Welcome to The Cult of Zion
@Healthierlifestyle, we are happy to have you as a lifetime customer!
Also I see we've topped 100 pages of good vibes! Outstanding!!
Now it's storytime!
Gather around, friends, and I'll tell you a little about RBT's humble beginnings as seen from this designers point of view. Hope I still have a job after this, har har!
Someone posted a little ways back something to the effect of ...seems like RBT listened to everyone's gripes about vaporizers and invented one to address them all...or somesuch. Props to that guy, I hope they will forgive my laziness for not quoting them directly. They don't know how right they were.
RBT is a colleague from one of my past lives and we've stayed in touch more or less, mostly less if I'm being honest but as we all know, that's life when people part company, but still enough to share jokes, major life events, and whatnot. We hooked up for a ski trip once for a score and to check out his "cool new vape" which was that Vapir unit shaped like a capital "D", but he forgot the little pucks that hold the shiz.
Hard to imagine, right?
Anyway, I had already formed my opinion of 'vaping' by that point and knew it had never fully cut it for me as a long time combustor, so it didn't break my heart. I did go out and get one of those units and as usual, it didn't quite cut it for me not to mention it seemed to blow more vapor out its seams than into the bag. Meh, back to the pipe collection.
A couple months shy of a year ago he calls me up all mad scientist and heyyyy buddyyy, can I come visit, I have a project that I could use your help on. He briefly described to me how he's completely fed up with existing vaporizer technology, and got so sick of all the BS and crap engineering that he decided to make something that actually worked, and so he engineers up with this brilliant heater system. I think he was even just thinking 'one off' in the beginning, it was just so he and his friends would have a vaporizer that functions as it ought to, YOU BET! Come on over! (bring your good shit) I'm always down for a nice hangout and helping my buds with projects.
So we're hanging out with some real good stuff, looking over his sketches and familiarizing me with the concept and where he's at with the design and where he'd like it to go, the usual project team design kick off kind of discussion, and he smiles and says 'I brought a prototype!' and proceeds to pull out some cube shaped box made of wood and drywall, taped together or maybe he was just balancing all the pieces. He has mad skills at holding several objects all at once and performing dexterous acts with them, it's quite amazing to watch. I won't be getting back to that.
So here he is with this wirey, screeny, naily drywall box with a couple openings looking all of a Smurf sized glory hole, hooks a battery up to it and proceeds to blow a couple meager clouds before catching some shit on fire in my bedroom. Wowwwww! Neeeeaaaat!
Yeah, he could use a little help. A lot of help. Not talking about the project anymore. I digress...
Over the next few weeks I would cad up the latest concept, and every time we'd chat he'd have gone off in another direction and I'd be starting over. It's like herding kittens working with RBT. GENIUS kittens, though.
But the design had not yet found it's formula. That happened a little before
@lwien started this thread. We were using cut borosilicate glass and thinking ceramic, but had not yet discovered how to work the tech into standard 'round' glass. I'm not sure what sparked that brilliant step in the evolution of Zion, that is between the universe and
@RastaBuddhaTao , but whatever it was, that was the moment Zion was born.
A couple weeks after that we had the "2x4" design packaged which is still really the same packaging as today, less the lid and the nice round corners. Shortly into the detail design
@KeroZen drew a wireframe 'lid' on one of our cad renderings, and a couple pre-alpha testers had also commented how nice a lid would be, and this is how the Zion got it's lid.
Add several months of FC community ideas and involvement, extremely valuable input from our insane beta test crew, lots of work to reduce the manufacturing steps required to produce, hundreds of hours of grueling old fashioned testing (i'm so hungry) and that form has been gently refined into what we see today as the first production Zions get ready to come to life.
and thanks to my good friend and his relentless pursuit of vapor perfection I haven't combusted for more than six months, smoking stopped cutting it for me the first time I tried my prototype and that, dear friends, is my Story of Zion.
your pal,
thekarmawhore
