Once again we want to thank everyone who participated in our Kickstarter campaign! We also want you to know that we will be continuing to take pre-orders through Indiegogo.
At this point we’re very confident in the basic design of the product and we’re moving ahead with securing production inventory for several critical components. At the same time, we recognize that we have the opportunity to make some improvements before starting production. If you are following our social media and have a keen eye you may have noticed some of the changes we’re making already.
The most obvious change is to the lanyard. Rather than being mounted on both sides of the frame, we are now mounting it on the front plate only. This moves the focal point on the lanyard and the rope tension acting on the device more inline, which reduces the twisting you see in so many of our videos. This twisting ultimately leads to more rope abrasion.
Less obvious is the updated deflection plate design. You may have noticed a small stripper component mounted to the bottom of deflection plate on most of the renders of the product we’ve released. This component was part of the design early on to prevent the rope from tangling if it failed to eject after running through the pressure wheel. It’s functionality was never truly tested, and with the amount of testing we’ve done we now feel confident that it is redundant. In addition to this change, we have substantially reinforced the spring lug and mount points.
Beyond this we have made a number of subtler design tweaks to the frame and internal components that will improve the fit, finish, and robustness of the product.
In the coming weeks we will be assembling a small number of units to test these changes and others before securing production inventory. It’s worth noting that we aren’t looking to add any new functions or major design features at this point, as we’re committed to delivering to our backers on schedule.