 Today we're going to talk a little bit about the evolution of the Vong from all wood stem to a hybrid wood stem to a full titanium take apartable stem with interchangeable sleeves. These are some of the initial ideas is to put these liners in. You can see the liner on the tip end was about 10 millimeters long and on the mouth present it's a little bit longer none of these ever went into production but they're just kind of cool looking. We sent them out to our internal beta test group got a lot of feedback from that beta test group regarding the durability you know the liners themselves either pulling out or like you see on these other ones where the wood itself is cracking. The beta testers were like you know we'd really like to have a full titanium liner. If we're going to do a full titanium liner well we need to have the sleeve able to have a little bit of clearance between that titanium liner and the wood to allow for a little bit of expansion and contraction. Well then how are we going to keep it from spinning? Well maybe we don't need to keep it from spinning maybe we kind of need if it would actually spin so you could adjust your airport. This version of the Vong has been available for a little bit less than a year. We were working on the the lined ones the summer of 2020. I think it was the summer of 2020 and that feedback pushed us in a different direction so we kind of shelf the project until the beginning of 2021 where we finished up with the design of this Vong. Then we had some real difficulty within the beginning getting it to rotate just right because the wood expands it contracts can be real pain sometimes it was too tight sometimes it was too loose believe it or not one of the things that we did to accommodate that is we actually put a little o-ring right inside between the liner the crown and the sleeve and that gave it a little bit of cushion so that it would spin but not spin freely and stay where you put it. It was a really important thing to get it to stay where you put it. Oh wouldn't we have an all titanium Vong right? So we machined up this part other than a couple different grooves on the side is exactly the same shape and size as the wood sleeve on this Vong. Dimensionally identical we pressed a few of these together the same way that we put the wood Vongs together and you know here's one example this is the non-take-apartable all titanium Vong we only made a few dozen they were really difficult to assemble we're struggling to get a good quality product and it just didn't seem like what we wanted to bring the market so those largely got shelved and Jason and I went back to the drawing board okay Jason I think our customers would really like take-apartable Vong don't you think? And he's like yeah and so would I. The first ones we made like this we actually had two o-rings on there to really isolate the rotating sleeve from the crowns because we didn't want that metal on metal feeling because it's just don't want to be grindier gritty or anything like that but then now we found if we could get the o-ring geometry which is now inside this sleeve just right to mate with the o-rings that we're now putting on the tip and the mouthpiece crown that the final assembly goes together much easier and there's a real nice feel to it this Vong versus this Vong the difference is not just the fact that the machining is a little bit changed on the side the crown the liner and the other crown are pressed together in an arbor press with tight clearances between the mating parts and it's generally not take-apartable this one here has been engineered specifically for disassembly by the placement of o-rings on the crowns and the machining of grooves inside of the sleeves so that the crowns can snap right on the sleeves so they hold themselves together through one another and the liner just kind of lives in between we've really taken a bit more of the more difficult path of iterating designing redesigning changing and sometimes starting all over again even though it may not seem like it the new Vong is quite a shift and a pretty significant change from what the Vong was when we released it just under a year ago on the surface it looks similar but inside there's quite a difference there will be aftermarket sleeves coming as a fun example here's one that was done by one of our crew members here is really specialized in getting these Vongs put together thank you Alex the colors we're gonna offer the choice right now was almost infinite we wanted to have a device that was easy to take apart we wanted the sleeve to be able to spin really nicely not too loose not too tight stays where you put it and easily interchangeable sleeves so you can have sleeves made from a wide range of different materials different looks different feels different appearances different textures whatever it might be and ideally even a geometry that's somewhat easy for people in the makerspace to replicate