y CF infused lower I got with the 13” coil does seem more rigid, but then again, I don’t typically swing like Superfreak.
Steves chassis is 463 grams while the stock D2 chassis is 456 according to my postal scale. There are advantages to his chassis. 250$ worth? That’s all up to the individual, but it’s pretty nice. The biggest thing is how he has it set up where it doesn’t take any “thumb stretch” to run the remote. His also locks the remote on, can be ordered for the dive cable to run inside the shaft, way better stand, very nice padded cuff, etc….so it’s 7 grams heavier with the improvements.
Thanks for the kind words, AND the information, IDX. There have been some questions from prospective customers recently, as to how my shaft compares, weight-wise, to the stock shaft. I THOUGHT I was within a few grams of the stock shaft, but don't have a D2 myself, so it was hard to know for sure. You seem to have cleared that up nicely.
TWO POINTS about my shaft's weight...
1. I KNEW I was making my shaft heavier, in an "overall weight" sense, than it
needed to be, as using carbon fiber as the shaft material WOULD HAVE allowed me to make a shaft LIGHTER than the stock shaft. However, I made my arm cuff about 4 oz. heavier than the stock cuff, ON PURPOSE. Reason being, one of my objectives with the design was to improve the BALANCE of the unit, as the Deus II is a nose-heavy machine, not unlike
essentially all modern detectors. My goal was to reduce the weight of the shaft OVERALL,
first, and THEN,
in the end, move whatever weight reduction I was able to achieve, TO THE BUTT END OF THE SHAFT -- i.e. into the arm cuff. In other words, I wanted the end result of the design to be that the total weight of the shaft is as close to the weight of the stock shaft as possible,
but also to
redistribute the weight -- moving some weight to the butt end of the shaft. Doing so, by definition, yields a MUCH better-balanced setup, and thus a machine that is more comfortable to swing.
2. My shaft's weight CAN be reduced some, simply by building it to the standard XP shaft lengths. My shaft is longer, in all three sections -- upper, middle, and lower. This was intended to allow taller users to a). have the ability to move the arm cuff back farther from the handle, and b). have the ability to extend the lower rod farther, to allow longer overall "extension" of the shaft. BUT -- that extra length also, of course, adds a bit of extra weight. It's not significant, BUT, the shaft could be reduced to below the 456g that IDX mentioned the stock shaft weighs, just by shortening up the sections back to '"stock length."
Steve