Originally Posted by
RCSMichael
Our holsters originally were compression-formed by hand from Kydex. They are now vacuum formed and CNC trimmed. We switched to Boltaron years ago (2012-ish) after repeated issues with Kydex's quality control (or lack thereof). When people inquire via phone or email, the staff is trained to simply explain that they are formed differently now, mainly because most people aren't interested in an in-depth explanation of plastics manufacturing processes. I apologize if our CS staff's explanation left you to make assumptions as to just what this process was, but I can assure you that the holster is NOT a "cheapened product."
We were one of the last holster companies to adopt vacuum forming and CNC routing. Nowadays, the vast majority of holster companies -- even the 1 and 2 man shops -- use the same process to make holsters. That's because it is faster, more consistent, and more cost effective. For eleven years, we have consistently made incremental improvements to our products and processes, and I can tell you that the Phantoms coming off the line today have better fitment, more precise form, and a superior consistency than ones we produced even two or three years ago. It's a continuous evolution, which is also why our product images aren't always 100% current on the site. If I did a re-shoot on product images every time we made a change or improvement, I'd be spending an incredible amount of money on product photography that could be better used in making improvements to the company and products.
The opened bottom near the muzzle of the pistol is a change we instituted due to demand from our .gov and .mil contracts. They found that during CQB, it was not uncommon to have ejected casings from the pistol bounce off the wall (usually in residential hallways or passageways on-board ships) and fall into the mouth of the empty holster. The opening at the bottom was not big enough to allow the casing to fall through, and the casing prevented reholstering the weapon. Unless the shooter had VERY long fingers, the only way to get the casing out was to invert the holster, which meant taking it off or doing a hand stand or cartwheel...none of which are good options in that scenario. After multiple trials, the opening you now see on the holster was selected because it ensures that even a spent .45 ACP casing will fall straight through. We felt that this fix was worthy of applying even to products sold to civilians.
The fact remains that, whether vacuum formed, compression formed, or injection molded, our products are priced based on their design and performance attributes; not their manufacturing method. Cheap, shitty holsters are cheap and shitty because that's how they are designed. Being injection molded isn't what made them shitty -- their design and tooling did. Our injection molded products are actually vastly superior to our products that are thermoformed from extruded sheets of polymer, simply because injection molding allows us to do things that are not possible with bent pieces of plastic. Don't be so quick to judge a product based on which manufacturing process was used; look instead at the execution of that process.
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