[soundman98]

there's a lot of negativity in my last post that i want to somewhat counteract. i can see that potentially going sideways, and that's not a direction i want it to go. i feel it was important to state all of what i did, but feel a 2nd post is necessary also.

i still bought this. i still believe in this product. i paid $345 + shipping for this. from a website i've never seen before, for a product made by a bunch of people i've never talked to, all because a product only claims to do something i want.

the great thing about the enthusiast market is products like this. but the enthusiast market is a double-edged sword.

i've seen entire brands built around the owners interaction on forums. i want to see others improve, and the interest you display asking where the downfalls are is a great step in that direction.

the enthusiast market you're catering to is always going to be a passionate group of people that, with the proper motivation, i've seen entire brands rise from nothing. i was around on mp3car went from one guy selling specialty computer parts out of their garage and moved into a corporate space, then started pivoting from selling to idiots installing pc's in cars to industrial pc solutions. and i was there when matt kosoff was selling old headlight parts out of his parents basement as The Retrofit Source, and when he moved to georgia to continue on to creating a multi-million dollar a year company employing over 2 dozen people, and custom-building entire headlight/taillight solutions.

i love to see people strive to improve, and love seeing all the solutions different people come up with for different problems. the biggest thing that some of those other success stories have done to improve themselves always started with what you're doing, simply asking for feedback.

on the other side of things, most of what those examples based their success on was really how they involved and discussed things with the community of enthusiasts their ideas catered to. like i said previously-- just showing your work goes a long ways. anyone that's willing to drop close to $400 on a part like this isn't going to be an idiot with a credit card but no wrenches. your market is people like me or the others posting in this thread. we've all got technical backgrounds, with varying understandings of metals and lubricant interactions, many of which likely exceeded knowledge of which those that designed the component.

in any forum community, we all come from very diverse backgrounds, many with some very unique requirements that oem's simply can't deliver to, or have experience in material limitations that can be invaluable for product development. because of those diverse backgrounds, many of us have loads of experience and are more than willing to freely share and help anyone we can to improve themselves or their products to better serve that same forum community. as such, many times a product better serves a forum, people like me start to freely promote such products just because it fixes something common.

i like the idea, i like it so much i went and got one despite any noted reservations about the design or brand experience, even when that $400 could've just as easily gone to any number of other projects i've got going on everywhere else. i didn't need this design. i didn't need to spend the money. the oem design mostly works for my usage. but being an enthusiast, it's hard to pass up on ideas like this that promise a better mouse trap.

i appreciate you taking the time to seek to improve yourself and your product, and i hope you keep this sort of thing going, and seek to fix other common problems in the enthusiast arena.