I blogged recently about the innovative holster from Crye Precision, the GunClip. The ability to holster a weapon either on a MOLLE platform or a belt, with both a light and a suppressor is a rare commodity and a feature afforded by very few products out there.
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| Crye in Tan (left) Clone in Black (right) |
The GunClip allows you to do both with it’s unique and Patent Pending design that retains the gun and encloses it with a poppered plastic flap. It’s compact, secure and lightweight. Unfortunately it’s only available for specific models of Glock hand guns presently, but it is compatible with airsoft replicas. Game on!
Not longer than a month after we picked up the real deal Crye Precision product, we noticed a clone had popped up on popular Hong Kong site, ebairsoft.com. It looked remarkably similar and a price of under £10 delivered. Curiosity had to be satisfied and an order was placed so we could perform a side by side comparison. Around 10 days later, the clone GunClip landed.
First things first, once you get the clone product out of it’s packaging you’ll be hit by a pungent, headache inducing chemical smell, presumably part of the plastic moulding process. This wasn’t present with the genuine article and leads me to believe that there’s definitely a different plastic used. This suspicion is backed up by the fact that the clone is a good deal more flexible than the Crye product, and may well stretch and lose its retention capabilities.
The clone bears the poorly disguised logo of Crye Precision, and narrowly avoids trademark infringement by reading “Crye Drecision”. Other than that small difference, the integral popper on the clone isn’t quite as positive or robust feeling as the real deal, leading me to think it might not hold up to repeated use. For £10 though, you’re probably not expecting the world, but given that it could mean your valuable gun dropping out never to be seen again, it is an important factor.
The shape of the clone product is identical but the finish is a good deal rougher. Mould lines and flashing are far more pronounced than on the real item and the item looks like it is produced to slightly rougher tolerances.
The rear portion of the GunClip allows you to loosen it off and adjust it to fit MOLLE webbing and belts and on the Crye product, small notches allow the adjustment to work in a stepped fashion, and provide a position friction fit when the locking screw is tightened. These notches are not moulded into the clone, and as such, there’s a good chance it may slip open over time, and drop off of belts or webbing.
Despite the fact the clone is pretty cheap, I do feel it’s a rather cheeky knock-off… It’s so similar, I’m sure that Crye Precision themselves will be making attempts at contacting the manufacturers. Overall though, I think it is lacking the overall quality of finish intrinsic with the genuine article and it would probably fail long before…
You can buy the Crye Precision GunClip from Level Peaks Associates.
