Hey, it's Luke with Out of Darts.
Today we are saying a partial goodbye to a great friend: Captain Slug.
Let's get going!
For those of you that are newer to the hobby,
Captain Slug is probably one of the most legendary and classic nerfers around.
He's been part of this hobby since the very beginning, building PVC homemades,
and I think he very likely might be the first person to sell something.
He was selling blasters back in the days when they were still building
them by hand or machining the parts uh individually before 3D printing.
Captain Slug was also one of the earlier pioneers of getting 3D-printed blasters to market, and he's
been a huge source for the hobby to get hardware and parts and kits for a huge range of blasters.
Slug recently released news saying that he would be moving to Korea.
This is a three-year placement or possibly longer,
and during this time, he's actually going to be closing up his shop.
Rest assured, he has taken the initiative to
train a few of us to make sure that we are ready to keep supplying his kits and parts.
Slug will be closing up his shop on the 15th of April;
at that point he will not take any more orders.
He's still going to be a big part of the hobby. He’s still going to continue to design
products and other parts and mods that you can add on to your existing uh Slug products, but
we are really excited to take on production ourselves.
I got the opportunity to fly out to Virginia and meet him in person and get to see his shop
and his packing room, and his little print farm.
During this trip, I was able to get hands-on training
to learn how to machine the parts print the parts, see how Slug organizes his shop,
and really kind of get a feel for his entire production line as well as sourcing.
I got to hang out with my friends Ryan and Jessie from SilverFoxIndustries;
they are also another licensed reseller.
They sell a huge range of blasters, and that TalonClaw back on the wall,
if you remember a previous video, that was one of their prints.
In addition to SilverFox, we will be taking on a lot of kit creation.
We're going to sell hardware kits for the majority of the blasters.
It's going to be a little bit of a slow burn; we'll start with a few kits and kind of expand
out as we get comfortable drilling the parts and getting everything produced here in-house.
We've always been really interested in Captain Slug’s blasters and products.
I play with the TalonClaw and Caliburn quite a bit, and in the past, it never really made sense
to me to actually sell and retail this because, uh, his parts involved quite a bit of production
and work to get going, and there were a half dozen other sellers, so we never did it before.
But now that he's leaving this void in the hobby, we wanted to be part of it to kind of step in,
keep producing all of the kits and the parts, and eventually produce 3D-printed parts as well -- and
potentially assembled blasters if that's something customers are interested in.
You'll see a whole new section on our shop for Captain Slug;
we’ll put the link down in the description, and there's going to be a lot more to come soon.
I'm also looking at doing tutorials and assembly guides,
so if there's something specific you'd like to see
or some specific product you'd like to see on the shop, first let us know down in the comments.
A little bit like when I visited Drac, visiting Slug really gave me some new ideas.
It's always fun seeing how somebody else puts together their shop and how they
organize their tools, their assembly lines, and their production methods.
Slug's setup is very lean.
He doesn't overproduce anything.
He produces essentially just to order what's actually being ordered for the previous week,
and that way, he's not overproducing and having his time and hours in labor sitting on a shelf;
he's just making the kits as he goes along, and I thought this was really neat.
We're going to take on some of his practices and kind of evolve and change some of them
to suit our production methods and our scale.
Ultimately what we're looking to provide is in-stock kits for all of the different
blasters all the time so that when you click order, we ship it that day or the next day,
depending on the time of day that you order.
Captain Slug's shop has been around even longer than mine,
and he's certainly been in this hobby a lot longer than I have.
His knowledge in his brain, the engineering and manufacturing knowledge that he has,
is so far beyond anything I could even imagine.
It was a really great opportunity to get to kind of pick his brain and dig in on how he
produces everything and why he chose to do things one way versus another.
I definitely learned quite a bit,
and I think we're going to translate a lot of that into our own shop.
This is kind of an interesting homecoming too.
We're going to bring some manufacturing back to my home garage because we don't really want to
produce all of the dust and mess that the cutting of the tubes and the aluminum and other things
that end up ultimately causing a little bit of a mess; we don't like having that with our printers.
So, I’m going to have some manufacturing back
in the garage again, which is actually kind of fun, I think.
We'll kind of have a little mini metal and plastic shop there for some of our production.
Slug has been such a huge influence in the hobby.
We know he's not going away, but it's uh great to be able to help out and jump in and kind of
fill that void that he's going to be leaving because his kits and parts are really popular.
He's been running a really great business for a number of years now.
We know he'll be back eventually, and we hope to see lots more coming from him as far as designs.
I know he's bringing a CNC machine with him, so he's definitely not quitting the hobby in any way.
He's just closing up the Etsy shop for now.
I'd love to hear what you think about Slugs products or specifics
of what we should carry or what we should check out.
We're definitely going to do a bunch more video content around his designs because it just makes
sense for us to do assembly guides and tutorials and product videos for these new blasters.
Thank you so much for watching!
Remember: April 15th is the last day that you can order parts from Slug's shop.
So, if you do want to get one of the legacy kits produced
by Captain Slug by hand, that is your last opportunity to do it.
I expect he will be very busy in the coming month
here catching up on all of these orders as people get their orders in before the shop closes
and then packing and getting ready for an overseas move.
Until next time, I’m out of darts.