How This Came To Be

This started out as a passion project to do something sort of fun and ridiculous. I had a goofy idea to shoot a local quarterly range competition's rifle portion with a shotgun using slugs. Just for the hell of it. The firing strings weren't very long but 7+2 at most is not a lot of ammo for a rifle drill. I had already been something of a fan of Jerry Miculek and had seen his videos using the Armstek loaders and a modified Arredando loading ramp. After talking about it for about a year, I decided to try and make my own as I simply didn't have the cash to throw at Arredando's products. A full setup from Arredondo would be in the ballpark of 500$ which was and still is a substantial amount of money to spend on a niche setup, especially considering I bought my 1301 for a grand used from a local firearms shop. 

So what to do? I had bought an Ender 3 3d printer and had been learning a lot while using it. I decided to try to make some home made copies of what I saw Jerry use. I went to home depot and found PVC pipe with a 1 inch inner diameter, a little hardware, and some glue. With these and some printed tabs, I managed to make the tubes. The plungers and ramp were entirely 3d printed. This was all in PLA mind you which is not a very durable plastic. I committed to doing it a couple weeks before the match started, and the majority of it was done the night before the match. I got about 40 minutes of sleep that night around 5:30 am. It worked but holy shit was it janky.

This design was a pretty poor imitation of Arredando's... and yet it worked. I got a better printer not long after that which allowed me to do a lot more design work and a lot less printer work. Ender 3 is a good learning platform, but it's far from reliable, convenient, consistent, or fast. Now I have iterated this many many many many times to get to a design more unique and in some ways I would claim is better than Arredando's. Primarily the way that the stick interfaces with the ramp. The wedge shape is advantageous for spreading out the pressure, having a larger target to aim for, and consistent alignment.

I have been asked before on posts in forums while developing this if I am violating a patent, and the answer (without consulting a patent lawyer) is that the "linear path holding aligned shells pushed down a track with a plunger type object into a tube magazine" patent has expired. My part geometry is sufficiently different so as to not resemble any patents for similar objects that I can find.

So here I am 6 months later having put a lot of work into developing completely 3d printed parts for straightforward manufacturing and consistency...something both functional and durable that I would actually feel a lot less imposter syndrome about asking someone money for. I have switched to much better materials, ABS and PPA-CF. I am proud of just having gone to the trouble of making something. It's even a useful something if you want to cut down reload times. The standard 1301 is not an easy shotgun to try to quad or even double load, and neither are most other standard, sporting, or tactical variants of shotguns that are mostly designed around home defense, hunting, sporting, or duty use.  

What this product enables you to do is expand the use cases of a tube fed shotgun, or if already in use for competition where this product has its roots, to use a style of reloading other than a variation of hand loading. I'm hopeful that this product will find a wide user base, and that will mean developing ramps for more models of shotguns soon. 

I didn't start this project intending to sell these. I just thought it was cool. Then I learned that most people have never heard of these, and some even wanted to buy them from me. I went to all this trouble because the product I wanted wasn't price accessible to me at the time and so I want to give you the option I didn't have. Arredando's products are no doubt excellent and of high quality... but expensive. For about 200$ as opposed to around 500$ (collated value, they don't sell full kits), you can get a product from me that does the same thing. Or you can buy theirs, I wouldn't hold it against you. This is a fun and interesting entrepreneurial endeavor and I appreciate your interest.