The new official TOJ thread, 2011 - Page 831

in reality you ate it's body long before it's skin got turned into luscious black leather, so no hard feelings man The guys who pm me about "chinchilla availability" though, I do get ideas...

^^ actually, no, not RFX or some exotic baller - The reality is that people pm and email all the time about strange things, think there's a good chance that I have a slaughter zoo of exotic animals, and expect that not only would they be the same price, but cost less, even - the reasoning being that the animals are smaller or something. The logic behind that, I don't know.

I will say, I actually like animals, and really only want to make jackets from animals that are caught and used for mainstream purposes. I think people are getting the wrong idea, since 90% of this thread tends to be fiction. We focus on lamb and calfskin, and wool.

I am going to explore different material combinations coming up, but down is prohibitively expensive unless you have proper machinery to pack the hollowfill, run standard sizing so that said fill can be meted out, and then you have to literally buy a truck full - a metric ton or something. It's obviously not expensive, since you see tons of cheap down products all the time, but at the same time they have to make thousands of copies, and we don't just use the cheap stuff just because it's the cheap stuff - I choose the material viability based on the quality of it first, and then availability comes second and decides whether it can be used or not.

IDEAL are very nice, actually. They're in the same league as YKK, Riri, Lampo, MRS, just different companies. Prices are all relatively the same, just depends on where you are and what you can get through trade companies. They all make metal or aluminum zippers that are heavy duty and slide nicely, and work reliably. I have had some reliability problems with RY zippers, so I leave them out of that, but fundamentally they should be in there too I guess, millions of zippers out there so it's probably not fair to count out a couple lemons.
Metal and plastic zippers are apples and oranges so they don't need to be compared here.

There is an honest difference between all of those makers, and I might be the only to have to gotten to the point of actually thinking about this - Riri is way overbeasted on, Swiss manufacture, gothninja gunmetal colors, it comes on your favorite gothninja brands, and so on- but the material content of Riri is slightly different - the teeth are very narrow (not the gauge of the two teeth put together width-wise, I'm talking each individual tooth in 'height') and so the look is lean, together they look like dashes. They teeth are hand polished (though they're not the only ones to do this, at all) yet they don't really sparkle or bling too much - it's because they come on muted cotton tape and the teeth are narrow, so they look 'stitched' - I admit, it looks cool. It's so very minute though, nobody really notices this, nor does it affect how it feels in your hand or the pull function. IDEAL makes a slightly narrow toothed zipper as well.
YKK metal and Excella metal, which we use - the former is built like all the other brands listed above, the Excella has very wide pyramidal teeth that are unique in their own right, and have a different look - it looks like a solid strip of metal for a zipper. It's cool but heavy looking, and the opposite of what Riri metal series looks like.

Anyway, these differences are like, microscopic minute. One guy is here asking what the difference between a DRKSHDW jacket, no i mean black scissors, no i mean Burberry, and TOJ is, and I'm here explaining the geometric makeup of popular metal heavy duty zippers. I'm not sure if I should take a break for the night or keep going.

tween: It's late here, quiet at the Temple of Jawnz, just sippin slow on a Havana Club 7 yr.

I have some interesting ruminations on the thread as a whole and how it's going as of late, but that is a long post and you guys gotta stop baiting me with questions so I can get around to it someday. Right now the thread is nearing absurdism, and I know people who operate brick and mortar clothing stores and realize I am gonna have kvnknurds and Woodyears coming by for their various reasons, they definitely do. This thread though, TOJ itself, everything you see before you - it was originally experimental and 2 years later, it is not shaking some of those elements. I'm not blaming anyone, or myself, it's just the nature of messageboarding, clothes and men's clothes in particular, trying to run a business in this day and age, and shifted reality - what actually seems like weak points regarding TOJ - people even express this in the thread- all of these just make it stronger, actually. There's a long road to walk before you see the other side of the picture....