Ok so I got the opportunity to meet up with PCBGRIP last week for a bit of a hands/eyes on the product. I walked away impressed, both by the product, and by PCBGRIP himself. He's obviously put a lot of thought into it, and was quick to address any concerns I had with a solution.
I'll start off with the look and feel. The machining looks to be excellent, with a good finish [ignoring the places where the prototype had been altered after the fact for experimentation... it is a prototype after-all] The anodizing is good and clean as well, though I did note some wear from all the handling the prototype has obviously been through. One possible improvement would be hard anodizing to make a more durable finish. Having said that, this is a tool, and the cosmetics don't matter after the package is opened, what counts is the functionality. But it is a pretty sexy piece of kit when it's new.
As for the functionality, it works as advertised. The rigidity is plenty sufficient for soldering, but there is some flex to the assembly. [I wouldn't say the flex is any worse than what I get on my panavise] The biggest problem I had was in loading the PCB, the length of the holding extrusions is so long that they tend to open up at the far end, allowing the PCB to pop out. This can be overcome by closing the far end with another extrusion, or making use of some of the rods and bolts that are part of the kit. It also may be that with some of the improvements in the hardware, planned for the production parts, this will be reduced as well. but nonetheless, it did make loading the PCB a little finicky. Having said that, I would imagine that after spending a little time with it I'd get the technique down pat, and be able to load and unload the PCB pretty quick. The flat spring that PCBGRIP recently announced and added to the kit also likely makes this a non-issue.
The armatures and attachments are great and provide a fair amount of holding force... but it can take a bit to get it set up.
The stencil attachment is really just a clamp to hold the stencil in place once positioned. You still need to manually position it for each board. Though I imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to rig it up for light production.
Bottom line, I think it's a great product for one-off/prototype type production. With some practice and work, I'm sure it could be used for light production as well.
[I know there were probably some other questions that I missed, so feel free to ask... my life is in a bit of turmoil right now, which is why it took me so long to post something about this, but I will try to be responsive over the next few days as the clock on the campaign runs down]