We've got a T-Rex announcement, and we're not quite sure whether it's a big announcement or a small announcement.
To be honest, that is kind of up to you.
Welcome to another T-Rex talk.
We are open sourcing a bunch of T-Rex stuff.
Now, the reason that this is a fairly small announcement is that we've already done this before.
We've already open sourced the sidecar, a whole bunch of different design files for the sidecar spine system.
So, drawings for all of the tooling that you would need to make sidecars and sidecar attachments that would be compatible with the T-Rex sidecars and the T-Rex sidecar attachments.
And not a whole lot of people have picked up on this. There's definitely a bunch of accessory makers that have made stuff.
Northwest Bladeworks made a very cool adapter for attaching knife sheets.
Our friend Garrett McClaren made a very cool adapter that essentially lets you carry a magazine in between your holster and your turn-to-get carrier.
And I believe terminal armament, our friend Vlad, at terminal armament made some kind of radio carrier.
So, there are definitely people experimenting with this, but there's a lot more stuff that you could do.
And we're releasing some more files.
So, in addition to some sidecar files for the double wheeled adapter, which we sold, I think that was our April Fool's Day joke earlier.
And a sidecar extender, that's kind of a new project.
That's something we tinkered with for a while. So, if you have, let's say, a larger belt size.
If you have more diameter, maybe the sidecar would be more comfortable for you if you could extend it a little bit.
If you could put a spacer in between the holster and the mag attachment.
People that have a slightly larger circumference have said that that is more comfortable.
It gives you a little bit more space in between those two things. It gives you a second hinge point.
And so, we released a bunch of 3D files related to that.
So, you can print versions of those in different sizes.
And our goal in releasing those files is to just provide something that the people can tinker with.
But our hope is that it actually is an encouragement to two groups of people.
First of all, individual users to download the files, look at them, think about how they would get them made.
We also included some links to the 3D printers that we are using, the filaments and resins that we are using.
And shout out to MK machining. So, if you don't want to print this yourself, you can send it away to MK machining.
And they can print it out of nylon 12 or nylon 11, something that is really super durable and basically on par with injection molded plastic at this point.
So, that individual who would like to have a dual wheel adapter or a sidecar extender, or maybe an angled wing,
can really easily send those files off and get those made by somebody else.
But hopefully, that starts the ball rolling in your mind.
Like, these are things that I could get made.
I could take digital files and physically turn them into actual, tangible, useful tools and products and parts and pieces.
And hopefully, that gets you, or whoever actually downloads and does the file, kind of on this track of digital manufacturing.
And kind of the gateway into learning more about either the part design side or the 3D printing side and fabrication side and just more involved.
But then the second group of people that we would hope that this encourages are people who are already manufacturers, people who may already have companies making and selling stuff.
And now that they have the files and the blueprints and the drawings for various things, they can see how they could expand upon these things.
And since it is an open source, there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't make a whole bunch of sidecar compatible stuff.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, we're also going to be open sourcing some nylon products.
The first one that we are open sourcing is the Kim Light Holder, which is a really super simple product.
That one is going to be more for that first group of individuals.
The single individual do it yourself or somebody who wants to learn a little bit about sewing and repairing kit.
And might want to make a Kim Light Holder.
Because those are great for batteries, those are great for cable management, those are great for a whole bunch of different things.
And maybe you want to make your own because you would like to just change the design just slightly.
It's sort of a weird thing to open source because if you know anything about sewing, you probably don't need a pattern to make it.
And if you do need a pattern to make it, well, that's actually probably a pretty good first project for you.
So all the drawings for that really simple Kim Light Holder, the 4-cell and the 7-cell.
The material is used and it prints out and it can be a pattern for cutting fabric.
And the digital files, if you happen to have a cricket or silhouette or some other vinyl cutter that can cut fabric so that you can start to use some of that equipment to experiment with nylon production.
So yeah, as I always saying, these are hopefully a gateway to making more stuff.
Whether you are customizing gear, making little bits and pieces for yourself, your friends, people in your local community, or that citizen defense industry that we have talked about.
We would like to support people who are involved in individual manufacture or larger companies who are building products to support folks in any way that we can.
Which is why, in addition to these sidecar parts and this one nylon pattern, which we will open source more nylon patterns.
But in addition to the sidecar files and this one nylon pattern, we are also releasing into the wild all of our 3D scan data for guns and individual weapon lights.
