"Lightweight" fans

During the initial dip in the economy after the housing market crash, we were looking for ways to save people money. Everyone was buying Kevlar, nobody was buying big ticket items. Clearly a lower cost item was needed in every tool grouping. An economy poi model was also introduced at this time.

Careful observers will notice that approximately the same materials go into the lightweight fans as in the original Countach Fans. The real savings in these models is in the time factor to create them. The Lightweights are much easier to build, about an hour quicker than the original. This saves in labor costs. The labor savings are then passed on to the customer.

The difficult part was the name. Somehow, Economy Fans made them sound cheap or flimsy. We discovered that their bodies were, in fact, a couple ounces lighter than the original Countach. So, we went with the moniker "Lightweight". For the record, the term Countach [koon - tahsh] is an Italian slur. When the Lamborghini company release it's Countach model at a car show, they named it after the first sound uttered by the stunned audience. A reporter said "Countach", loosely translated and toned down: "Holy Crap."

Fire Fingers. This was one of the first tools we were asked to re-imagine (rather than invent or replicate). At the time, there weren't as many retailers and pretty much no way to get fire fingers online. Most people made their own or had a close friend make it for them.

So, we were asked to fix a few of the problems with the home recipes. Most of them included armature wire or some other flexible material. So during use, they'd tangle. Worse, they covered the entire finger from base to tip, eliminating a vast amount of mobility. The customer in question was learning traditional Hindu dancing and needed to express mudras.

So, we re-designed the finger attachment and replaced armature wire with L-shaped brass. The first version included fitted cuffs for each finger. So, when people ordered them, they had to measure around each finger. They were arduous to make and had to be labeled so that you could get each torch attached to the correct finger.

When we came up with the idea to make them adjustable, a lot of things needed to be taken into consideration. First, we tried padding the finger grips, but that compromised the rigidity. Plus, all the paddings we could find were vulnerable to petrol fuels. So, we settled on the current one-size-fits-all design. Literally: these things fit the smallest fingers, all the ay up to the ham hocks of yours truly.

But the real inspiration was in the struts. See, we had been making Countach fans for a while by then, and had all these spare pieces left over from their construction. Since it's our policy not to throw things away if avoidable, they were starting to pile up. I took a good long look at them, and noticed they were evenly split between 9" lengths and 12" lengths. It was perfect, we had a new, more rigid strut for the 9" fingers, and a new size: 12" fingers.

With the fingers now outselling the fans, the backlog of spare pieces is long gone, and most fingers are cut from new tubes. And that's where the 18" lengths come from: half a tube. All of them designed to produce nearly no industrial waste, and the first tool to help us realize that goal.

They're still the only design intended for the middle of the finger, the only one stable enough to avoid frequent wick crossings, the most secure and the most expressive. And, as always, Steampunk approved. :)

Safety Flex Spines

Well, this product has been a long time coming. When we developed the fire hoop back in 2000, I never thought I'd see it get so big. Only a few people seemed interested in it, and the person who originally commissioned it never really got into fire. So, it seemed a bust. But now, There's dozens of fire hoop makers out there, most using our original design, or some variant of it.

Once we lost Kandice as a product tester, she started selling flexible spine hoops based on springs. Holistic hooping did okay but never really took a command of the market. I think the real problem was weight. Her hoops were pretty heavy, and most of the hoopers were still struggling with the idea of a larger hoop with wicks, never mind extra hardware. Still I was content to let her have that market: she was adding to the art, not just photocopying someone else's design.

And despite her angst, I felt the same way about Brandon's contribution (now sold through TC). At least the rubber flex spines were novel. My problem with that design was in safety. Rubber is flammable, usually more so than the hoop material. But that turned out to be the least of the worries. Once these things pervaded the market, we started seeing the real issues: mysterious cracks would appear in the rubber parts and release at unpredictable times, and the rubber was vulnerable to concentrated exposure to petrol fumes. Granted, you'd have to dip the wicks, then put them in a plastic bag to get this kind of exposure, but it could, and did, happen.

That's when I started looking into a solution. Clearly the rubberized spines were more popular than the springs, and probably more popular than the cables (which do not come out). So, the trick was to create a rubber, flexible spine, that connected the wick to the hoop with an all-metal connection. I tried and vetoed several designs until we came up with this one.

Like the image above, we add a loop of metal to each half of the wick. The loops are connected and welded so that the base is "hard connected" to the wick spine. We cover this joint in high heat, silicon rubber. This way, even if you tear the rubber completely off, or otherwise managed to destroy it, the wick stays attached to the hoop. But this silicon rubber is the shiznat. We tried it out for the dodats and it has far surpassed our wildest expectations.

We tested them for over a year and made one significant change: the base material. Originally, the wick spine and the base were both aluminum (for weight reasons). But we found the bases were bending and taking damage. So, we grabbed a cup o' Get Over Yourself and hit the drawing board. Eventually it was decided that the high carbon steel we offer as the super spines was the best choice. This took the weight of an individual spine up to 1.75 ounces, putting it nicely between our all aluminum spines at 1.3 oz, and our high carbon steel spines at 1.9oz.

See the spines here.