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Using names isn’t very elegant, lets just say a certain guy nicknamed “FerF**” was planning on taking a knife, baton, and H2H self defense class this Saturday and needed an expandable baton.
His instructor told him “Don’t buy crap”
His buddy Nomad over at Minion’s told him “Don’t buy crap”
What does the guy do? Being as stubborn as a mule, he buys crap.
Come on, it was only 5 bucks.
I knew it was crap, but 5 bucks was so cheap, vs. the 80 USD the ASP baton costs.
Looks like the ASP, but its a chinese copy
To be honest, I told myself “You still have one day left”, so I was planning on getting the quality thing but I first wanted to try out the cheapo baton. Good thing I did that.
“Trying out” consisted on giving it to my son.
I could hand over a M1 Abraham Battle Tank to Tommy, my 6 year old boy, and I know for certain five minutes later he will come back to me and say “Dad, I broke it… can you fix it?”.
He played a bit with it but soon it was supper time.
When we finished supper he left the baton on the table and rushed into his room, came back with a 4 foot steel pipe and attached me.
The pipe once had a short life as a stick horse toy.
My wife thought it was cute.
It took my son about 30 seconds to discover it was much more fun to remove the horse head and hit daddy with the cloth wrapped tube instead.
So here comes my insane kid, wildly bashing with this tube completely unaware he can probably brake my fingers with it.
I expanded the baton and blocked a couple blows, and after stopping 4 or 5 it broke, the smallest segment just detached and flew away.
“My sword it stronger than you baton daddy”
And he was right, how pathetic is that?
Imagine using that thing on a real fight.
You’d think it would take a serious idiot to trust in a 5 dollar weapon, but someone is obviously buying them, and it sure looked sturdy at first.
I’m 5 bucks poorer but I learned that lesson yet again.
Do not buy crap, specially when it comes to important gear and supplies.
At least tomorrow I’ll get a serious tool for the class.
Who wants to bet that this Saturday there’s going to be more than a few guys showing up to class with a similar cheapo baton?
Your knife, your gun, the ammo you load it with, you food and other essential supplies, don’t go chap on all that.
Do lots of research, but most of the time, you have to pay a reasonable price for good stuff. There are some bargains out there, but most of the time you get what you pay for.
There’s other ways to cut expenses, don’t go cheap on tools that you plan on using to protect your life. It’s just stupid.
FerFAL
9 comments:
Buy once, Cry once!
Wrong lesson learned here, FerFAL. Correct lesson to learn is: Do not let son attack Daddy with cloth covered pipe!
:lol:
Vic303
I've got a generic fake asp and it is great. However it was more like 30 bucks and I got to see it before paying.
I have an off topic comment here...
Hi Ferfal,
I'm have a small dilemma and I'd like to get your view on this.
Background first. I live in the suburbs and work in San Francisco. I take public transit (BART) to work.
As you might already know, SF is full of homeless people and general weirdos.
To help block out the train noise and other people talking on their mobile phone etc, I put on my ipod pretty much 100% of the time.
I keep the volume pretty low so that I can still maintain situation awareness.
So here is my delimma -- the pros of having my head phones on is that I can pretend to not hear the homeless and the weirdos on the street asking for
hand outs or asking me to buy their stuff -- they tend to keep their distance if you don't react to them. The cons is, of course, this makes me appear to have low/no situation awareness, which could make me a more attractive target to the bad guys.
We're not at a point that I'd want to react violently to every street person I encounter (quite a few daily)
Thanks!
The trick is to walk the line between buying crap (think cheap flashlights...a cheap one MAY work when you need it, a good one WILL work when you need it.) and spending too much. Since you are reading this and have a computer...do a lot of research on an item before you buy it. FerFAL is pretty good at this...and you do have to pay a little more for quality.
Off topic: Ferfal, I thought I would give you a heads up re a dangerous new strain of flu breaking out in Mexico, in case you had not heard of it.
See http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090425/ap_on_he_me/med_swine_flu
PS I checked with my doctor a year ago re stocking up on Tamiflu. He thought it was not worth the bother -- he felt a dangerous flu virus would quickly develop resistance to Tamiflu. Said the main safeguard will probably be old-fashioned quarantine measures.
Oh, I'm with you all the way on this one, FerFAL. Buy cheap knockoffs and you might as well call up the manufacturer and ask if you can purchase them by the case, because you're going to keep replacing them time and time again.
The old saying holds true again:
You get what you pay for, sometimes less.
the Monadnock 'Autolock' is much superior to the ASP baton. Well worth the money. Stronger. can be opened and closed quietly. won't close on you, pinching your fingers.
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