One of the most useful pieces of equipment that we have owned as holster makers, technically we still own it, so I'm not sure why I phrased it that way.
Is the EIN scan SP structured light 3D scanner? It's extremely accurate once it is calibrated and it's very easy to use once you work around the sort of buggy software.
And we have scanned hundreds of firearms and lights. And now we have uploaded all of those scans. Well, I should clarify, not all those scans.
All of those scans that are good quality and make sense. There's a whole bunch of little weird scans that I found as I was going through the archives where we scanned a part of a gun to solve a specific problem we were having with the holster.
Those scans I did not worry about, but good clean scans of firearms and good clean scans of lights. We are releasing in the 3D scan library, which at the time of this recording is up on grabcat.
And it's possible that we will have to release that library in a couple of other places if we get kicked off a grabcat.
It's several gigabytes of data. And as I said, it's dozens and dozens of files for most of the different manufacturers and you can look through those. And I think it's pretty well organized.
So hopefully that is useful. And I am not entirely sure who it will be useful for. Obviously will be useful for holster manufacturers who would like to have the point cloud data of different types of firearms so that they can build their vacuum forming molds around those just like we have done.
And it will probably be useful for, say, graphic artists and guys working on movies and video games where they are building models of guns. And rather than using photo reference, they will actually be able to see scans of actual firearms.
Get the proportions dialed in just right. And some of the data is detailed enough. You can actually see engravings and things. And that would help them line up textures and stuff like that.
So there's a bunch of different ways that this data might be used by a bunch of different kinds of people. But some of you may be asking yourself, why are we releasing all of this data? It represents an awful lot of work. We've been scanning guns for about five years.
This is the data that has driven our holster development for those five years. This is the source material that has allowed us to improve quality and improve fit and retention on all of our holsters moving forward.
So why are we releasing this data into the wild so that everybody else in the industry, all of our competitors will have access to it.
You know, without doing all of the work that we did to gather this data together in the first place. And that is a good question to ask because it does represent a huge amount of labor.
And it's also a good question to ask if you're familiar with the open source community. Communists and socialists kind of make up a big part of that community and have written most of the talking points for why open source is good.
Open source is better than proprietary data because, you know, the socialist belief is that you don't actually, people shouldn't actually own property and people shouldn't actually own intellectual property.
And people maybe shouldn't even own the works of their own hands. So given that, the open source community is kind of riddled with all of these socialistic presuppositions.
You might ask why are we jumping into the open source arena with some of our flagship products and some of our most useful data.
As an American conservative, I'm a free market conservative. And as a Christian, I think that there are some very significant biblical reasons to be a free market conservative when you study these biblical principles.
And I think that there is actually a really valuable understanding of free market economics that does support open source stuff.
Now, it does sort of require that you have a free market. One of the ways that the American free market works right now in the United States is that it's, well, it's not super free.
There is this idea that you should be able to own property and you should be able to own intellectual property. And I think that is the first one is very good.
People must be able to own property. That is a human right. An intellectual property is something that is so fuzzy nowadays that it probably needs to be defined before you declare it to be a right.
Is intellectual property a human right if intellectual property just means any idea that you have inside of your head?
This is kind of where we're at today with American copyright law and patent law and just general assumptions about stuff.
And so we have a kind of a non free market where the United States government has an awful lot of protectionism around various types of intellectual property and private property inside the United States.
There are companies who exist solely to fight over intellectual property and to license intellectual property. And I'm not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, but they rely very heavily upon the government to be the muscle.
They cannot actually defend their ideas through execution. They need paperwork and the agents of the state to do it. I think that is more problematic.
So here at T-Rex, what we are trying to do is to figure out what is our labor, what is our work, what is our property, what is it that we actually offer, and what are the things that we should do to help out the wider community in other ways.
So the way that we make the holsters, the execution of the holster manufacturer is something that we have worked really hard on and we're really proud of.
And we think that that is a way that we have differentiated ourselves from some of our competitors. But when it comes to ideas like this is where you grab onto the trigger guard of a Glock 17 in order to get a good retention, well that you don't think you can own.
That is just so blatantly obvious to anyone. That's the kind of idea that you couldn't possibly own and shouldn't really be able to send armed goons of the United States government out to shake down companies that are doing a similar thing.
