wall of kits

We finished kitting all the kits last Wednesday, and anticipate the international kits will ship out on Tuesday. Two days behind schedule, alas.

Final parts count of kits

We spent 17 straight hours soldering and heat-shrinking potentiometers, stripping and tinning wires, buying markers at the last minute, and assembling boxes. When we emerged from our cave of robots (space kindly lent to us by oneTesla), several inches of snow had fallen.

so much snow

Monday we will be printing out shipping labels (after we talk to our friend today who has the label printing machine), buying envelopes and stamps for the stickers, cutting the custom kits for our highest-value backers (and printing the narwhals), and opening and testing the international kits.

…narwhalsnail…don’t ask

(I don’t know what’s going on either). Thanks to bchan for modelling the narwhal for us andCharles for the test prints!

The t-shirts also arrived from customink, although we wish we’d discovered the services that print and fulfill your orders earlier, then we wouldn’t have to ship the shirts out ourselves. Oh, and we need to email our general mailing list reminding them this week is the last week to join the course.

The main hold-up, as anticipated, has actually been the packing tape from apstape! We ordered it on the 16th on January, but I guess either we’re a small order, and they don’t care about us, or they’re just backlogged in general. Sigh. The Chinese companies we’ve worked with seem so much more on top of customer service for smaller orders like ours. We’re going to ship out the international kit with plain packing tape to make sure they arrive on time, giving them 2.5 weeks to arrive. Hopefully that’s enough time. The packing tape should get here Tuesday or Wednesday, so all the kits should ship out by Friday. In fact, all the rewards should ship by Friday.

Lasercutter sample fail

The lasercutter order from China arrived last Friday, and we’re a bit disappointed. See the difference in etch quality between the top one and the sample they gave us on the bottom. Perhaps they were rushing for Chinese New Years. I suppose at least each kit will be unique!

After the kits ship we will start polishing our course and filming the sections that need to be filmed.

We’ll upload all the manufacturing pics and write a more detailed blog post about some of the tips and tricks we used someday soon.

Wish everyone a happy February!

–Cappie and Nancy