gearbox was driving a high torque driving a worm drive that pushed high force. With that particular grease, we could get good performance of the product (low noise, efficient drive) over about a hundred thousand cycles. It takes a f*cking long time to accumulate that many cycles even in a lifecycle testing rig that does actuations a thousand times higher than the expected daily usage rate. If you want to compare several greases, you have to repeat your lifecycle test for each goo. Anyhow, a container load of our much anticipated first run arrived and everything should have been fine. Our on site visit confirmed that they were using specified plastics and steel components and assembly procedures were being followed. After our team left, the plant decided to rush the production (I guess so they could start on someone else's contract) so they stopped applying the magical grease with the applicator we engineered for them. They applied the grease by hand (scoop out a blob and spread it) which consumed much more grease than anticipated. They blew through their supply early and applied something else that they had scads of and shipped the container without telling us what happened. The gunk they used was about a grade or two higher than bacon fat which is tasty but a poor lubricant so we had to design a squeegee to remove the crap and apply the proper goo. Almost every unit had to be disassembled and regreased before they could be sold.

If you can arrange a permanent inspection team or at least make visits for the duration of every production run then the situation is much different. For instance Ryobi tools are extremely well priced for their performance and features (except for their drill presses which are junk). I've got three of their drills and other tools that were very well priced and they're still kicking after over 5 years. They actually work quite well and on inspection (I love disassembling things) they've got high density powder metal gears and hardened components just where they're needed. From what I've heard, there is a permanent engineering team in China headed by a German tool maker who is their product design lead. With that kind of on site QC from a team, who really appreciates the design intent, it's possible to benefit from a very low cost of skilled labor and not be vulnerable to subtle screwups that make your well designed product a heap of junk. A strong engineering team in China can make very well engineered products produced at very economical prices.

Unfortunately AI isn't big enough to have an inspection team in China that appreciates the design intent of our products. We source a few items there, but their not difficult parts to make. Our spoon head castings are Chinese, but we intentionally make the mounting features undersized so we can precisely ream them so they slide onto a grenade just right.

[MadMax]

Originally Posted by L473ncy

... So is that portable refilling thing actually in development? Surprisingly I'd actually like to see one made. I don't doubt there'd be inefficiencies in it but still....

Our first production run is done. We're waiting on the label printers. In the meantime we're redoing our site entirely. When it's up, we'll have the GasCan product page up. My favorite feature of this reservoir is that you can open it up when it's empty and dose in your lubricant before refilling it with propane. That way you can fill your gas products with prelubed gas!

[L473ncy]

Originally Posted by MadMax

What's a TNC?

Lol sorry, a TNC is a "Transnational Corporation", it's an Economics/Geography term that only recently has come into wide use (in the field), the other name is MNC or Multinational Corporation (apparently there's differences between the two according to the prof but I don't want to go into that).