Inside the A40, next generation suggestions

[capn]

Hello Astro,

I have had the opportunity to acquire a spare A40 headset, and decided to have a look inside. With my experience in plastic part design I find it interesting to see how others decide to build and their design choices. This will serve as a dissection and critique of the A40 design approach and part analysis with the intent to give ideas for improvement on later models of headsets.

I won't do a full engineering report docket, but I will however give some background and statements. Hopefully it won't bore too many.

Abstract:
Designing with plastic brings about certain considerations that will influence the final part quality and manufacturing overhead. With a plastic part the inherent design flexibility and complex part geometries available to the designer allow for large part consolidation. When taking facts of plastic into account one can effectively reduce part cost and increase production bandwidth. However, if a designer does not take into consideration the shortcomings and intrinsic properties of plastic the resulting part can cause production downtime due to inherent design flaws.

Results and discussion
The Astro A40 headset is a solidly built headset, with many unique features that make it a desirable product for gamers and audiophiles. However this product contains many plastic parts to secure items and define its main structure. These plastic parts present an opportunity to use plastic's ability to consolidate multiple parts into one and eliminate the need to use fasteners.

Shown in the picture below is a dissection of the outermost portion of the headset. Some parts do not require refining to accommodate plastics, due to the part's simplicity, namely the Astro covers. Other parts however show a need for redesign with an eye to increase the plastic's inherent advantages. Such parts include the outer ring, magnetic base, and foam pad stay. The outer ring used to attach to the rest of the headset to the ear cup is of concern. The outer ring has a very steep surface which the ejector pins push against and do not have texture, or slots on the pins to aid in ejection. This is a more long term problem, as ejector pins that lack texture, or slots will wear down and cause cosmetic defects. The ring also has brass inserts that look to be heat stacked in place, without actually cutting the part I cannot comment on the insert design. Yet the inserts are not of great concern, the only reason to point them out is that they could be removed and the ring be combined with the top ring holder. These parts all use screws to attach together, and as such give rise to a higher production cost due to labor. When Screws are used within a plastic part the chance for failure and cost will increase. When using screws in any assembly it is almost always necessary to implement a worker to this task as automating this would be costly. This in itself has the opportunity for quality control problems, arising from human error.


http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/IMG_0270.jpg (http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/?action=view&current=IMG_0270.jpg)

The cost of using screws may first seem trivial, but when dealing with high volumes the issue of inventory and part consistency will come into play. With plastic, the ability to attach these parts is simply accomplished through snap-fits or part consolidation. This design flexibility thus eliminates the need for screws, large inventories, and reduces part to part variability. If snap-fits were to be used, the assembly time could drastically be reduced and have the possibility to be automated. However if part consolidation is implemented then several whole step are removed from the process and could greatly improve productivity.

Going deeper into the ear cup we see another opportunity to use simple design elements which can reduce part cost. The main speaker is glued into its holder and the wires are routed to a circuit board which is attached to another plastic piece. Then the pivots for the ear cup are made from metal and then screwed in. From a process standpoint the parts show small amounts of gate blush due to an undersized flow gate, however it is minimal. The extra plastic piece to hold the mic boom is unnecessary, and could easily be integrated into the speaker holder. The boom holder also includes a small spring to give a firm grip on the mic jack. The use of this is somewhat subjective, reasonably it could be seen as undersized snap fingers or a design choice. However the case, the three small grips could easily be replaced by two larger semi-circle snap-fingers. The Circuit board used in the assembly does not need replacing, however the screws used to attach it are redundant. To the previous point, the two parts could easily be consolidated and with provisions to positively locate the wires, speaker, and circuit board. The metal pivots could also be integrated into this piece, by either adding a way to positively locate the pivot or simply adding the plastic equivalent.


http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/IMG_0272.jpg (http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/?action=view&current=IMG_0272.jpg)

At a minimum for one ear cup it is possible to combine the outer ring and top plastic holder into one, eliminating two screws. The magnetic base and foam pad stay could still be unique parts, however the eight screws between them could be eliminated for snap-fingers. Lastly the inner assembly could be condensed into one part which have provisions for wire stays, speaker location, mic attachment, and circuit board retention. This eliminates the need for glue to keep the speaker in place, metal spring, and five screws that hold the existing pieces together. Considering the whole assembly this part consolidation would eliminate 28 screws and greatly simplify the assembly of the headset, and reduce the labor cost.

