Hey my name is Jake Meeks, this is fireside technique and today we're going to continue
our machine review series with our good friend Ty Pelada. We're gonna talk about the scorpion by ink
machines I hope you enjoy it.
So this is the first tattoo pen that was built to be Wireless it's not
like a Zion that has a battery pack that every time you turn your grip the battery spins around
because your grip, if you're adjusting your grip like this, your battery is gonna keep spinning
around this damn thing. This thing, the battery pack, clips onto the back here. Your adjustment
for your needle depth is on the top. I do like that, it's super awesome. Let me show you on the
magnetic version, it's gonna be easier for you guys to see. So if you turn this back you'll see
that whole thing go in you turn it down you'll see that whole thing move again so though it's
over the power. So you're looking and watching this whole thing go up right now. If I turn this down,
this whole thing goes out so your length of your stroke is it how much needle you have coming
out of the cartridge is gonna be set by this. When you throw a bag over top of this guy this is
a disposable grip, these are reusable grips here. If you throw a bag over this whole thing
you can still turn this thing very easily through your clipboard bag, yeah. So even if you have this
thing bagged with the battery pack on the back, this is super easy to turn inside of a bag.
You don't have to take the grip off to change anything, you're not trying to rotate a grip on a machine
you've got fully bagged to try to get the needle depth. Here, it's all right there which is awesome.
A couple things that set this machine apart from other machines, it runs standard cartridges or neo-carts.
So standard cartridge setup looks like this. The neo-cartridge setup we have here looks like this.
This is exactly like any other machine your this is where your plunger for your cartridge sits
inside this this little this little stroke knob here this thing goes from hard to soft that's the
soft setting all the way this way is the hard setting, it has an awesome amount of give just
like a Zion or any other machine with spring give. The travel on this give is great and you've
got a four millimeter stroke on this thing that's fixed. If you want to use their neo carts they
have a white magnet here which is softer which gives you more give and they have a red magnet
which is a little harder which gives you a little less gift and more power. Your cartridge goes in
here there's no plunger on it so the magnet that's hollow here sits on the outside of the cartridge
and drives another magnet on the needles up and down so it it cycles with no contact because it's
magnetic power. This is more like a coil machine than any other pen that's out there. It's super
smooth, it's super efficient, it saturates fast and does very little trauma. You get great heels
and great saturation with this thing. Talk for a second about the difference in the grips. Okay the
difference in the grips even though we have the standard cartridge adapter inside this grip here
it comes with everything you need to make this if you want to use standard cart. So it comes set up
for the neo cards which is there there yeah you can buy it from them and select whether you want
to set up for standard cartridges but they'll send you what you need to make in all the tools that
you can change it to whatever you want to change it to. It takes about three or four minutes even
if you're a novice to change it from one to the other so if you decide one day you just want to
use standard cartridges three minutes of your time not a big deal to change it out. What you do want
to know is going into this machine that there is induction that's caused between magnets and
aluminum if you're going to use this thing with standard cartridges your aluminum grip is fine
your disposal grips are fine this one grip works for both neo-carts and standard carts. There's a tiny
little plastic piece in the back here, if you can see it moving around in here. If you're gonna use
standard cartridges, you take this plastic piece and you snap it into the face of the grip and it's
super it's super rigid there's no plane if there's no slop in it, you snap that thing into place and
all your cartridges fit perfect as if it was a grip that was made for it because this piece is
made for it. If you're gonna run neo carts you just take that piece and you throw it in the garbage
with the packaging and just use the standard grip by itself. This grip it's soft rubber it's
a it's a very soft rubber and it sticks to your gloves really well it's an awesome grip if you
want to use a disposable grip. If you're gonna use a reusable grip and clean it properly, you need to
know that with neo carts there's induction that causes a little bit of heat and power loss it's
called the lens effect. If you look it up on Google you'll see that magnets react with aluminum even
though aluminum isn't magnetic and it will cause a little bit of power loss and they say it's less
than 10% power loss, but you will notice that your machine hits softer if you use an aluminum grip
with this magnet than this stainless grip. So if you want to get the full power out of this
machine using a cord, you want to use a stainless grip which they sell with neo carts. If you're gonna
use a standard cartridge, the grip that comes with it this one is fine they also make one that
looks more like this that's a larger grip that tapers out in aluminum but they only make this
one in the stainless. So any grip will work for standard carts, if you wanted to get softer use
an aluminum grip with the Neo carts but if you want to get the full power and potential out of
the machine buy this grip or use their disposables. So it's a specific reaction between the magnets
and the aluminum. Yeah. It just it's it slows down the momentum of the machine causing power loss
and that induction causes a very small amount of heat but you wouldn't notice the heat much because
it's not like a coil machine where it actually gets hot, yeah. If it got slightly warm it would
get slightly warm you might not even notice it once it's wrapped but you're gonna notice
the performance is a little the hit is a little softer if you're gonna use it an aluminum grip.