So we're going to operate as if the market were as free as we would like it to be. We're going to continue to try to develop value for customers in our product development and in our product execution.
And sell those things to people at the prices that those people believe those things are worth. And as we develop various techniques that we think that the wider community defense industry should have access to, we're going to share those things.
And a perfect example of this is the 3D scan library anybody in the holster space anybody in the civilian defense industry can go out and buy scanners and they can go out and buy or borrow guns and weapon lights and scan them and have access to that exact same data.
But we would actually like to save that wider industry some of that work some of that effort now that we have done that work.
We actually think that it would benefit the citizen defense industry the manufacturing industry the United States of America if we just share that work.
And thanks to digital manufacturing and digital file sharing it costs us nothing to share that work and prevent other people from wasting time and energy and sweat on it.
And I think it's also time for us as as conservatives who have principles as opposed to just reactionary thoughts about political elections to take back some of the ideological ground about what is property.
What is life liberty and the pursuit of happiness when it comes to human rights. And then how should we think about property and intellectual property in the digital world as we take advantages of digital manufacturing.
How should we think about property and ownership in this digital space where I can give hundreds of thousands of people access to gigabytes worth of 3D files and it doesn't cost me anything.
I think this is ground that we need to retake both ideologically but also economically in the marketplace.
And I think that there's a bunch of people who are kind of doing this work now. There's a whole bunch of people in the software industry who have a much better understanding of how open source can and should work and can and does benefit the larger software industry.
There's a bunch of people who are developing product A which they will sell for money. That is their product it is close source it is proprietary it is a product.
But in order for product A to work or in order for product A to be built they have to build some code some library some utilities and they decide that they're going to make those libraries and utilities free for all other software developers to use that way they're not wasting time doing basic simple work that has now already been done rather than reinvent the wheel they can use these libraries and they can use these utilities.
And they can go out and they can develop product B and whether or not product A and product B are in direct competition kind of doesn't matter you see both companies benefit from the fact that work isn't being done over and over and over and over again for no purpose and no reason and not much output.
We believe that the better thing for the entire economy is not just that everybody do activity and that activity just sort of theoretically generates the universal basic income that the government decides that everybody needs for a specific standard of living that can get whatever.
We believe that what really matters is results and that whether we were trying to benefit say the manufacturing space of Tennessee or whether we were trying to benefit the citizen defense industry
or whether we're just trying to invigorate say the manufacturing industry of the United States of America trying to get as much possible benefit from the work that we have already done is going to be good for everyone.
And there's nothing socialistic or communist stick about that it's a basic free market stuff.
That's why I think that there's actually going to be a pretty significant benefit for Glock the company perhaps not the man since Gaston Glock is pretty old at this point.
But I think that there are Glock clones that exist on the market the sheer number of companies that have taken the Glock design and now the design patterns have expired for the Gen 3 Glock the Glock clones that exist to further bolster the aftermarket parts market and further verify the quality of the company.
The quality of the Glock product itself will probably benefit Glock the company a little bit but it will also benefit the consumer a lot.
And that is what I see happening when companies inside of a specific space see themselves as friendly competition rather as this very doggy dog cutthroat competition.
Yes it's true there's a limited amount of dollars that are available for any particular market sector to go and get.
But they can expand that market sector and they can work more efficiently if they share certain resources and again I think this should be a free market principle not a socialistic communist one.
Socialism and communism requires that the assets pre-exist the means of production need to be built by some other economic model.
And then the socialistic economic model requires that you seize those means production it cannot create it can only alter and then it has to force people to share that data or the product of those means of production as opposed to something that is very much voluntary.
And I own the labor of my hands and I own the scans of that particular 3D scanner but I think that TREX the company and all of TREX's friends and competitors will benefit by that work being available to more people than just the TREX arms holster dev team.
I don't think that everybody should immediately open source all of their stuff and I don't think that the US government should immediately open source all of everybody's stuff.
But one of the cool things about the citizen defense industry is while there is friendly competition between all of us we are really trying to accomplish similar goals.
We have really similar missions and there is an extremely large market share that we don't have to fight over because ultimately we are trying to serve that market share more than just profit off of them.
I'm sure the math gets a little more tricky for giant companies like Glock but the fact of the matter is we would like to see far more people equipped with good holsters than we could ever manufacture holsters for.
The holster maker that exists in the United States that is making a good product is an ally as well as a competitor.
