Friends,
I've been getting inquiries regarding the status of this first Mini production run so I thought I could cover more territory by posting here.
As usual...things never go as you plan. We ran into a snag with our enclosure parts vendor. Since we don't have the manpower here to do everything as fast as we'd prefer, we decided to outsource our wood parts to another CNC shop. We figured that at the intro price we offered the Mini at, we'd get swamped with orders and have a hard time keeping up while still having to build other, previous and/or larger model orders.
So...we sought out a vendor for the wood parts. That way all we had to do was assemble and finish the enclosures. Besides, we needed to reprogram our CNC to run the Mini as we discovered some time wasting "snags" in the original program used to build the prototype. We figured that since the Mini needed to be reprogrammed anyway, why not have someone else do that programming and then start feeding parts to us as a time saving secondary benefit.
Well...the vendor started out just fine, but then we heard nothing after a while. After tracking them down, we got the scoop. I guess the family owns a construction company besides the CNC shop and they had some kind of crisis. Apparently, something went wrong at one of the job sites and they ended up in court over it. As a result they pulled their CNC programmer (one of the sons) out of the CNC shop in order to work at the job site to try to fix things. Upshot: Since he wasn't in the CNC shop - he wasn't programming Mini parts.
Guess it must have been a real "crisis" as they never even had the time to call us and let us know.
Soon as we found out my son Jason started reprogramming the Mini on our machine. Seeing that we were really behind now, he did a crash-course and worked 16 hours per day until he got it done. It's something that we needed to do anyway, as you never want to have all of your eggs in one basket to begin with, but the timing sure sucked.
We did get one benefit though... he also managed to "fix" our post-processor program that had always been a major pain. That's the translating program that converts CAM/tool path coordinates into the version of "G-Code" that the CNC understands. Our machine is made in Italy (by SCM) and to have a post processor written for it would have cost around $10K. We never had that kind of dough so my son found a post-processor written for a different machine and "hacked" it so that it would "kinda" work on ours. The problem has always been that it would take him 5 hours or more to de-bug the G-Code after it was generated, so doing a program change - even for one little thing - took forever.
But...while he was at it he went back and tweaked the post-processor such that now it generates virtually perfect G-Code. Now we can make changes in virtually no time. Smart kid - huh?
That's a real benefit to us but totally superfluous to you guys, as it doesn't tell you how soon your Minis will be done. The good news is that we're making parts now and have a couple of enclosures already assembled. If we hadn't been delayed, those enclosures would have been finished and in the process of being tested, tweaked & packed by now. Still, I don't think we'll be too far behind schedule. I'd say we lost about 2 weeks through all of this, so that's how I'd recommend that you adjust your expectations.
Please bear with us, we are going through some VERY significant growth issues right now. In fact, it won't be long before we'll likely (you never know though - nothing in life is ever a guarantee) be making some very major announcements. I can't tell you what they are yet, but I will say this: If you've ever seriously considered getting an SP Tech product, now may be the time you want to place your order. If you wait very much longer they may be out of your reach. In fact, it's saddening to say on a certain level, but SP Tech may not be a "good fit" for the AudioCircle crowd much longer. Please, take no offense, it's all a matter of economics and our need for growth and survival. One benefit of this though is that should any of you SP Tech owners decide to sell your speakers, there's a good chance you'll get every penny out of them that you originally paid - maybe more! aa That should help with the wait a little.
I'll try to keep you all updated.
Take care,
-Bob
