the AS196 label print is suspiciously even and dark (i've seen those printer dies and most of them are in pretty sorry shape), and they look kind of gold in your picture (they should be very very silver), but the ultimate determinant is the pump itself. i know the ds017 we saw in the soldering thread, from the internals, was hilariously fake, and it did have correct packaging except for the suspiciously dark DS017 label, but i'm hesitant to call those fake from that pic. it's annoyingly difficult to do the silver plating process and i kind of have a hard time believing that any of the many cloning factories would bother with the AS196 when they could just sell DS017 fakes for the same margin.
i'm happy to help anyone who buys one to convert it to a GH soldapullt
the only weird thing about the silver ones is that the metal plating actually makes it harder to get a seal at the junction between the plated barrel and the tip. it's just a weird tolerance stackup thing. that said, the silver looks really good. bwa!'
actually, when i first started talking to edsynnick about carrying these, we were thinking of making it possible to customize the color of every part of your soldapullt, but it ended up being too much of a pain to sell the parts alone. that is why i have so many soldapullts sitting around the lab with mismatched parts though. hah!