End Notes

I hope my little dissection of a spare headset has helped give you some ideas for your next headset, and possible avenues to decrease production costs. Feel free to critique my analysis or comments, I would be more than happy to give more clarity on it.

[Nevermind]

great analysis and I agree with some of your snap pins replacing the screws but some of the screws may need to be kept to allow easy maintenance by astro in the event of a problem, combining plastic parts would save on manufacturing processes but again if one part breaks the whole thing must go and it's allot of waste if many parts are integrated into one molded piece. I'd like to see one or two parts replaced, the three plastic camps that hold onto the boom mic should be replaced with brass or aluminum, the part that these clips clamp onto the boom mic look to be aluminum and as a sacrificial part this should be changed to plastic as it's much easier to replace a worn out mic than the three clips if they wear down, so basically the boom mic should be the sacrificial component and not the parts of the headset.

I'm at uni at the moment so I'll return and give more ideas when I get home, I've also said before that I'd like the cable quick disconnect joint to be at the headset and not in line.

[Nevermind]

looking at the mount for the mic it'd have to be redesigned nearly completely with pivot points and springs for metal clamps.

[Nevermind]

I also have to say that i think that having two semi circles instead of the three points would make it harder to insert and remove the mic and could cause damage if forced which I say people would do.

[capn]

Thanks for the comments, I'll try to address them point by point.


"but some of the screws may need to be kept to allow easy maintenance by astro in the event of a problem"

This is actually contrary to what you may think. When thinking of serviceability in a plastic part, this does not automatically necessitate screws to accomplish the job. In fact, using screws to make an intentionally serviceable part will actually create more problems than they would solve. In practice if a plastic part is going to be routinely opened up and serviced (ie. daily) the part usually has brass inserts as not to strip out the plastic boss. This creates a lot of overhead with the particular part, because you have to keep inventory of the brass inserts and the machine screws on hand. Not to mention the inherent complexities of molding in an insert. This is why an appropriately designed plastic snap-fit would accommodate the rare event of service.

The whole purpose to use plastics is to make the part at a lower cost. Because of the flexibility of plastic design you do not need screws, at all. If you want serviceability in a plastic part you design it as such, and you can do so without screws. Snap fits give you great flexibility; you can make the part so it is as serviceable, or as unserviceable as you want. Having a three part plastic assembly allows you to replace a single piece in the system if one fails. However this makes it even easier to service. Instead of having the chance to strip the holes, or break the bosses, which can make the part unserviceable, you can just release the snap fit with no risk of breakage. And due to the fact that we will assume the customer will rarely if ever disassemble a unit, then the need for a brass insert is tertiary.

It is completely possible to design a part that uses no screws, and for such a simple assembly screws really aren't required. They used to make products with this in mind, but due to much shorter design cycle times and a greater pressure to get to market quicker, these considerations oft become an afterthought.


"but again if one part breaks the whole thing must go and it's allot of waste if many parts are integrated into one molded piece. I'd like to see one or two parts replaced"

Waste? I am note sure I understand, in the way of time, or hassle? As far as a material stand point it is definitely not a waste, and is actually a cost savings. If you mean waste as in if a small piece of it breaks then the whole thing has to be replaced, I guess I can see a point there. But creating one monolithic ear cup assembly would be much more difficult from an assembly and perhaps a moldability standpoint. That's why I suggest either a two or three piece design, to allow quick assembly and R&R in the case of a warranty claim.


" the three plastic camps that hold onto the boom mic should be replaced with brass or aluminum, the part that these clips clamp onto the boom mic look to be aluminum and as a sacrificial part this should be changed to plastic as it's much easier to replace a worn out mic than the three clips if they wear down, so basically the boom mic should be the sacrificial component and not the parts of the headset."

I am going to have to disagree with you there, once again if the parts are made from plastic you want to stay plastic. There is no need to add a complex metal structure to hold the aluminum mic base in, yes the base of the mic could be replaced by plastic to reduce that cost. But if the mic and base were made from plastic they would have to be of dissimilar material to prevent galling. Also from what I can gather is that Astro decided to go with the aluminum mic base because the process looks to be Urethane injection over the mic, and the aluminum probably provided the best sealing.

