Sure.... this is a long story.
The original plan was that we would build 20-30 beta units here in the USA in order to work through the inevitable early production issues. After doing so we would transition over to having them made in either China as we ramped up to doing higher volume.
We started working on the beta units well over a year ago. In house we did the 3D CAD work and translated all of Bill's paper napkin drawings into computer files. We also built a couple units by hand and made some changes to make them easier to manufacture. I designed a simple PCB for the motor controller and we built units with the proposed changes so that Bill could measure them and confirm nothing had changed for the negative. All of this took time.... lots of it.
When we where ready to start small-scale production I had an outside vendor with a CNC machine & painting booth doing the plinth & platter. The outside vendor in question dragged their feet and it took forever for us to get our engineering sample to confirm the work. Once we did get a pre-production product it had several problems. After going through a couple revisions with them on the pre-production stuff they finally got everything cut to our specs. The vendor then disappeared for a couple months. I got excuse after excuse why we didn't have plinths and platters but it was abundantly clear that the guy was just not going to work. I never knew when I was getting the truth from the guy. Anyway... a couple months ago we FINALLY got the plinths and platters. I don't know how you can screw-up CNC work. You have to be just downright incompetent once the stuff is properly programmed into the computer but hey... this guy managed. We had parts on the plinth that where off by 1/16" over a couple inches. We had platters that were not flat and wobbled like a top.
My machinist took some time and corrected the errors on a couple units. We shipped one down to Bill for measurement and it was the best measuring unit made to date. That was great.... the problem was that my machinist was spending 10-12 hours to make the poorly made CNC parts actually work to spec. It doesn't take much of an accountant to understand that 10-12 hours of machine shop labor wasn't going to allow us to turn these things out for anywhere near our projected price point.
During this whole fiasco we have been moving forward with samples in China. Rather than go through the process of finding another vendor for the CNC work we are moving forward with a company that has a track record of manufacturing. Our main goal with the first units was to learn and troubleshoot our way through early production issues. Even though we never produced the beta units for sale, we did learn a lot about how to design the parts.
The actual manufacturing phase of this is outside of my hands. It is something that others are handling. The last report I had we should have production units before CES. I'm eagerly waiting as the units we hand-built where really kick-butt units and the production units should become an instant classic.
That is the story.... I'll be announcing more when I have news.