Yes, we are probably vying for a few of the same dollars but we are all trying to take on a mission that is larger than any of us could do on our own.
And at any point in time somebody in the holster industry is going to invent a much better way of solving a particular problem.
We invent a brand new wheel and rather than all of us holster makers rushing to catch up and reinvent that wheel at exactly the same time I think that what would be most beneficial for everyone including the guys who reinvent that new wheel for the first time.
The brand new non-round holster making wheel if they help us understand what it is that they did and what the benefits are they have the advantage of a head start because they are the ones who did it and they get the initial return on that investment.
But if they help the other people in the industry come along and figure out how to improve their processes all of the customers are benefited.
This company A the first ones to come up with the new non-round wheel benefits by having their process, their invention, their innovation validated and verified by the rest of the industry that rushes to catch up.
That is one of the things that happened with Glock. They got a massive head start on some new manufacturing technologies in the 1980s and all of the gun companies that were slower to adopt those missed out on the investment of investing in those manufacturing technologies earlier.
But when they did come on board and they began to compete with Glock for the very same customers they were also validating Glock's design and Glock's materials and Glock's manufacturing technologies and the rising tide really did help all the ships.
This effect is compounded if you have something like the T-Rex arms side car system. If I am making holsters for a whole bunch of guns but not, say, Taurus's somebody else making Taurus side car holsters that are compatible with the T-Rex arms tourniquet holder, well that's going to help me sell more tourniquet holders.
If we make holsters for guns that people have but not the accessories that they want, someone else can come along and serve our customers and ultimately sell more holsters for us.
Both companies will benefit from this kind of teamwork. Again, a voluntary teamwork, not one that is enforced by the government or certain communist party of individuals that would like to take control of both means of production and then run both companies into the ground.
So, this is an idea that deserves a lot more development. Take back the ground of the open source community and say this is a free market idea. This is a way that economies, large economies inside of nations, can benefit one another rather than just seeing themselves as individual short term companies vying for the exact same consumer dollar.
Occasionally technologies come along that utterly and completely change an industry and not all of that change is going to be incredibly fun. That will be really hard catch up for a number of people in the industry and some of the companies probably won't make it.
But if the industry is actually able to grow as a result, that's actually going to be more beneficial for the people working in the industry once that stuff shakes out.
And again, this presupposes that there is a free market where a large government entity doesn't come in to try to stop innovation from happening too fast or make sure that the pain of being slow to market and slow to innovate isn't felt equally and equibly across everybody as opposed to letting those penalties fall on the people that actually deserve them.
As long as that market is actually free, this kind of innovation is good for the customer, but it's also really good for the industry.
And so when industries can share these kinds of innovations amongst one another and save each other from busy work, everybody will benefit.
So let's take back some ideological ground and let's make the citizens' defense industry operate a little bit more on this kind of playing field, this kind of thinking where we are pursuing a common mission.
And the mission is not only equipping serious citizens, it is also improving the manufacturing capability of America and strengthening the innovative capability of that citizen defense industry as a whole.
Not in a socialistic way, but as a whole bunch of individual companies that take care of their own customers and take care of their own employees, but also look out for one another as an industry.
That's why I said I'm not sure if this announcement of T-Rex releasing all these files is a big announcement or a small announcement.
But I have no idea what the effect will be, and I have no idea how useful these files will be.
I have no idea how well or how widely they'll be utilized, but at the very least I think that it will help a few people get their foot in the door of 3D printing, maybe sewing, and maybe it will start a wider conversation of how the industry can help each other out.
And I would say our least friendly competitors to not do a whole bunch of unnecessary busy work that's just going to kind of drain the innovative and manufacturing capacity of the entire industry when we really want the whole industry to improve on every level towards this mission of equipping the citizenry.
So continue to think about this particular topic, but also please avail yourself of all of the open source materials, which I guess I will link to in the show notes.
You can get the big 3D files of the scans, you can get the little 3D files that are ready to print of all the sidecar attachment, accessory type things, and that chem light holder.
The pattern is there, and the shapefiles are there, and we want to open source more nylon, so make sure that you reach out to us with specific nylon things that you would like us to open source.
That would be the most helpful for you. This is, in some ways, the biggest question mark in my mind. I don't actually know what you guys need or want, so let us know, and we will do our best to meet those needs and continue to experiment with ways where we can see improvements.
Try to help push along improvements that are industry-wide.