But just looking at the differences in cost, the mic is only $19.95 US where as the pads are $29.95 US; so as far as costs are concerned the mic is already the sacrificial part in Astro's accessory line.


"looking at the mount for the mic it'd have to be redesigned nearly completely with pivot points and springs for metal clamps."

Fortunately there is no need for metal clamps or metal springs. The amorphous plastic that Astro is using has an inherent elasticity to it and does not require the help of metal springs. You can actually design a lever arm that will spring back just as well as metal would, but at many magnitudes lower cost. And as I said before, if you can design it all in plastic, stick with it. When you add more sub-assemblies to the product, it is going to open up areas of quality concern and part defects, not to mention cost increases.


I also have to say that i think that having two semi circles instead of the three points would make it harder to insert and remove the mic and could cause damage if forced which I say people would do.

I think you missed my meaning when I said replace the three fingers with two semi circles. Because as it sits now the mic is held in via the three small fingers and a metal ring spring as seen below. If one were to replace the three fingers and spring by two larger semi-circles it would be easy to achieve the equivalent force that's applied now. Since the force would be equal, you wouldn't have to worry about people using excess force to pull the mic out. But Astro may have had other reasoning to use the metal ring spring that I have overlooked.



http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/micbase.jpg (http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/?action=view&current=micbase.jpg)

I hope that clarifies some of the points I made earlier.

[Nevermind]

Thanks for the comments, I'll try to address them point by point.



This is actually contrary to what you may think. When thinking of serviceability in a plastic part, this does not automatically necessitate screws to accomplish the job. In fact, using screws to make an intentionally serviceable part will actually create more problems than they would solve. In practice if a plastic part is going to be routinely opened up and serviced (ie. daily) the part usually has brass inserts as not to strip out the plastic boss. This creates a lot of overhead with the particular part, because you have to keep inventory of the brass inserts and the machine screws on hand. Not to mention the inherent complexities of molding in an insert. This is why an appropriately designed plastic snap-fit would accommodate the rare event of service.

The whole purpose to use plastics is to make the part at a lower cost. Because of the flexibility of plastic design you do not need screws, at all. If you want serviceability in a plastic part you design it as such, and you can do so without screws. Snap fits give you great flexibility; you can make the part so it is as serviceable, or as unserviceable as you want. Having a three part plastic assembly allows you to replace a single piece in the system if one fails. However this makes it even easier to service. Instead of having the chance to strip the holes, or break the bosses, which can make the part unserviceable, you can just release the snap fit with no risk of breakage. And due to the fact that we will assume the customer will rarely if ever disassemble a unit, then the need for a brass insert is tertiary.

It is completely possible to design a part that uses no screws, and for such a simple assembly screws really aren't required. They used to make products with this in mind, but due to much shorter design cycle times and a greater pressure to get to market quicker, these considerations oft become an afterthought.

Granted but anyone who has tried to take something apart that has plastic clips will tell you it can be annoying and the plastic clips DO break often, it's not a perfect system, which nothing is, I fear that the quality of A40's would go down due to economization of production, There are inherent problems with all types of production but screws or screws with inserts as you suggested are better in the long run in my opinion as over time fatigue will have a greater effect on small plastic clips that have give in them regardless of how well they are manufactured and will flex and eventually break where as if designed properly screws and or screws with fittings would far outlast plastic clips.



Waste? I am note sure I understand, in the way of time, or hassle? As far as a material stand point it is definitely not a waste, and is actually a cost savings. If you mean waste as in if a small piece of it breaks then the whole thing has to be replaced, I guess I can see a point there. But creating one monolithic ear cup assembly would be much more difficult from an assembly and perhaps a moldability standpoint. That's why I suggest either a two or three piece design, to allow quick assembly and R&R in the case of a warranty claim.

Yes I was meaning if a small piece breaks the whole thing must go, as it is I can see maybe two pieces that can be integrated together, nothing greatly significant.


I am going to have to disagree with you there, once again if the parts are made from plastic you want to stay plastic. There is no need to add a complex metal structure to hold the aluminum mic base in, yes the base of the mic could be replaced by plastic to reduce that cost. But if the mic and base were made from plastic they would have to be of dissimilar material to prevent galling. Also from what I can gather is that Astro decided to go with the aluminum mic base because the process looks to be Urethane injection over the mic, and the aluminum probably provided the best sealing.

