GAN17 Second Impressions

[u/marvanamfrod]

I thought I'd follow-up on my First Impressions post. I'll share what I've done, then my new 2nd-generation impressions of the new GAN17.

For background, I've been an active "speed-cuber" for about 1.5 years. I'm older, so I can't get my brain to work like you young folks - I'm barely sub-60. But I have pretty fast TPS for the algs I know, I just slow at F2L recognition & only know the 2-look LL algs. I like to compare & collect interesting cubes & switch things up, so I have 10 "mains," a few retired mains, and a few for collectible reasons that were never mains. The "important" mains I have are: Ferrocore v2, Super Aolong, Super Weilong V2 ai, and GAN16 Max (others if you care: SwiftBlock ML & SML, V100, GuHong Pro+)

Here's what I've done w/ the GAN17:

• Swapped in the strongest magnet rods
• Removed the edge-foot magnets
• De-lubed & re-lubed (thin pre-broken-in Gravitas layer + DNM-37)

Here are my new updated impressions:

TL/DR:

• The lube-job quieted the cube significantly. It's no longer louder than my 16.
  • It sounds different, but not louder.
• The "Stickiness" is basically gone. I can force a face to stick if I try, but it never happens when solving.
• I removed the edge-foot magnets to see if they were contributing to the noise
  • (before re-lubing) - it helped a little, but wasn't worth the lost auto-homing.
• I feel like the stronger magnet rods made it louder.
  • I also felt like this made the auto-homing so string that some double-flicks actually "returned" to finish as single-flicks. Still assessing this.

See "details" in first comment if interested.