Tuesday 19 November 2013

Return of the Vertical Foregrip Handles

MkI old breakable foregrips!
A great Nerfer once said "Do not accept the limitations of your materials at face value, if you want to do something, find the best thing for the job and do it" (Or words to that effect). We couldn't agree more!

We built some prototype grip handles using our 3D printer a couple of weeks back. We were ready to abandon the project when we ran into stress fractures and other nasties that posed serious problems. While we could get a game or two out of our handles, the fact the plastic mounts would fail resulted in the near mothballing of the project.

It was then another intrepid Nerfer
contacted us with an idea. Just use a better material. Initially hesitant, I put out feelers and commissioned a set of replacement rail grips for our 3D printed handles. This is the result:


New and improved fore-grips that don't break!
That Rapidstrike is held by my single hand at arms length with nothing but the grip holding it in place. I've just spent 20 minutes swinging it around my head in the hallway and generally stress testing it. The whole assembly has just looked at me and gone "nope.avi". It's wonderful. Granted, it's not slide on, you have to clamp it in place with screws but trying to twist it off sees the Rapidstrike's body fail before the plastic and aluminium used here.

This is obviously a prototype but we'll start selling black units (black anodised aluminium to match the plastic) later in the month. Orange and other colours will follow in the future. In the meantime, we'll open a register of interest for people to start forming an orderly queue. No money will change hands until we have these in stock, the register will just be a way to gauge interest and to ensure we are able to produce at the quantities needed to avoid disappointment.

Current price projections place these around £10-12 for UK/EU customers (includes VAT @ 20%) and £8-10 for non EU customers (though local sales taxes may apply). Once the initial order queue is cleared, we'll operate a stock policy - i.e. no lead times but you'll only be able to order if they're in stock. We'll get some video of how the prototype holds up in the next couple of days.


Please note, if you are great Nerfer who we badly paraphrased earlier, thank you for your pearls of wisdom and apologies for such terrible lexical butchery!

2 comments:

  1. Well done for making it work! Put me down for one please.

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  2. I'd certainly be interested in an Orange one when the time comes.

    ReplyDelete