But just looking at the differences in cost, the mic is only $19.95 US where as the pads are $29.95 US; so as far as costs are concerned the mic is already the sacrificial part in Astro's accessory line.

I am going to have to disagree, the price of the mic is not applicable to my point, the three clips inside the headphone are as of now the sacrificial parts as the tougher material of the aluminium boom mic mount will wear out the plastic before you see any significant wear on the mic, it would not be unrealistic to switch the materials around, aluminium would be ideal, it's light weight, easy to machine, corrosion resistant and doesn't gall easily, especially when it's just rubbing against plastic which is evident in the current construction.



Fortunately there is no need for metal clamps or metal springs. The amorphous plastic that Astro is using has an inherent elasticity to it and does not require the help of metal springs. You can actually design a lever arm that will spring back just as well as metal would, but at many magnitudes lower cost. And as I said before, if you can design it all in plastic, stick with it. When you add more sub-assemblies to the product, it is going to open up areas of quality concern and part defects, not to mention cost increases.


My point is for the quality of the product, it is dissatisfying to find that your boom mic is falling down every time you move your head after only one year of use due to the plastic clamps wearing down, the elastic properties of the plastic don't last forever and do degrade over time, the spring steel ring I see on there would help prevent this but is putting more pressure on the clips causing them to wear more. Again my point is that the wrong part has been made sacrificial



I think you missed my meaning when I said replace the three fingers with two semi circles. Because as it sits now the mic is held in via the three small fingers and a metal ring spring as seen below. If one were to replace the three fingers and spring by two larger semi-circles it would be easy to achieve the equivalent force that's applied now. Since the force would be equal, you wouldn't have to worry about people using excess force to pull the mic out. But Astro may have had other reasoning to use the metal ring spring that I have overlooked.

I'd like you to provide evidence to support this please, as I see it the curvature of the support spring plastic would generate more resistance to flexing and bending and the increased surface contact would again increase the hold the two parts would have on the boom mic.

3 min to uni, gotta run or i'll miss my bus

[Nevermind]

Dear god, sprinting for my life, just caught the bus, I forgot I could do this on my phone, anyway if you have XBL I'd rather talk about this over a audible medium, I hate having to explain myself in writing.

[capn]

"Granted but anyone who has tried to take something apart that has plastic clips will tell you it can be annoying and the plastic clips DO break often, it's not a perfect system, which nothing is, I fear that the quality of A40's would go down due to economization of production,"

Well the reason the clips break when people take those products apart are two fold. Usually the designer will design the product as a single use product. And as such the need for a snap fit that can deflect a lot is unnecessary. Second, most designs, and designers are ignorant of some simple cardinal rules for plastic parts. Even big companies like Honda, Samsung, and Logitech often neglect simple facts that should be abide by when working with plastics. Also now a days, the engineer is left out of the initial design cycle and is charged with making the product work better, and usually has no say in the initial design. Because of this the designers "design" the part, they don't know or realize that putting too much strain on parts will cause fatigue and ultimately premature failure. Or that certain geometries result in a plastic part that is often much more frail than anticipated. So saying that they will break isn't completely accurate, because most designs are inherently flawed to begin with.

I think you are getting quality and overhead mixed up. Just because a product has low overhead and can eliminate redundant parts does not mean that the actual part quality will go down. I do realize it's just a qualitative observation, but in reality, if the A40 were made with no screws you would not be able to discern the two visually.


"There are inherent problems with all types of production but screws or screws with inserts as you suggested are better in the long run in my opinion as over time fatigue will have a greater effect on small plastic clips that have give in them regardless of how well they are manufactured and will flex and eventually break where as if designed properly screws and or screws with fittings would far outlast plastic clips."

Yes, it is true that a brass insert and a machine screw will far outlast any plastic part. But this comes back to overhead and design criteria. In most cases when designing a part you don't want to over-engineer the part as it will drastically increase costs, this goes for all products, not just plastics. When designing, at least in the corporate world, you want to use the cheapest material that will survive. Unless you are NASA and have a nearly unlimited budget you just can't afford the "best" solution, that's why you have to get creative. Also the more screws you use, the more time you are going to spend assembling the part; not to mention the extra overhead to accomplish the task.


