A customer asks for my wand recommendation; specifically, he wants a comparison of my wands to the Butler wand.
OK. In my biased opinion…
All my wands are custom made, built-to-suit. You have several choices not available with any other wand purchase.
VT14 is a descendent of the Butler wand. So many improvements over Butler though, hard to explain them all here.
Head design – VT is an improved version of Butler’s wand. California Metal Products CMP first took it and eliminated the catch points inside then Greenie and I popularized it. Butler’s innovative ‘attic’ style is a little restrictive and catches hair badly; they actually had to install a cleanout port; or at least the ones I’ve seen have that. CMP and VT wands have more open designs providing greater cfm. The VT was the first with a Clearview window that lets you ‘see’ your recovery.
Main Tube – Whereas Butler is an heavy gauge all stainless wand with a relatively skinny main tube of only 1.5″ tube, the VT uses a higher flow 2” main tube made of much Lighter Titanium tube (all my wands use titanium tubes). You get a much lighter wand with higher performance and a lower price. That’s called Value and it’s what you see in all my wands. I’m also the only wand builder who provides you custom length wands actually built to fit your body’s height.
There never was a reason for one -size-fits-all wands. Even my stairtools arer available in custom lengths. It’s always been a cop-out to not offer customization imo.
Optional Wander’s Thermometer – another feature you can choose if you like. Your choice of Fahrenheit or Celsius. I even let you choose which side of the wand you want your display.
Spraybar – My wands come with adjustable Shear Angle Spraybars allowing you to adjust from low shear for dirty carpets to high shear for not so dirty. Butler’s jets are fixed in one position.
Jets – All my wands let you choose the flow you want. All my jets come with drip stopper check valves and the smaller flow jets come with jet screens, all standard and all included in the price.
Glide – pure Teflon, long life design, fits tightly yet removable if needed. 3 popular glide patterns to choose from Ultraslot (if you’re new to glides or don’t vacuum much), Ultraholes (premium glide for amazing dry times) and Hybrid (some guys like this pattern but there’s no true advantages over the slot or hole).
I also make custom variations to the glide patterns depending on the popularity of the given wand. For example, the Recessed Slot glide is very popular with the Prochem Titanium wand because it does not show glide marks until the glide gets some age on it.
Trigger valve – the Soft Touch Trigger Valve. Italian design. It’s all I sell. The Soft Touch became the industry standard in custom wands about 15 years ago. Yellow jacket provides comfort for tired hands. Gradual open features ends the ‘popping’ at high temperatures you experience with traditional triggers. Your choice of male or female QD, optional all stainless Tophat strainer assembly. Lifetime warranty nipple ensures you will never break off behind the trigger valve.
Dang V4 swivel wand – Top seller over last year. Many of the same features of my VT and My Ti wands since I helped and worked with Tony Dang early on in his wand building career. Later though Tony came into his own and produced the DangPro V3 wand, no doubt one of the best swivel wands made. When he had his stroke I took over making it with a few modest improvements and call it the DangPro V4. This wand is wildly popular. I sold one hundred and twenty three of the V4s in the first 3 months of production; more than double the number of wands I’d ever sold in that short a period of time. I still can’t keep up but gradually getting there. Wait time is about 2 weeks. Not as light as the VT or MYTi but still about 15% lighter than the all stainless Butler.
My V4 comes with all the features I introduced in custom wands: clearview window, custom length, custom flow, custom shear angle, custom glide, and now custom color.
In terms of:
Airflow: #1 is DangPro v4, #2 & #3 is a toss-up between the VT and My Ti wands.
Customization – all my wands are custom built to fit your body and your machine.
Weight – MyTi is the lightest high production wand made at just under 7 lbs. complete with glide. VT is around 9 lbs, DangPro14 is around 9.5lbs. Weights vary with head width and addition of optional Wander’s thermometer.
Price – Wanders has always been known to offer the best value in high performance wands made. Examples:
VT $565 and up depending on options.
MyTi $600 depending on options.
DangPro v4, $1000 and up depending on options.
Durability – all my wands are considered career wands with the exception of the MYTi. It is so light and so thin some guys report only getting a few years out of it.
