It's been a while since I have done a peek behind the curtain blog - so its probably time for a decent update. We now have Rear Rails in TiN in stock. Click below if your feeling TL;DR
I dropped them into the store last night, to let the people who had back in stock notifications for those particular products turned on a fair chance at getting them before going live to everybody. We only have around 50 sets as we want to see how they sell before investing more . Historically DLC stuff outsells TiN stuff by about a 7-1 ratio so we ordered a lot more Rear Rails in DLC.
"But ROOK?" You may ask. "Where are the DLC Rear Rails?"
Well you see, we had a bunch of them in our hands ready to go, and we tested a couple of sets, and achieved less than satisfactory results. The coating was wearing off in a couple of spots with only 5-10 slide racks. So something was definitely incorrect. It either was not applied or cured correctly. We pride ourselves (as most of you know) on not selling a shoddy quality product so we made the decision to hold off on release and sent them to a different coater for rework. You can see below where the coating was wearing from the slide racks and also where I managed to score some off very easily with a knife - this should NOT happen.
Understand that DLC stands for Diamond Like Coating in essence it should be as hard as...well...diamonds...It's also supposed to be super slick and very resistant to friction wear i.e the exact type of wear a slide and rail interaction has. These were just not up to snuff, so we got a refund from the one company and sent it to a different company that uses a slightly different process with a more resilient base layer for rework. We expect them in a couple of weeks fingers crossed.
Don't get me wrong ALL coatings wear - however HOW they wear is important. Most of these coatings even as they wear and you think you start to see some bare metal will still have residual coating attached to that metal surface atomically bonded it just becomes thin enough for the metal to show through.
TiN while really hard like DLC will not last forever and will show signs of wear sooner. To be honest we view the TiN coating as more of a "pretty" performance upgrade for those of you that are looking for an ALL Gold piece kit.
While I'm not sure if lifetime rails are achievable with coatings, we are sure trying. ROOK does have some early prototype front rails with DLC that literally have ZERO wear, and I know of at least one person with 100k+ rounds one some of our bare Stainless Steel rails now and they are still kicking - though they do need some rework and polishing from time to time.
Oh good you made it this far - okay so we also now have a pin kit for the GST-9 since a LOT of people seem to be making that switch - those can be found at the link below. Only Stainless Steel for now but we should have coated ones in the not too distant future The question on GST-9 rails is currently still a no we have no plans to make them:
Lastly I'm guessing some of you may be curious about The UNO - now as I am sure you all are very aware everything in this area of the industry has been been very much up in the air. Polymer80 changed their frame format which we saw at SHOT Show, and we adapted to that by adding the fourth hole capability. Now it's looking like it may all just revert back to what it was before *fingers crossed* so we (I) have been continually working on it in the background diligently to get it pushed out. We are about ready to cut first chips and once we have a "good" prototype with some testing on the newest layout then we will be ready to go into production, but for now I'll just leave this right here.
SEE!! I'm not just twiddling my thumbs over here!!
Love Y'all
ROOK.