Instaling Kaleidoscope1/17/2024 On August 17, the factory confirmed to us that all preordered sets of QWERTY keycaps, all blank black keycaps and about half of the preordered sets of unpainted keycaps had been mailed out.Īs of this writing, not a single set of keycaps has been received. Given how unlikely that sounded, we were a little bit annoyed. At that rate, we’d have been better off self-insuring unless more than 1 in 20 packages got lost. They told us that if any of the keycaps didn’t arrive in a month, the shipping agent would pay to have the keycaps remanufactured and resent. They told us that we had to buy insurance at what we thought was a slightly high rate of 5% of the cost of the goods. They offered us a decent shipping rate and cautioned us that shipping this way wouldn’t get detailed tracking and could take 2-3 weeks. ![]() After some fairly significant back and forth, the factory recommended a local shipping agent who was willing to handle a few thousand sets of keycaps going out to more than 30 different countries. They watched as the injection-molding supplier cleaned out their molding machine and finally started producing workable parts.įor cost reasons, we decided to have the factory arrange shipping of keycaps directly from Shenzhen. In total, the entire run was destroyed and remade three times, with a delay of several weeks between runs.Īfter that, our factory sent an engineer to babysit the production process. The supplier blamed the painting jigs they’d designed for the discoloration issues, so they redesigned them and tried again.Īuthor’s note: The previous paragraphs were repeated verbatim because the production problem happened twice. ![]() However, ordinarily, an injection molding supplier is able to injection-mold plastic without discolorations. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal because the keycaps were being painted. The factory rejected that run because the keycaps had various discolorations. The entire production run of keycaps was destroyed at the supplier’s expense.Īfter that, they made the entire run again. ![]() The next day, the factory confirmed to us that the problem was that the injection-molding supplier had… changed the plastic they were using to make our keycaps. Eventually, we asked the factory to confirm that the injection-molding supplier hadn’t accidentally or intentionally changed the type of plastic they were using for our keycaps. Numerous theories about what could possibly have gone wrong were proposed to us. When the factory started to check the keycaps, they discovered that the paint simply wasn’t adhering to the keycaps. They were painted, UV-coated and some of them were laser engraved before being delivered to our factory for final QC. The injection molding factory produced an entire run of replacement keycaps a few months ago. The factory assured us many months ago that the additional sets of keycaps they owed us (and you) would be in the mail within a few weeks. As of now, they believe that they’ll have enough units to fulfill backorders ready for inspection by the 19th and the rest of the batch done by the end of the month. The factory had previously committed to having them ready by this weekend, but told us that they’re running behind because fewer workers than expected came back from the National Day holiday. The next shipment from the factory is due at our warehouse in Hong Kong within a couple weeks. We managed to keep keyboards in stock for almost two months, running out on August 22. ![]() With the exception of about five folks we haven’t been able to track down and some of the folks who ordered Mahogany Model 01s, we believe we’ve now offered a Model 01 to everybody who preordered one.Īs of this writing, the Model 01 is out of stock. We also have a bit of news about a travel case for the Model 01 and a mysterious teaser about our next product. It’s been a few months since we last wrote, and lots has been happening! We’ve delivered (almost) all of the keyboards that had been preordered, had a couple hundred keyboards in stock, run out of stock, and started taking backorders for additional keyboards.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |