Howdy folks, it's been a while.
Needless to say, things have been quiet for a while. We've kept everyone who pre-ordered up to date, but have erred on the side of caution since missing our goal for launch. Anyways, this post is a bit of a catchup to get the game rolling again.
So what happened?
Initially when we first set up our site and started outreach, we were planning to take pre-orders in November and launch production within the first weeks of December. We had a handful of manufacturers we had reached out to to help make a mold, but over time they all fell through. Some of the estimates were over 100k for a single piece of a very complicated mold, and others simply ghosted us. We're not naming names- no shaming here.
But as time went on, our team spent a lot of time learning about the manufacturing processes themselves. 3D printing, CNC milling, and more. Eventually we shifted away from having someone else make our molds to wanting to do it in-house. By doing that, we not only could tweak designs and replace parts on the fly, but vastly speed up any expansion we will hopefully soon need.
And that leads us to May. In early May we reached out to several 3D printing manufacturers to see who would be the best fit for our needs. Eventually we narrowed it down to a handful, and on July 9th we got our printer delivered to our doorstep. Let me just say, this thing can print some reaaaaally big stuff. Since then we've been fine tuning and testing over and over, and today? Today we just started the first of the mold pieces. You do not want to know the print time on these things, but to be safe we upgraded our workspace to have a simulated sine wave UPS with 2 hours backup power in case of power surges and storm outages. Dang thing is used for servers, so this printer gonna keep on trucking.
Over the next month, we'll be answering questions on Twitter @KoboldCreations and sharing some photos of our projects as it progresses.