Arizona firm claims bigger flamethrower than Musk’s
An Arizona man says his company’s flamethrower is bigger and better than the one Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk began selling over the weekend.
But instead of declaring “Flame On!”, Ion Productions Team CEO Chris Byars has a different challenge for the billionaire tech entrepreneur: “He should buy our company. It would be really cool to collaborate, I think,” Byars added in a telephone interview.
Musk made news by posting a Saturday tweet that said “say hello to my little friend” and linked to an Instagram photo of a flamethrower with the logo of his Boring excavation company. Musk followed that with a brief video that showed Boring employees using the flamethrowers.
The response was swift, spurred by Musk’s reported 18.4 million followers on Twitter and 4.9 million followers on Instagram. By Tuesday afternoon, he tweeted that 15,000 of the company’s $500 flamethrowers had been ordered, representing roughly $7.5 million in sales.
The result easily topped the several thousand units Byars said his company has sold over the last few years. Launched as a part-time venture more than a decade ago, the Apache Junction, Ariz., company has used a 2015 fund- raising campaign to grow into a fulltime business, Byars said.
But Byars said Ion Production Team’s updated flamethrower has a reach of 30 feet and can be outfitted with a backpack fuel kit that enables roughly four minutes of non-stop firing that is powered by burning gasoline, a half-gas/half-diesel mix or an alcohol-based fuel. It’s also bigger. “His entire unit is basically the starter torch for ours,” said Byars, whose latest units have a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $1,099 and sale price of $899.
Is a flamethrower legal? Francis Kelsey, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in an email federal gun and firearms statutes don’t regulate “domestic production and possession of flamethrowers.”
“Therefore, ATF has no regulatory function in this matter,” Kelsey wrote.
However, Byars said his company’s flamethrowers can’t be sold in California, which prohibits units with a reach of more than 10 feet, or in Maryland, which has a total ban.
Buyers of Ion Production Team flamethrowers have included law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Forest Service, which used the units for controlled burning, Byars said. Many private customers use them “mainly for dealing with weeds and snow,” he said.