Invader Beta Update - 10/27/2021

Oct 30th 2021

Hello friends,

Its been a busy week at Digital Nimbus Labs where I've been working hard on updating the Invader PDW design with the latest changes based on feedback from the testing group in addition to working out a solution to prevent the brace from ejecting from the frame: here are the latest updates resulting in the latest version, v0.3.0


Major Change 1: Overall Aesthetic

I received a pretty cool image from a user on twitter who inspired me to add some more flavor to the frame design, the bare FDMA frame is lackluster and overall just boring.

Here's the inspiration image from @RICECUTTA0

Image

I love this design and all its cool shapes and aesthetics. I also thought it was pretty cool that "SHORAI" translates to "future" or "tomorrow", basically it reads "Tomorrows Invader", which was pretty accurate. In the end I ended up with a design that looks like this:


I tried to keep close to RICECUTTA's design, but tweaked a few things for personal flavor and printing ease, overall I think it looks pretty sweet. A massive improvement.

Major change 2: Grip Comfort

The beta testers are in full swing and already provided some great feedback. The high part of the grip was just not comfortable with the 0.2.x version. The angle of the grip pushed the users hand right up against the bottom of the brace housing resulting in some beat up thumb knuckles (myself included). So my first idea was to reshape the grip and lower the trough for the webbing of the hand to allow for a lower grip posture. Going from the FDMA style grip to my reshaped grip made the grip feel a bit more "vertical".

Before:

After:

Then there was still the challenge of allowing enough relief above the thumb knuckle. I still wasn't super happy with the feel, so I moved the entire brace mechanism back about 7.5mm to allow for more arch in the relief.

Before:

After:

You can see the difference in the spacing between the grip and the opening for the c-clip.

Overall these changes should make the grip a bit more comfortable.

Major change 3: Brace End StopsI tried many different iterations of end stops to try and get something together that didn't require more hardware or metal work to implement. At this point, I haven't found anything that works well enough to meet that criteria so I settled on just adding screws to the brace bars. Here's a peek at one of the things I tried, which was the most successful thing:

Here's a cut-away of the mechanism that would be "captive" inside the pocket shown.

In this position the bar slides freely until the notch reaches the triangular body.

At which point the body falls into the notch, stopping the rearward travel.
I experimented with many different shapes for this, but overall, the action is just too violent and dislodges the latching body, which causes it to fail on subsequent runs. I could pin this in place to make it work more fluidly, which is my next attempt. I'll update again when I have more info on this.

Ultimately here's what I landed on:

Adding a small screw to the bar with a tapped hole seems to be the simplest solution for now. I may update in the future when I have a better solution for this. I'm trying to make these updates in a way that doesn't require changes to the pdw kits. Adding a hole seems like a reasonable change. If you guys come up with any better ideas that don't involve adding more springs to the kit, I'm all for it.

Minor changes:Feed back from the beta group revealed that the shape of the frame housing was kind of in the way of reaching the slide release:

The sharp corner was impeding access to the release so I decided to taper it down which you can see in this picture here:

Overall, just a comfort QOL change.

Future changes and ideas:

There are a number of other feature ideas I have in testing and development at the moment.

For one, I'm looking at having the brace locking plate CNC'd from aluminum to offer a more premium product feel for the brace mechanism. The brace locking plate is kind of a pain to change out so a long-lasting version would probably be pretty nice.

I'm also tinkering with a holster design for the Invader. Progress is a bit slow on that but the concept is in place:

Lastly, I thought it would be fun to see what the Invader looked like with a covered slide. I'm not sure if I'll pursue this design, but I think it looks pretty neat: