Polymer80, Spectre Frame

[shawnmitchell]

Speaking of chopping on Spectres, has anyone chopped the nose off the frame to accommodate a G19 slide? I have a P940c on pre-order but I'm thinking I might use this clearance full size frame to build a Spectre G26L by chopping the front down to G19 length and cutting the grip all the way down to accept G26 mags.

Ah apparently putting a G19 slide on a G17 frame is not quite as simple as chopping down the dust cover. Guess I'll go for a 19 grip length with a 19 or 22 slide.

[Awesomesauce]

the PF940c will have metal rear rails, which I think will alleviate much of the break-in drama folks are having.

[shawnmitchell]

Got an email this morning from MidwayUSA that the P940c is "overdue"

[shawnmitchell]

[Nelson_2016]

Everywhere I've found that these new compact frames are being "pre-sold", the price is presently at $149.99.

After all the BS I endured with the Spectre frame, I'm not inclined to pay top dollar until I see that the new frame doesn't have a bunch of issues. Does anyone know of anyplace "pre-selling" at a better price?

[Inlander Arms]

Everywhere I've found that these new compact frames are being "pre-sold", the price is presently at $149.99.

After all the BS I endured with the Spectre frame, I'm not inclined to pay top dollar until I see that the new frame doesn't have a bunch of issues. Does anyone know of anyplace "pre-selling" at a better price?

Dealers now have to sign a pricing agreement with Polymer80 because some of them were selling at cost or even a loss in an attempt to drive traffic to their site for slides and parts kits.

[Nelson_2016]

@ Shawnmitchell

Thanks for posting that. I'm going to call BS on Polymer80's "coating (sic) the rails with black nitride" story.

The "Spectre" uses a plastic rear rail, but all of a sudden not even bare stainless steel will suffice? Even though factory Glock frames (and other manufacturers) use bare stainless steel? And isn't one of the reasons for using stainless steel in the first place the fact that it generally doesn't need any "coating"?

I'm going to guess that they're having some other problems which are causing the delay, which they don't want to divulge, and the nitride treatment is just camouflage.

@ Inlander Arms

Are you saying there's no flexibility in pricing AT ALL (with regard to a lower limit of course)?

[Inlander Arms]

@ Inlander Arms

Are you saying there's no flexibility in pricing AT ALL (with regard to a lower limit of course)?

We can go higher than 149.99 that's about all we're allowed to do. I can also say that there might be a sale later in the year. If you want it now, it will likely be 149.99

The only other thing dealers can do is offer package deals for a discount (like how we offer the bolt action slide conversion, extended barrel, and frame for $30 off)

Or free shipping, or "we pay the sales tax"

[Awesomesauce]

Dealers now have to sign a pricing agreement with Polymer80 because some of them were selling at cost or even a loss in an attempt to drive traffic to their site for slides and parts kits.

this makes sense, since Poly80 is also selling slides and therefore in competition with their re-sellers.
If the re-seller cuts the retail price on the lower and matches (or beats) the slide price, Poly80 loses out on both sales.

[Awesomesauce]

What the actual F?
So I typed in the web address to Polymer 80, but put in the secure "HTTPS" vice http and I get jumped to a development page for rainier arms.
Poly 80: http://www.polymer80.com/
I typed https://www.polymer80.com/ and ended up at https://dev.rainierarms.com/

Maybe this is why the delay, they got bought out.

[shawnmitchell]

The plot thickens....

[Awesomesauce]

First it's tere hanges and now this.

[relatively-anonymous]

Hmmm that's a bit interesting. I know a couple internet things so decided to investigate. www.polymer80.com and dev.rainerarms.com are on the same IP address 68.71.252.20 and that block is owned by "Zerolag Communications Inc." which is a managed hosting provider in LA. 68.71.252.20 has no reverse DNS entry, which is very uncommon for an https entry. I decided to do an SSL certificate dump on www.polymer80.com:443 and it showed that the certificate name is indeed dev.rainerarms.com with an owner of "no-reply@zerolag.com" but it's a self-signed certificate so it's probably just for development use. Rainierarms' main site's certificate is a proper SSL cert issued to www.rainierarms.com and properly signed by the DigiCert Global Root CA, so that can be trusted.

The main site of www.raineirarms.com, which is on 104.37.132.186, is also in Zerolag IP space. The default https entry for that IP is that dev.rainier site, so any site serving on that IP will get that site on an https request.

I decided to add an item to my cart on polymer80 and try to check out. At no point in the checkout process did it switch from HTTP traffic to SSL traffic (!!!) and it even would allow me to submit credit card information in an insecure form. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANYONE EVER DO THIS. I didn't go past the part where it tried to verify my credit card number with Javascript algorithms because I don't have a cancelled card number that hasn't expired yet. I would never do this with a "live" card.

Both have very different WHOIS registrar information and nameservers, suggesting they were registered by two entirely different entities originally and have not merged that part of their business if they merged at all.

Tinfoil hat explanation: They're merging and the polymer80 site will be part of Rainier's larger site.

Less conspiracy-theory explanation: Whoever owns Polymer80 and whoever owns Rainier know each other and the Rainier guy let Polymer80 host his site through the Rainier account and, since it's shared, Polymer80 couldn't set up SSL.

The "inexperienced web dev mistake" explanation: It's possible, however unlikely, that some third party developer was doing site work work for rainerarms and hosted it through the polymer80 IP using name-based virtual hosting, but that's unlikely. Both sites are being hosted by zerolag.

[relatively-anonymous]

tl;dr: The connection between polymer80 and rainier is up for speculation, but please tell everyone who has an account and especially an order directly through polymer80 that their card info was transmitted in CLEAR TEXT over the internet.

[Awesomesauce]

Quite the autist! Well that is a strange twist, and not good at all for internet purchases. Can you drop them a note of your findings via their website?