Blast Legacy

[Trbo323]

So.. I needed some gen 4 Timmy parts. And placed an order knowing full well the shit show that went down on FB.. the order arrived promptly, the items came as they were intended, the box was hilariously too large, but there was a pretty nice microfiber thrown in..

I don't know if there was a moral to this story....

Yeah if it's something he has on hand, especially small parts it's typically fine. All he has to do is shove them in a box and send it, the same stuff that happens in the bst threads here on a daily basis.

But he has also sold stuff that he doesn't have on hand, sometimes as a preorder, sometimes he needs to order the item from F1, he has also sold used parts as new, or I should say, "unlisted" condition but with the common new price on them.

It's a complete crap shoot with him and if anything goes wrong it's really difficult to get it resolved

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[Tracker]

So.. I needed some gen 4 Timmy parts. And placed an order knowing full well the shit show that went down on FB.. the order arrived promptly, the items came as they were intended, the box was hilariously too large, but there was a pretty nice microfiber thrown in..

I don't know if there was a moral to this story....

[Trbo323]

I'm still kind of shocked at how many people seem to believe that some big company with multiple employees. It's 1 guy and MAYBE someone he is paying close to minimum wage to do grunt labor.



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[martix_agent]

hmm, who would have guessed that?

The business owner has a TERRIBLE attitude; I can't believe people who know about him continue to do business with him.

[zinger565]

Seems the new is the same as the old...

[Rickfactor2]

In my experience, dealing with Blast even when it was still under the Long ownership was a challenge at times. Some of the people that would answer the phone had no social skills at all.

I also has an "exchange" with their head tech when I asked what he considered a controversial question regarding the ability to lock down modes/rate of fire to prevent cheating. He did not like that but thankfully others backed me up in also posting that it was a valid question and that they would like to know. Keep in mind, this was in the era of "team" guns that just seemed to shoot a bit "different" than others.

Planet Eclipse on the other hand has been exemplary with even Jack Wood himself who responded to my emails.

During my early playing days, I handed my cocker directly to Budd ORR who made fun of my non-WGP parts, stripped them off, and then replaced them with stock parts for free while explaining everything.

[martix_agent]

hey guys, Trbo can't see these comments because he uses tpatalk.

[Myrkul]

I thinks it's honestly more along the lines of just straight up addiction. I've made tons of purchases from sketchy venders and sellers. If I REALLY want a part, and they are the only ones selling it, you just send the PayPal, hope for the best, and trust in buyer protection.

[Impactfour]

The paintball market seems to have either a short memory or a forgiving attitude.

[tyronejk]

On one hand, what this guy is doing is shady and his customers are paying the price, but on the other hand, I'm glad Field1 is getting bulk orders for work.

[Trbo323]

On Facebook it seems nobody has recieved their orders yet for the new "Hindsight" engine. No shipping confirmation, even though folks placed orders going on 10 days ago. The only response someone has gotten was along the lines of "we ran out and are building more", which I find suspect.

Anyways, if this ends up being smoke and mirrors, I hope too many people don't get burnt.

Oh boy here we go again

History repeating itself I think is what's happening here. To preface this, much of this is speculation but it also has some history involved

When I started working for him he was in the middle of we'll just call it the gear drive debacle. Most of what I learned about this actually came from various sources around the internet rather than him but here's essentially what happened in a nutshell

He decided to put up Bob long gear drive ASAS for sale as a pre-order item no big problem there really a bunch of people bought in and sent him money

From here he essentially had two options since he did not make any of the things himself

Option 1) order complete units from field one already anodized and assembled ready to ship

Option 2) order raw parts from field one send them out to his own anodizer and then assemble himself. Obviously this option would be cheaper and therefore that's why it was chosen at least that's what I believe

He waited until after the presale to even set up the order with field one so we are already like at least a month in


So he places the order and it takes field one a while to ship it it shows up and the biggest problem is that there's a few parts missing not just a few parts total but like all of the knobs not there something along those lines it turns out field one had run out of raw and needed to manufacture some more. We are at least 2 months in at this point

field one goes about manufacturing and it takes another month at least for these missing parts to show up