Gotcha, and we've been talking we were together we talked a lot about machines and you're way more
of a machine expert than I am which is why you're doing this and not me but you've been really high
on these machines as a I've heard you talk higher or talk more positively about eight machines than
basically any machine you think their engineering has really set itself apart.
Their engineering is really amazing, its world-class like if somebody grabs this thing for make machines now
and they buy their full battery kit and they buy everything here and they try to reproduce
this machine as a clone or a knockoff, they're not even going to come close. The technology and
the engineering in this thing is so high-end that ink machines themselves they're barely making it
which means you're not going to be able to buy this machine as a knockoff any cheaper than it
is from these guys. I truly believe their markup is small enough on these things that no one
doing a knock-off is gonna make it anywhere near as good a quality. It's not going
to perform as well and you're gonna be end up you know burning out a motor or throwing it out.
This stuff is definitely world-class if you look at it you might say to yourself like holy [ __ ] that's
like way too many moving parts inside this thing here but the way they designed this thing here,
it's very hard to see on this video but this is a sealed bearing up here nothing can get up inside
to this motor and they have on the sides here where this swash plate hits these side plastic
bars, these are all ceramic bearings and they're extremely high tolerances there it's a
very expensive product that they're producing for a very little bit amount of money for us as
a consumer that's going to last a very very long time. Yeah, how much were these machines new?
they're 540 us about yeah I believe maybe 600 us yeah I think they're 540 in euros yeah but what's
going into this thing for the amount of money they're selling it to us for and it's designed
to be very reliable and you know just extremely high in components in this thing, it's gonna run
for a very long time. And it does accept RCA or clip cord, yeah yeah. It's the only pen that actually
takes a clip cord and if you're gonna use a clip cord that's awesome but I still think the RCA is
a better way to go it stays out of the way then it's kind of cumbersome, yeah. If you're gonna be
lazy enough to use just a clip cord for your coil machines and then jump onto this he gave you that
option but you might as well just buy an RCA cord and get a clip cord adapter, pop that thing off
when you're ready to use your pen and use the lighter-weight cord that stays out of your way.
What do you use this machine for mostly? Mostly for shading. I'm not gonna jump on board with
anybody and say like "hey I'm a hundred percent in and I can do everything with one machine." Everyone
can do everything with one machine. You're gonna line better with a coil machine, you're gonna
line better with a Dan coop and then you're ever gonna line with any pen style machine or rotary
machine. If you're pushing a small line, you can do that with anything. If you're getting into
larger lines, you need something that's got that force. This for me is a color machine.
I'll use it for black and gray, but if I want to do detailed black and gray it's not my favorite
machine for black and gray. I love it for color
Scorpion, get yours at the hot link below.
There's no link below, you can't buy it here you have to go to their website to buy one and we don't care
if you buy one or not we're not trying to sell it to you we just like to hear ourselves talk. It is a
pretty cool little machine though. I actually bought one of those two machines that Ty was showing off
and I've been using it, this is it. I've been using it for oh I don't know six months or so now and I
love it as a pen liner, I really do. It lines way better than my Cheyenne pen. I don't like it for
soft black and gray at all, I haven't been able to get it to do really buttery smooth little
gray blends. But, I do like it for solid color, it's really nice for that. It runs nice and strong so
you know it has its uses and then other machines have their uses too that's the reason we're doing
all this stuff. So unfortunately, this is the last episode of our machine review series, if you guys
enjoyed it I would love to do more along these lines but I need you let me know. Next time I
promise we'll have a better camera setups, better audio, better lighting and we'll try to make it
look cool, we just were kind of doing that one off the cuff. So, thank you guys as always for
supporting the fireside tattoo Network. We love you all and we will see you next time.