"Yes I was meaning if a small piece breaks the whole thing must go, as it is I can see maybe two pieces that can be integrated together, nothing greatly significant."

Yes, basically that boils down to semantics.


"I am going to have to disagree, the price of the mic is not applicable to my point, the three clips inside the headphone are as of now the sacrificial parts as the tougher material of the aluminium boom mic mount will wear out the plastic before you see any significant wear on the mic, it would not be unrealistic to switch the materials around, aluminium would be ideal, it's light weight, easy to machine, corrosion resistant and doesn't gall easily, especially when it's just rubbing against plastic which is evident in the current construction.

I think I am confusing your terms, when you say sacrificial I think of replacement part; but I see your meaning is the part which will more readily fail. But your idea of the aluminum holder as opposed to the aluminum mic base is kind of in contention with what I said earlier. You want to design for survivability not longevity. Having a custom CNC aluminum base would be wildly expensive and amazingly complicated. It is just not feasible to do something like that, machining is a secondary operation and an expensive operation. This may not be a bad idea for one or two parts, but when looking at production volumes in the thousands it is absolutely unrealistic. And the argument that it is light is untrue compared to polycarbonate (PC) or most amorphous plastics, PC is roughly 1.21 g/cc where as most common 6061 aluminum are 2.7 g/cc. Corrosion resistant? You have to remember these are headphones, they aren't being designed for chemical warfare, it goes back to our design criteria of building to survive.


"My point is for the quality of the product, it is dissatisfying to find that your boom mic is falling down every time you move your head after only one year of use due to the plastic clamps wearing down, the elastic properties of the plastic don't last forever and do degrade over time, the spring steel ring I see on there would help prevent this but is putting more pressure on the clips causing them to wear more. Again my point is that the wrong part has been made sacrificial
"

I'll address galling and the boom mic droop here since it makes a bit more sense. I shouldn't have brought up galling as it is more of a dynamic failure mode than a static one, which the mic is usually faced with. And it would actually make more sense for the two pieces to be of similar plastics, because the friction of PC on PC is greater than that of PC on steel, or aluminum. This simple fact would avoid the problems of mic droop with the current design. As I suspect since the friction was not great enough from the three fingers they needed the extra spring to add extra clamping force so the mic would not move.

But mic droop is also a function of the mic itself, the current mic is not a bad design, but it could be improved a little. Drooping is caused when the friction force of the base can no longer support a moment about that axis greater than the mic's moment of inertia. A simple fix could be to design a lighter mic who's moment of inertia was closer to that of the mic base.

Yes, I'll agree with you that plastic properties do not last forever and will degrade. Yet that does not mean that the plastic is going to simply loose all of its physical properties one day. This is just a simple assumption during the beginning of the products life cycle. When the product has been designed and engineered to specifications a safety factor and life span will usually be noted. Unless these parts are traversing the galaxy their life cycle and safety factor are quite low.

Yes the plastic will exhibit creep due to the extended static loading. For PC at low levels of applied stress, say about 5~6 MPa, you will loose roughly a third of its elastic properties. But this will occur over a period of 100,000 hours. With that number in mind that would be roughly 11 years with the boom installed and not being removed. I personally don't have the mic hooked in too long at any one time, and for anyone who doesn't keep the mic in continuously the life of the base could be much greater.

To the point of fatigue of repeatably putting the mic in and out, the time for failure is still very long. Most cyclic loading schedules of 0.5 Hz for PC at standard temperature pressure (STP) will normally go past 10,000 hours with less than 15% decrease in strength. That means if someone were to take out their mic and put it back in every two seconds, 18 million times they would only see 15% decrease in the force required to pull the mic out.

But more to the point is that if both parts had equal survivability, or they both had the same probability to be sacrificial, you wouldn't have to specify which one should fail first. Basically what I am trying to get across is that one part does not have to be significantly overbuilt compared to the other.


"I'd like you to provide evidence to support this please, as I see it the curvature of the support spring plastic would generate more resistance to flexing and bending and the increased surface contact would again increase the hold the two parts would have on the boom mic."

Gladly.

First we will start with the mating force required on a two dimensional basis.