So for those keeping score we're somewhere around 3 months in finally these raw parts are ready to go out to the anodizer

I don't remember exactly what sequence this happened in next but at some point he decided he was not happy with the price the anodizer gave him I want to say it was after he shipped the parts to them but I could be wrong. Regardless he decided to argue with them about price and it took at least a month

So the anodizer finally goes about making them, because our friend wanted to argue with them in price they gave them a decent price but basically said we're not going to make these parts a priority so it took them at least 2 months to anodized all of the parts in the different colors

So somewhere around 6 months in and the parts are finally back in his hands but now he has to assemble them. This however is work for peons. If my memory is correct nothing ever actually came about it but he was talking about hiring a bunch of high school or college kids to basically do an assembly line to build these asa's

I don't think anything ever came about of the assembly line somewhere in the assembly process he found that he was missing something like a screw. This problem was an easier fix than most of the other ones in this process though. By the time he had everything ready to go or even just the first batch of ASAS customers have been waiting around 7 months. I've heard of multiple people who had to wait right around or just over a year to actually get their asa

"So those customers were patiently waiting this whole time?"

I'm glad you asked no they were not many people were requesting refunds and it was always some kind of a stall that he would send in a response. Most people received a response along the lines of I will have to send this over to our returns department, where the email would then just sit in an inbox because he was the returns department he was the everything department. I know a few people did get refunds mainly the ones that were very active on social media and bringing this whole situation to light but more commonly the customers were stalled and stalled until he finally had the ASAS ready

So assuming he is ordering these hindsight engines from field 1 this whole situation feels very similar

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[Insixdays777]

This is a total shame that the only available Bob Long Legacy parts are being held hostage by this criminal enterprise.

[zinger565]

On Facebook it seems nobody has recieved their orders yet for the new "Hindsight" engine. No shipping confirmation, even though folks placed orders going on 10 days ago. The only response someone has gotten was along the lines of "we ran out and are building more", which I find suspect.

Anyways, if this ends up being smoke and mirrors, I hope too many people don't get burnt.

[Jaccen]

Always interesting to get a "behind the scenes" look at the industry. Thanks for the write-up/analysis of the situation. Disappointing, though, as finding BLAST parts is a bit more difficult now.

[Trbo323]

-How long ago was this? I seem to vaguely recall somebody emailing me out of the blue, wanting a run- fifty or a hundred, maybe?- of Spyder hammers. This was long before I had the CNCs, and I gave him what in all honestly was an absurdly low price, considering what it would have taken me to make them on my manual machines. (It was one of those cases I wanted to "win the bid" so to speak, hoping it'd lead to more business.)

I don't recall specifically if I ever heard back, but I have a vague impression I thought they must have thought the price was much too high.

Doc.

Oh man, let's see, I think it would have been somewhere around 2016, could be off by a year or two

Yeah he never really understood the value of labor and especially if it's a form of labor you can't really hire a 17 year old to do.

And this would also bite him in the ass sometimes. For instance, that lot of used noids he got from F1, he wanted them tested, so he found a company to test them at some like $40 each rate. I was like, "what?" You just need a basic function test, I can do that. So we worked out a deal where it was like $5 each. All I did was dismantle a gen 3 Timmy, use some extra long LPR hose and swap through each noid on the work bench. Plug in to board. Connect hoses, pull trigger. Disconnect and move to the next one. Each one took me about a minute, maybe 2. He had around 50 of them. So the amount of labor was very low but the knowledge to do that was somewhat specialized. He even up paying me around $200 for maybe 2 hours of work. But to him he was saving money because he wasn't paying $40 each

I'm pretty sure he was thinking in order to test them himself he would have to completely assemble the marker. It just never occurred to him to have it all dismantled on the work bench. Because of the way it was set up I ended up doing eyes next with the same setup to see if they were functional or not.

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