As shown in the figure below, when considering the force required to engage a snap, or better know as mating force; we will first define the friction.


http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/matingforce.png

In the above case the friction coefficient is defined by:


http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\bg_white \mu = tan(\beta )

And the mating force is:


http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\bg_white Mating force = W

From there

http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\bg_white W=Ptan(\alpha +\beta )

we can then algebraically rewrite that as:

http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\bg_white W=P \frac{\mu+tan \alpha}{1-\mu tan \alpha}

Now if we are to keep everything constant and plot the mating force as a function of friction coefficient. We can see that as the friction coefficient grows linearly the mating force grows exponentially.


http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z160/capnthepeafarmer/Disassemblies/matingforcevsmu.png

And if we take our previous example, of PC on metal vs PC on itself and substitute the average friction coefficients we can see approximately 20% MORE force. Thus implying both the pull out force, mating force, and maximum bending moment possible is much greater with just a change in material.

And... apparently there is a 10000 character limit. So I will discuss the effects of snap-finger length and mating force in a later post.

[Nevermind]

On my iPhone so only the pretty pictures caught my attention, anyway I'll read everything later on. And I said the clips to be made from aluminium and the boom mic component from plastic, not both from plastic. I'm not sure if I read it right, I just bolted 250m in steel caps to catch my train so I'm a little woozy but you where talking about plastic on plastic in your diagrams yes?

[capn]

On my iPhone so only the pretty pictures caught my attention, anyway I'll read everything later on. And I said the clips to be made from aluminium and the boom mic component from plastic, not both from plastic. I'm not sure if I read it right, I just bolted 250m in steel caps to catch my train so I'm a little woozy but you where talking about plastic on plastic in your diagrams yes?

Yeah I caught your intention of the mic being plastic and the base aluminum. But I am trying to stress the use of plastics, I'll comment on those parts later. But for now I have to do some actual work.

[Nevermind]

Reading through what you're saying you're confuseing allot of what I'm saying and I'm getting mixed messages from you to, I may not be an expert but I know a decent ammount, obveously you know more than me (I'm in mechanical engineering) but I find that your points are just getting lost and muddled in your explanations of everything, one point is drowned in two paragraphs of explanation. Talking like this is just gonna create more confusion mate, talk to me online and I gaurantee well understand eachother better. I'm finding were agreeing on things diagreeing on things agrees on and having similar ideas explained incomparably.

I like your little motto in your sig :) I've always thought a good engineer will get the job done, a great one will get the job done right. Bit of Aussie culture and my fathers teachings :)

[capn]

Reading through what you're saying you're confuseing allot of what I'm saying and I'm getting mixed messages from you to, I may not be an expert but I know a decent ammount, obveously you know more than me (I'm in mechanical engineering) but I find that your points are just getting lost and muddled in your explanations of everything, one point is drowned in two paragraphs of explanation. Talking like this is just gonna create more confusion mate, talk to me online and I gaurantee well understand eachother better. I'm finding were agreeing on things diagreeing on things agrees on and having similar ideas explained incomparably.

I like your little motto in your sig :) I've always thought a good engineer will get the job done, a great one will get the job done right. Bit of Aussie culture and my fathers teachings :)

Yeah I will concede that I am not the best linguist or writer, I usually spend more time on reports to make them more concise.

If I could find some free time to hop on an Xbox I would be more than happy to speak with you on the matter.

But if you take anything away from our conversation here it's that I want to stress the proper use of plastics. As you said, getting it right is better than getting it done.

[Nevermind]

Yeah I will concede that I am not the best linguist or writer, I usually spend more time on reports to make them more concise.

If I could find some free time to hop on an Xbox I would be more than happy to speak with you on the matter.

But if you take anything away from our conversation here it's that I want to stress the proper use of plastics. As you said, getting it right is better than getting it done.

the right material for the right application :)

it may have to wait a couple days, i just got my tongue pierced and talking for me is....difficult

[DBakerr]

This was an intense reading experience for myself. Hahah.

I knew some of the things you guys were talking about, but most of the time.. it was too drastic for my brain.

I give props, lots of props.

[Gunzman]

This was an intense reading experience for myself. Hahah.

I knew some of the things you guys were talking about, but most of the time.. it was too drastic for my brain.

I give props, lots of props.

ditto.. (this post has to be at least 10 characters..) :p